Creating Great Schools

In Creating Great Schools, Phillip C. Schlechty—one of the nation’s best-known experts on leadership and change in schools—offers a hands-on primer that will help arm school leaders with the tools they need to buck the system from within. Creating Great Schools shows educational leaders how they can sustain continuous innovation and improvement in order to create truly great schools. Schlechty outlines the six critical systems that define the norms and expressions of the school’s organizational culture¾recruitment and induction, knowledge transmission, power and authority, evaluation, direction, and boundaries¾and shows what it takes to lead effective systemic change in order to sustain new values and direction. The book is filled with effective strategies and offers guidelines for introducing the “disruptive innovations” that are necessary to change the fundamental norms of an educational organization and truly revitalize a school. He offers suggestions for working through the thorny issues that arise from the efforts to introduce new norms and provides school leaders with valuable insights of the critical rules, roles, and relationships in schools. Introduction.

The Author.

Part One: The Need for Change.

1. From Compliance to Engagement.

2. Understanding the Normative System.

3. Patterns of Commitment, Engagement, and Compliance.

Part Two: Six Critical Systems.

4. The Recruitment and Induction System.

5. The Knowledge Transmission System.

6. The Power and Authority System.

7. The Evaluation System.

8. The Directional System.

9. The Boundary System.

Part Three: New Norms, New Values, New Directions.

10. The Changing Context.

11. The Future of Public Education in America.

Appendix A: Creating Engaging Schoolwork.

Appendix B: Creating a Learning Community to Transform Schools.

Bibliography.

Index.

Phillip C. Schlechty is founder and CEO of the Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform. The creator of some of the nation's most innovative professional development programs for educators, he has been the recipient of the American Federation of Teachers Quest Citation and the American Educational Research Association's Professional Service Award. Schlechty is the author of Working on the Work, Inventing Better Schools, Schools for the 21st Century and Shaking Up the School House. Today's educational leaders are under siege. They are accountable for more but hindered by a system that encourages business as usual. Myriad experts offer dream scenarios of how things ought to be, but ultimately their "solutions" offer little hope for long-term success.

In Creating Great Schools, Phillip C. Schlechty—one of the nation's best-known experts on school leadership and change—offers a hands-on primer that will help arm school leaders with the tools they need to buck the system from within. Creating Great Schools shows educational leaders how they can sustain continuous innovation and improvement in order to create truly great schools.

Schlechty outlines the six critical systems that define the norms and expressions of a school's organizational culture—recruitment and induction, knowledge transmission, power and authority, evaluation, direction, and boundaries—and shows what it takes to lead effective systemic change in order to sustain new values and direction. The book is filled with effective strategies and offers guidelines for introducing the "disruptive innovations" that are necessary to change the fundamental norms of an educational organization and truly revitalize a school. He also offers suggestions for working through the thorny issues that arise from the efforts to introduce new norms and provides school leaders with valuable insights into the critical rules, roles, and relationships in schools.

Creating Great Schools is based on Schlechty's decades of work with schools and districts all over the country. His practical wisdom provides leaders with the information and tools they need to transform their schools into outstanding learning institutions.

Praise For Phillip Schlechty

"Schlechty offers a clear and concise vision of systemic change to address the problems with education."
—The School Administrator

"Schlechty marshals readers through the ideas-to-action labyrinth of improving schools . . . A worthy successor to his earlier work."
—The American School Board Journal

"Not all reformers in the country will agree with Schlechty's solutions or even the problems, but they will be the richer for having read what he has to say on the subject."
—Louisville Courier-Journal

"Schlechty adds a refreshing voice to the ongoing how-to-fix-our-schools debate . . . Highly recommended."
—Library Journal