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Democracy, Power, and Authority: The Development of a Conceptual Basis for Shared Professionalism between Teachers and Administrators

Overlooked in the recent literatures on the enhancement of teacher professionalism and the changing role of school administrators is the task of rooting such newer ideas in a conceptual framework that would underwrite and give much needed coherence to these ideas. Despite redirections of some existing administrator education preparation programs that move away from emphasising “managerial/supervisory” aspects of school administration, the notion of principal, etc., as authoritarian leader is still ubiquitous in educational practice. The literature on teacher “empowerment,” however, suggests that there should be major, if not radical, changes to the roles and relationships of teachers and school administrators. Some researchers of teacher empowerment issues and school administration have argued that increasing democratic relations between teachers and administrators require that school administrators “should lead from behind” in bottom-up structures of decision making, while the more daring question the need for school administrators at all. This paper examines some of the issues involved. In arguing that both teachers and school administrators have role expectations grounded in a set of moral ideals and commitments external to their current and historic roles, we seek to advance the development of a framework that grounds and makes sense of the call for greater teacher autonomy and empowerment, while establishing the need for and authority of school administrators. In doing so, we attempt to show that educational authority is not an all or nothing, zero-sum, game, but that, because rooted in external ideals and commitments, it is something that requires shared professionalism between teachers and administrators. It is a shared professionalism that features different, but mutually supporting, realms of educational authority.