Educational leadership for the twenty-first century reflects a shift to an unprecedented commitment to community. No longer is authoritarian, top-down compliance the most effective way of governing a school. This book examines the shift in authority from the district office to the individual school, a shift from the principal as authority-manager to a variety of constituents who share the school’s governance. New Era leaders are students, teachers, families, community members, school boards, politicians, and corporate and philanthropic foundations.

This book examines the major questions of how leadership distributed throughout a community might look, how collaborative relationships might be forged, and how the school can be perceived as a rich environment of collegiality, shared authority, and authentic partnerships. In addition, it discusses how leaders mobilize people for change, what the critical issues are that leaders confront, what leaders do and how they do it, what an effective leader might look like, and how effectiveness may be measured. The text also discusses the moral and ethical responsibilities that stakeholder leaders must exercise when equitably educating all the nation’s young people.

Finally, because leaders initiate, support, and conduct school reform, the text offers a critical presentation of twenty leading reform models. Also included are valuable reform resources for foundation funding and annotated lists of organizations, leadership workshops and institutes, websites, and print and nonprint materials.

Pat Williams-Boyd is an Associate Professor of Education at Eastern Michigan University. She is a member of the Kellogg Foundation State of Michigan Advisory Board for the Middle Start Initiative. She has received an Office of Research and Development Fellowship for Project Middle Vision, a fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley’s Developmental Studies Center for social justice in middle-grades education, a Knox Scholarship to study at Harvard, a Kellogg Foundation grant for Project Middle Vision, and three federal Comprehensive School Reform Initiative Grants for systemic reform initiatives with Title I schools.

She has presented her research at the annual meetings and conferences of numerous scholarly and professional organizations, including most recently the National Middle School Association’s annual meeting and the American Educational Research Association’s annual meetings, and she has forthcoming work in Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy (ed. Dan Weil and Joe Kinchloe). She has presented workshops throughout the United States on differentiated instruction and heterogeneous grouping, student-led conferences, portfolio assessment, teaming, educational leadership, suicide prevention, and full-service schools.

She is a reviewer for and has been cochair of the Nominations Committee for the Qualitative Special Interest Group for the American Educational Research Association. She is also a developer and director of Middle Vision: The Center for Dynamic Middle Level Education at Eastern Michigan University. She has worked closely with an Ypsilanti middle school that recently received an award from the U.S. Department of Education as a “Promising Site” for whole-school reform. During her twenty-eight years of public school experience, she has won numerous awards, including Teacher of the Year, Outstanding Young Educator from the Jaycees, and the Governor’s Award for Exceptional Service to Kansas Public Education. She is also listed in Who’s Who in American Secondary Education. She holds two doctoral degrees, one in ethnomusicology and the other in curriculum and instruction.