The irreplaceable Peter Drucker, now 95 years old, wrote a brilliant piece in the December 30th Wall Street Journal about the singular roles and responsibilities of the American-style CEO. It set me to thinking about school leaders and wondering yet again why we don't view the principal as a CEO.
The crux of the CEO's job, Drucker writes, is to link an organization's "inside" with its "outside," by which he means "society, the economy, technology, markets, customers," etc. "Inside," he explains, "there are only costs. Results are only on the outside. Indeed the modern organization . . . was expressly created to have results on the outside, that is, to make a difference in its society or its economy."
Isn't that the way we now view schools, as organizations that incur costs on the Inside in order to produce results and make a difference on the Outside?
The CEO's premier tasks, says Drucker, are to define his particular organization's "Outside," determine "what information regarding the Outside is meaningful and needed for the organization," then "work on getting it in usable form. . . ." That, in turn, "makes it possible to answer the key questions: 'What is our business? What should it be? What should it not be?' The answers to these questions establish the boundaries within which an institution operates. And they are the foundation for the specific work of the CEO."
Such work comes under four headings: (1) Deciding what results the institution must pursue. (2) Determining what information is vital for that pursuit to succeed. (3) Shaping the organization's priorities. ("In any but a dying organization, there are always far more tasks than . . . available resources. But results are obtained only by concentration of resources. . . .") And (4) deploying people in key positions. "This, in the last analysis, determines the performance capacity of the institution."
This view of the chief executive's role, Drucker explains, is peculiarly American and can be tracked back to Alexander Hamilton. "There is no real counterpart to the CEO in the management and organization of any other country."
It is not, however, limited to the corporate sector. Successful nonprofits have CEOs who play kindred roles. (Think of major museums, hospitals, and large charities like the Red Cross.) Highly focused government agencies, though subject to more political constraints (e.g. Congress, legislatures) often have analogous CEO-style leaders. Think of the FBI, the Coast Guard, the Census Bureau, a state or municipal police force.
When we turn to education, however, such people are scarce. We see the odd example heading the occasional college, private or charter school, and a handful of districts (e.g., Boston's Tom Payzant or San Diego's much-beset Alan Bersin - see below for more on his travails). But they're rare, because of governance structures that constrain the executive's authority, because of politics, union contracts and faculty predilections, and because other personal traits often trump executive capacity and leadership prowess when such organizations select their leaders. Giving a university's faculty a major say in the choice of its president, for example, is apt to yield a pliable executive who bends to the faculty's wishes. (Observe recent grumps about Harvard's less plastic Lawrence Summers.) And when teacher unions dominate school board elections, hard-charging superintendents seldom last long.
Most striking, though, is how alien Drucker's account of the CEO is to our usual view of the public school principal and the requisites for success in that position. Check out the ISLLC (Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium) standards for school leaders and see how many parallels you find. I spotted very few.
Drucker assumes that an effective CEO is the hinge between inside and outside; the definer, gatherer, and user of data; the mission shaper and priority setter; and the deployer of the organization's personnel.
How many U.S. public school principals see their role thusly? How many have the leeway, the authority, the personal capacity and drive to define and play such a role vis-??-vis their school? Granted, outside authorities have a lot to say about the definition and gauges of success in public education. Schools are not wholly autonomous. But why not when it comes to deploying resources and people in pursuit of that success? Why are they not data-driven organizations? Why are principals not sophisticated data gluttons?
Yes, the best ones tend to be. But even they seldom have much say over who works in what capacities in their schools - or they acquire that say by bending rules, exploiting relationships, and utilizing every loophole in the system. Yet how can one be accountable for the performance of an organization over which one has limited sway?
Innovative programs for the development of principals, such as New Leaders for New Schools, understand that a principal's authority must be commensurate with his/her responsibility. So do heterodox education thinkers like Rick Hess. But (like Drucker in the corporate domain) they're the exception.
I submit that America won't have the schools it craves until it has the leaders they require - and that we cannot equip ourselves with such leaders until such time as we are ready to treat them like "the American CEO."
"The American CEO," by Peter Drucker, Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2004 (subscription required)
