Blazing New Trails - Connexions

216 CRITICAL ISSUES IN SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT
making, (f) provide staff with challenges and responsibilities, (g) convey trust and
understanding to others, and (h) assist in personal development. The list of action steps to be
undertaken by the building-level principal provides a framework from which to develop
faculty who act upon their ethical convictions and subsequently realize their potential.
Doggett (1988) claimed, “Many of the routine issues confronting principals each day
are of an ethical nature and call for school administrators to uphold principles of honesty and
integrity” (p. 6). Because school leaders should fulfill their obligations in both moral and
ethical ways (Campbell, 1997), the challenge is for a principal to be an ethical leader who
maintains standards of honesty and integrity. This challenge means that the school leader is
making decisions based on what is right or wrong such that the residual benefit extends to
both the members of the organization and to the organization itself. Describing both the
process and the goal of ethics, Pritchett (1999) understood ethics as the process of making the
right decision based on having the knowledge of right and wrong whereas the goal is to make
ethical decisions that result in what is best for individuals and the organization.
School administrators must possess moral reasoning skills to lead their school from a
moral perspective. For Greenfield (1999), leaders’ competence in moral reasoning is
fundamental to the administrators’ ability to oversee a school in a distinctly moral manner.
Raising the plane of responsibility higher, Campbell (1997) posited, “Contemporary
theoretical and empirical literature increasingly has addressed the necessity for educators to
regard their professional responsibilities as basic moral and ethical imperatives” (p. 288).
From an organizational perspective, “School administration, in contrast to administration in
other organizations, makes a unique set of ethical demands on the administrator” (Greenfield,
1991, p. 2).
Leaders’ focus must be unidirectional as they must simultaneously address a variety of
different educational responsibilities and challenges. According to Martin (2004), schools are:
…charged with assuring the well-being of their students. The campus leader has a
profound influence on the stakeholders and moral fiber of the campus. Therefore, the
behavior of the leader must consistently focus on moral and responsible actions,
directly impacting the ethical culture of the educational institution. (p. 1)
In addition, Martin (2004) asserted, “School administrators are held to an even higher
standard than leaders in other fields because they are uniquely in charge of establishing
citizenship as well as socializing children to the norms of society” (p. 16). Greenfield (1991)
maintained that the activities in a school not only have consequences for the child, but for
society as well. Therefore, ethical leadership in the school also has a profound effect on the
community at large. With the myriad of responsibilities that school administrators must
shoulder, the importance of making the right ethical decisions cannot be overstated. Such a
case for the importance of ethical decision-making is made by Walker and Dimmock (2002)
who wrote, “Ethical leadership is synonymous with effective schools. It is the moral
component of instructional leadership” (p. 32).
Moral Leadership
McKerrow (1997) maintained that education is a fundamentally moral venture.
Greenfield (1991) contended the public school administrators are moral representatives, and
Smith and Blase` (1988) reasoned, “The moral leader should realize that there is much more
to schooling than the attainment of certain quantitatively measured goals” (p. 8). Lunenburg