Editorial

Citation

Ross Thomas, A. (2006), "Editorial", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 44 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jea.2006.07444baa.001

Editorial

We welcome to the Editorial Advisory Board Dr Anthony Normore who will replace Professor Allan Walker as Review Editor. Dr Normore is no stranger to the JEA having published an article as well as several book reviews in the journal. He is a member of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Florida International University, Miami. We look forward to his contribution.

Professor Walker will remain a member of the Board and resume the responsibilities of paper assessment, policy review, and determination of the annual outstanding article award. This, the W.G.Walker Award, is named in honour of Professor Allan Walker’s father and Founding Editor of the Journal of Educational Administration.

This issue

As foreshadowed in our previous issue contributors in this number of the journal represent several countries – Australia, Qatar, Spain and the USA. Four of the articles address issues of administration and leadership in schools; one is directed at administration in a university.

The first article is contributed by Cranston, Ehrich and Kimber. Data for the study were provided by a sample of leaders in Australian independent schools. Analysis of such is most revealing and likely to have implications well beyond the purlieu of the principals involved. That ethical dilemmas are the “bread and butter” of educational leaders’ lives emerges most clearly from this article. Dilemmas of many forms confront school leaders on almost a daily basis; resultant decisions are frequently made only after intense consideration and evaluation of competing evidence. As the authors attest, the most difficult dilemmas are not those in which “right” opposes “wrong” but when “right” opposes “right”. Ethical issues and dilemmas emerge when school leaders are required to make complex decisions in contexts where individual, group and organisational interests may be in conflict.

The study of the ethics of leadership is fast developing as a particularly important aspect of school leadership. This journal has been active in encouraging research in the area and the publication of a special, thematic issue in 2004 (“Education, ethics, and the ‘cult of efficiency’: implications for values and leadership” Vol. 42 No. 2 edited by Begley and Stefkovich) attests to such. A second thematic issue on ethics and values in leadership is planned for next year (Vol. 45 No. 3)

Trust has been the subject of several articles published in the journal in recent years. It is clearly a phenomenon crucial to the effective leadership of schools, particularly as it serves to link teachers and school leaders. In our second article Forsyth, Barnes and Adams report on their investigation of parent trust. The emphasis herein is upon trust in the school and its teachers as manifest by parents (and not as perceived by the teachers themselves). Data from a sample of American schools are used at first to generate a trust-effectiveness typology. The study reveals that a complex and extensive trust environment is predictive of school conditions and consequences, regardless of the socio-economic status of the school community.

Their analysis of decision making in a small rural school district in the USA is next presented by Patterson, Koenigs, Mohn and Rasmussen. Basis for the process of decision-making investigated was the allocation of resources to schools during a period of economic retrenchment. Organisational archetypes were used as an analytic framework to expose deep cultural values and preferences that influenced decisions made by the school board and by the superintendent. It was revealed that the historical patterns of decision making were not congruent with what the community preferred. Most disturbing, was the practice of district leaders of ignoring information that did not agree with their own beliefs. A most important observation was that these patterns of decision-making advantaged one group of constituents but disadvantaged another.

The internationality of the journal is further displayed in the following article. Herein, Kanan and Baker report on their investigation of student satisfaction with a preparatory programme for educational administrators. The programme was offered by a leading Palestinian university in the West bank. Formal graduate programmes in educational administration were first offered in Palestine in the mid-1990s and thus remain a relatively new domain of study. Personal satisfaction of graduates was found to be more closely related to interpersonal interaction than the academic content of the program of study. Furthermore, their criticisms of the programme are similar to those made by students of educational administration in western universities four decades ago.

Our final paper, by Tarí, reports on his study of an exercise in self-assessment conducted in a Spanish university. A total quality management approach was used by the university in assessing the effectiveness of five of its key services and functions. An outcome of the study is an indication of the steps a university may follow to apply this exercise successfully. The benefits of such, the obstacles encountered, management and employee commitment, and the support of self-assessment teams are all discussed.

A. Ross Thomas