During the last decade, the educational arena has been replete with the rhetoric of decentralization, site-based management, teacher empowerment, and distributed leadership. But does the reality match up to the rhetoric?
Since the 1987-88 school year, the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education has conducted surveys on leadership in public schools. Every three school years, survey staff ask a nationally representative sample of some 9,000 principals and 50,000 teachers to rate their influence on selected schoolwide and classroom issues, on a scale ranging from "no influence at all" to "a great deal of influence."
An analysis of the data collected in the 1987-88, 1990-91, and 1993-94 schools and staffing surveys reveals certain trends in the perceptions of teachers and principals. Here's what they say.
Principals: We Used to Have a Little More Power
Principals perceive their own influence on schoolwide issues to have increased slightly. The percentage who said they had a great deal of influence in the hiring of new full-time faculty increased from 75 percent in 1987-88, to 82 percent in 1990-91, and to 85 percent in 1993-94. The corresponding figures regarding the setting of discipline policy were 81, 85, and 87 percent. However, principals' perceptions of their leadership in establishing curriculum basically remained unchanged, possibly due to a concurrent trend of state-mandated curriculum.
Teachers: We're Where We've Always Been
Teachers perceive their own influence to have remained the same over the past few years, and to be primarily confined to the classroom.
At all three timeposts in the survey period, only about 35 percent of the teachers said they had a great deal of influence on schoolwide policies regarding discipline and curriculum. Regarding the content of in-service programs, the figures tended toward 31 percent.
Figures were considerably higher on classroom issues. In 1993-94, the proportions of teachers who said they had a great deal of influence on various classroom issues were as follows: selection of textbooks and other instructional materials, 55 percent; selection of content, topics, and skills to be taught, 61 percent; disciplining students, 69 percent; selecting teaching techniques, 87 percent; and determining the amount of homework, 87 percent. These figures were essentially unchanged from 1987-88, with only nominal increases or decreases.
Principals and Teachers: Differing Perceptions of Teachers' Leadership
Principals perceive teachers to have more influence on schoolwide issues than teachers perceive themselves to have.
In 1993-94, 35 percent of the teachers said they had a great deal of influence in establishing curriculum and in setting discipline policy, but 62 percent and 75 percent of the principals, respectively, said teachers had a great deal of influence in those two areas. The discrepancies are even greater in regard to school budget, inservice programs, and teacher evaluation. Forty-one percent of the principals—but only 10 percent of the teachers—said teachers had a great deal of influence in determining how the school budget should be spent. Similarly, 24 percent of the principals but only 3 percent of the teachers said teachers had a great deal of influence on their own evaluations.
When we compare perceptions of teachers' leadership over time, we see divergent trajectories. While teachers' perceptions of their own leadership remained stagnant, principals felt that teachers' leadership increased tremendously. As mentioned earlier, approximately 35 percent of teachers said they had a great deal of influence in establishing curriculum and in setting discipline policy, with no significant change during the survey period. Meanwhile, the percentage of principals who had that perception of teachers' influence in those two areas increased from 52 percent in 1987-88 to 75 percent in 1993-94.
Closing the Gap
Despite today's rhetoric of teacher empowerment and decentralization, empowerment thus far appears to have gone to principals. Teachers perceive their own leadership not to have increased, and to be primarily confined to the classroom. Yet principals perceive that teachers' leadership has increased steadily over the years. Principals appear to have the impression that the rhetoric has been translated into practice. To make the teachers' and principals' perceptions congruent is a daunting task facing us in this new era of school leadership.
