Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Inclusive Middle Schools, by Craig H. Kennedy, Ph.D., & Douglas Fisher, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

How Educational Administrators Support Best Practices

Where do LEA administrators (e.g., school district superintendents, special education directors) and school administrators (e.g., principals, vice principals) fit into the mix of policies and practices? Their role as administrators is central to the adoption of best practices by teachers (Janus, 1994). In many respects, LEA and school administrators are gatekeepers, allowing the individuals whom they directly or indirectly supervise to innovate and work toward improving existing educational practices. An important role of LEA and school administrators is to assess current and future educational policies and to take steps to prepare schools and teachers to meet these changes successfully.

In proactively supporting best practices, educational administrators can enable and facilitate schools and teachers to adopt, and even develop, innovative practices from which students and others will benefit. Educational administrators can help schools and teachers to innovate by

1. suggesting directions for improving educational practices,
   
   
2. allowing grass roots innovation among teachers and community members, and
   
   
3. providing leadership that creates an environment supportive of improvement and new initiatives.

Discussions on reforming educational practices have focused on issues of school leadership (Murphy & Louis, 1999). This focus is based on the observation that federal and SEA policy changes are filtered through LEAs and enacted by administrators at each school in an LEA. This places school leaders in the role of creating school environments that are receptive and making shifts in pedagogical practices based on larger policy changes. Creating schools that can adapt positively to change requires active leadership on the part of school administrators. It has been cited by researchers in educational leadership that if a competent and innovative principal can be found, then a competent and innovative school will be found (Klecker & Loadman, 1999). This suggests the important role that school leadership plays in fostering improvements in educational practices. Interestingly, recent developments in how school administrators can create more effective schools focus on leadership changes that place the school administration in a secondary rather than a primary role in creating educational innovation. This observation suggests the enabling and facilitative roles that school administrators can play.

The following sections outline a set of practices in which school administrators engage and that have been associated with improvements in school functioning and creating more inclusive learning environments.

Mission and Vision

How a school defines its purpose and how it pursues its goals is associated with the outcomes it achieves (Gilbert, 1981-1982). This is at the heart of efforts to assist schools in defining their mission and vision. The goal of defining a school's mission and vision is to enable the school to find its focus through the dialogue of individuals.

Mission is the overarching set of goals that a school tries to achieve. For example, a school might set as its mission to improve the social and academic success of all students. In general, mission statements focus on a primary set of objectives contributed by people in the school. Vision is the perspective of how to achieve a school's mission. For example, a school that is interested in facilitating inclusive practices might define its vision as bringing together educational and community leadership to make a difference in children's lives. Together, a school's mission and vision help define for people inside and outside the school what the organization values and focuses on in its daily activities (Lipman, 1997).

A school that defines its mission as creating the engineers of the future will have a different perspective on what the role of the school is compared with a school that defines its mission as improving the social and academic success for all students. One should note, however, that although these two mission statements are different, they are not incompatible. The importance of mission and values statements is that people work together to define what it is they value and strive to achieve.

There are two aspects of creating a school's mission and vision. First, it is a process that brings together all of the people who contribute to a school (e.g., students, families, community members) to define the school's purpose. Second, it provides a concrete set of statements about what these individuals are working toward creating. When done effectively, the creation of a school's mission and vision statement allows for the articulation of what all members of a school community should be working to achieve and provides a unifying theme around which to coordinate activities.

School/Community-Based Management

Schools are part of the communities in which they exist. However, only since the 1980s have educators realized the importance of this observation (Talley & Schrag, 1999). Traditionally, schools have been thought of as bastions separate from their communities. They were places where people congregated from various areas to educate children and then left at the end of the day. Unfortunately, this type of view, which has its roots in a higher education approach to middle school education, creates a strong disconnection between a school and the neighborhood in which it resides (George & Shewey, 1994). Administrators and staff at the school view themselves as separate from the community, and members of the community view the school as an entity apart from the neighborhood.

Fortunately, this traditional approach to school-community relationships is changing. There is a realization that a school and a community have much to gain by working together. Community members have a social and fiscal investment in the activities of a school. The curriculum to which students are exposed, the manner of instruction, and what students are taught to value and avoid are viewed as school-based activities. As educators have gained knowledge regarding the processes that underlie learning, there has been a realization that learning takes place across contexts. Having consistent themes stressed at school, in the home, and throughout the community facilitates a more effective school.

However, school personnel cannot dictate what a community values; rather, they should reflect the community in its most positive sense. Using this tension between a school and a community in a constructive manner is the focus of school/community-based management. In this approach to managing a school, individuals from the community and the school work together to make strategic decisions about a school's activities. Community members include parents of children who are attending, will attend, or have previously attended the school, local civic leaders, business leaders, and individuals who have a stake in the outcomes produced by a school. These community members work with the school's administration and staff to set goals for the school, decide on strategies for achieving desired outcomes, and monitor the school's progress in achieving those goals. This approach has helped make schools more involved in their communities, has increased community participation in school activities, and facilitates the perception that the school is a resource for the local community (Sanders, 1996).

Many educators advocate that schools should focus on serving as a resource to the community, rather than vice versa (Sailor, 1996; Simeonsson & Simeonsson, 1999). An increasing number of models adopt such a perspective and view a school as a 24/7 (i.e., 24 hours a day, 7 days per week) resource for the community, instead of as a building that is open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday. A school is seen as a resource center for the local community in the view of school-community partnerships. Many resources that families and other community members need are located at the school or nearby (e.g., mental health services, health care, family counseling). In addition, through feedback from community members, the school can serve as a meeting place and activity center for groups from the community.

