Murphy leaves behind the superficial propaganda of 'leadership matters' to offer an exploration of the kind of leadership that matters most for each and every student. Let us hope the thinking reflected in this book and the new PSEL standards redirects our attention to what it really means to lead in education.
-- Michelle D. Young, UCEA Executive Director, Professor of Leadership
The effectiveness of the new Professional Standards for Educational Leaders
depends upon both their quality and their ability to be used to frame educational leader practices and the policies that inform their work. This book provides an excellent foundation to understand their nature and to promote their active use in leader practice and policy. The book lays out a clear, current empirical and intellectual foundation, while strengthening the field's commitment to its moral purposes of leading schools of care and effective learning for all children. -- Margaret Terry Orr
This book is a thorough exposition of foundational evidence and argument for effective educational leadership. It establishes a well-supported rationale for the new Professional Educational Leadership Standards 2015 and goes further to help readers clearly understand the elements of educational organization and practice-key foci of leadership work-most conducive to student success. Particularly important is the way that this book integrates the essential elements of ethics and equity. When we are tempted to reduce educational leadership to a set of technical elements, this book rightly reminds us that it is a deeply moral and human enterprise. -- Mark A. Smylie, PhD, Professor Emeritus * Author *
Joseph Murphy debunks myths about standards for educational leaders and skillfully unpacks the moral, foundational, and experiential basis for the revised professional standards to guide effective leadership of our nation's schools. He does a masterful job of depicting how the ten standards reflect academic press and caring support and are driven by mission, vision, and core values; ethics and professional norms; equity and cultural responsiveness; and school improvement. This book is a must read for those interested in leadership for learning and the academic success and wellbeing of students, because these standards will shape our field for the next quarter century as the ISLLC standards have done since 1996. -- Martha McCarthy, Presidential Professor