By encouraging community involvement in school planning and decision making, a school becomes a reflection of the community in which it is situated and can serve as a resource for community members. This allows school personnel to have contact with and input from the school's neighborhood and allows the community to become more invested in the activities of the school. Typically, the result is an increase in the quality of educational services and greater use of school resources by the community (Swartz & Martin, 1997).

School Restructuring

Middle schools have inherited their management structure from universities and colleges (see Chapter 3). Although this may have seemed an appropriate approach to school management, new information suggests that other approaches produce better outcomes (George & Shewey, 1994; Lounsbury, 1992). The process of moving from a higher education model to an alternative structure is referred to as school restructuring.

School restructuring involves determining a school's focus (i.e., its mission statement), how it will achieve those goals (i.e., its values statement), and the best arrangement to achieve those goals. This process involves creating school teams that concentrate teacher efforts on groups of students, rather than on traditional academic domains. For example, a middle school might decide to restructure itself so teachers from various curricular domains (math, social studies, health, English/language arts, special education, and science) work as a team for a certain number of students from a particular grade level. These teachers and students work together as a unit throughout the school year.

Community Volunteers

Another way that community members can be involved in school life is through recruiting family members and other volunteers. This approach has at least two benefits. First, having additional adults working at the school results in increased personnel resources. Second, recruiting volunteers increases the involvement of the community in the activities of a school. Family members and community volunteers infuse the school with new ideas and allow additional activities to take place. Although family members, particularly parents of students, are the focus for recruiting community volunteers, additional resources are available for identifying potential contributors. Community groups that focus their efforts on volunteering are an effective resource.

Advocates of community volunteers suggest that these individuals can serve a number of roles within a school (Strom & Strom, 1999). For example, some can serve as instructional assistants to supplement the instruction of teachers. Others can work in areas that support instruction, such as the school office, library, cafeteria, or facilities maintenance. One of the best strategies for incorporating community volunteers into schools is to make use of their unique skills.

The second benefit of volunteerism for schools is increased interaction between school personnel and community members. As with school/community-based management, the greater the interchange between the school staff and community members, the more the school comes to reflect the values and character of its neighborhood. In addition, community members experience a greater connection with and understanding of the school.

Fostering Inclusion

There are other practices that educational administrators can take to foster inclusion. Three that merit particular attention are

1. promoting neighborhood schools,
   
   
2. providing staff development, and
   
   
3. demonstrating leadership in inclusive practices.

As mentioned previously, neighborhood schools is a concept that focuses on which school students attend (Sailor, in press). This approach is important for promoting inclusive educational practices because it facilitates placement of students at schools in their zone in a noncategorical manner. In a neighborhood schools model, a school serves all students from its area. Advocates for neighborhood schools point out that this model enhances a school's presence in its community because the school reflects the diversity of students who live in the community and does not exclude students because of a disability.

Because education is a profession, ongoing staff development is a critical component for improving the skills of teachers and others. One of the barriers to implementing effective inclusive practices is the perception of teachers that they are required to learn additional skills. If teachers do not perceive themselves to have the abilities necessary to work in an inclusive school setting, then staff development becomes a necessary vehicle for increasing the skills of teachers and promoting a greater comfort level among school personnel.

Above all else, educational administrators should focus on leadership when increasing a school's capacity to be more inclusive. Although the concept of leadership is full of intangibles, it is, nevertheless, acknowledged that for effective school reform to take place, district and school administrators need to demonstrate support for those reforms. This entails supporting others' initiatives to make educational practices more inclusive, developing new initiatives, and modeling ways in which others should behave.

What does each of the practices discussed in this chapter have to do with creating inclusive middle schools? Each provides a context for positive change. A school is a complex web of events, policies, and people that are necessarily interdependent. How one event may affect one group of people will have an impact on others at a school. For example, if one school team has a positive experience with inclusive practices, that experience will be communicated to others. This would result in people's viewing events and policies relating to inclusion more positively.

If schools are to change — and making a school more inclusive is a fundamental change — then the context needs to be set to enable and facilitate those changes. Educational administrators are at the foundation of those changes. By setting policies that allow teachers and others to pursue innovative practices, district and school administrators create an environment that will nurture and promote those changes. However, without administrative support, educational reforms are difficult for individuals or groups of individuals to carry out.

Reform efforts in the area of inclusive education require administrative supports. For example, district administrators who create school zoning policies that make neighborhood schools the preferred placement option promote inclusive practices and set in place a series of changes that make inclusion likely to succeed. Those changes include rearranging resources among schools and making sure that individual schools have the staffing to accommodate those changes. Another example is a building principal's decision that each school team will include a special educator as a core part of that group. This sets the context for general educators and special educators to work together and view each other as part of the same team, rather than as separate entities (as they have historically been perceived).

A school cannot become more inclusive without the clear and unambiguous support of educational administrators. The goal of this chapter has been to outline practices that have been demonstrated to promote inclusive educational practices. However, the practices reviewed are unique because they cannot occur without the explicit decision-making abilities that rest with educational administrators. District and building administrators cannot make educational reforms happen in a vacuum; they require setting a foundation for others to innovate and try new practices. However, educational reforms do not happen without the support and leadership of educational administrators.