Educational Administration Quarterly

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The Decline of the Local: A Challenge to Educational Leadership

William P. Foster
Educational Administration Quarterly 2004; 40; 176
DOI: 10.1177/0013161X03260360
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Educational Administration Quarterly

Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 2004) 176-191

ARTICLE

10.1177/0013161X03260360
Educational
Foster
/ DECLINE
Administration
OF THE Quarterly
LOCAL

The Decline of the Local:

A Challenge to Educational Leadership
William P. Foster
Foster anchors his analysis of educational leadership by situating the function of schooling as bureaucratic control over individuals. Within the context of schools as a systemic,
rule-bearing institution, Foster challenges the work of educational leaders. Are educational leaders virtuous and free or are they mere agents of the state? Foster pits national/
state narratives for disseminating rules and standards against local communitiesethos.
Can educational leaders create communal narratives against the domination of the
states? [JCL]
Keywords: critical theory; leadership; school and community relations; moral leadership; leadership ethic

In the history of Western states in the last few centuries, there has been a

remarkable confluence of forces: the rise of the industrialized nation-state,

the promise of democratic regimes, the further development of bureaucracy,
and the use of rule-based ethical systems. Although bureaucracy is not
indeed a modern invention, its rise as a means of securing a moral order in
industrialized states has been unprecedented, and this rise has been supported by an individualistic and economics-driven system of social relationships. The post-Aquinian development of rules ethics, and with it emphasis
on individual obligation, certainly supported the development of the bureaucratic state. This leads to control over the state subjects to form nations, and
this is done through various institutions including schools.
In the modern era, the nation-state developed systems of control over populations, and such systems depended on dependable social relations, compli-

Authors Note: Although this presentation was developed for the 2002 conference on Values and
Leadership at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, parts of
it have been drawn from previously written manuscripts on the same set of topics.
DOI: 10.1177/0013161X03260360
2004 The University Council for Educational Administration

176

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Foster / DECLINE OF THE LOCAL 177

ance, and information. The individual, bound by the obligations of rules, became a creature of the state. The French philosopher and sociologist,
Foucault, was interested in the idea of mentalities, that is, ways of thinking
about perceived realitiesa habitual mental response. In particular, he wrote
about govern-mentalities, which are those ways of thinking concerning political realities. He became concerned with how governmentalities began to
control people in a nation-state. Miller and Rose (1993) wrote,
He [Foucault] implies, societies like our own are characterized by a particular
way of thinking about the kinds of problems that can and should be addressed
by various authorities. They operate within a kind of political a priori that allows the tasks of such authorities to be seen in terms of the calculated supervision, administration and maximization of the forces of each and all. (p. 76)

This concept is important: It suggests that an administrative mentality pervades modern society and is exerted through what Foucault labeled technologies of thought.
Such technologies, although not completely controlling, do exert a primary influence on the way we think and act, and they are exerted, in a sense,
through the influence of leadership. A technology, in this way of thinking, is
the application of a systematic procedure toward a particular end.
There are at least three technologies of thought that need mention here.
One is the control of numeracy, then of information, and, finally, of language.
With the control of numeracy, one has to refer to the collection of statistics
and numbers about things and about how these are used to develop and influence policy. Both the political Right and Left use such numbers. Two common examples are, first, the collection of statistics about world rankings of
educational systemssomething of a national pastime in the United States.
Here, politicians earn reputations and press by showing how poorly students
perform compared to, say, Japan, England, Germany, the Scandinavian
countries, and so forth. On the other hand, reformers point to statistics showing that the United States has the highest percentage of children living in poverty of any industrialized nation and that this fact should be the basis for political action. It is common also to rank school systems and their students by
achievement test scores, by SAT scores, and by indexes of reputation and to
feed this information to the media. This is not simply a neutral endeavor;
rather, it is used to gain control over issues, to strengthen the clout of state
agencies, and for a multitude of other purposes. The standards movement
has, of course, garnered enough statistics about the so-called weaknesses of
the educational system to fuel a rather large public confidence gap; although
the accuracy of such statistics has been challenged, there is no doubt that they

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178 Educational Administration Quarterly

have served a political purpose in establishing a particular narrative about the

failures of American schools.
Another technology of thought that is important is the distribution and
control of information systems. These include, of course, the computer and
its attendant devices but also television, as when TVs are provided free to
schools in exchange for requiring students to watch particular programs each
with its own set of commercials. Here is an excellent example of what
Foucault called biopower, that is, the physical control over another to exert
influence. Thus, children are compelled to be in one physical place for significant portions of their day and during this time are exposed to the messages of
the powerful.
Computers are themselves a significant source of control-oriented mechanisms in todays classrooms. Who programs them, and for what purposes?
As Web-based courses become more and more popular, these questions
become more and more important. It has been suggested that the physical
need for schools is an outmoded concept; learning can effectively take place
through computer instruction at home, and this may well be true. But it has
strong implications for the development and creation of a public that has a
certain amount of political consciousness. Indeed, it would seem to play
fairly well into the needs of an individualist, consumerist economy.
The final technology of thought that can be addressed here is language
itself, both as a mechanism for conveying thought and as a means for legitimizing relations of power. And this relates well to any comments we have
regarding leadership, because leadership is a language used subtly in power
to persuade. That is, leadership is language and language is how leadership is
exerted. A study of this issue should include an analysis, at least, of the type
of language in use and its effects. The effects of language are both enormous
and awesome and nearly infinite. Some of these include the ability of a particular discourse to limit access to groups without the same linguistic capital as
the powerful, to subtly genderize social relations, and to silence the soft
voices. The types of language, too, are many. In the study of leadership, for
example, one finds many different types of discourse. If one examines the
academic discourse, there is often a functionalist, positivistic, and technical
language oriented largely to modernist issues: linearity, rationality, and a
hope for predictability. Were one to look at populist models of leadership,
one finds a different type of language, a poetics of leadership as found, for
example, in the I Had a Dream speech by Martin Luther King Jr. Language,
and its use, becomes a subtle way of reinforcing different mentalities from
protest to regulatory.

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Foster / DECLINE OF THE LOCAL 179

REGULATORY STANDARDS AND HIGH-STAKES TESTING

One example of governmentality exercising control over leadership
and school culture now lies in the development of national and often statemandated and approved standards in various areas, from curriculum to
teacher and administrator preparation. In educational administration, for example, a consortium of educational professors, professional organizations,
and interest groups have developed and adopted what they see as national
standards for the licensing and regulation of individuals entering the profession. They provide what Foucault might have labeled a metanarrative for the
conduct of schoolinga story of how and why schools should be. A narrative
is a coherent description of a constructed reality, albeit one constructed to the
advantage of those telling itthe powerful.
Postmans (1996) interesting little book equates narratives with the gods
we worship in a society, and his gods (with which he takes exception) are
those of consumerism, technology, economic utility, and separatism. Narratives, for Postman, then, help to define social reality. The modern narrative
presents a universe of progress and rationality that supports the development
and expression of technology, economic development, and consumerism.
Cherryholmes (1988) found that modern, analytic, and structural thought
seek rationality, linearity, progress, and control by discovering, developing,
and inventing metanarratives, metadiscourses, and metacritiques that define
rationality, linearity, progress, and control (p. 11).
However, postmodern thought, and Foucault is representative, is skeptical
about such narratives, and this skepticism arises from the observation that
such narratives are not simply neutral constructs that have evolved in a society but that they are intimately linked to forms of power. A number of years
ago, Berger and Luckmann (1966) observed that the interesting question is
not What? or Why? but Who says? The postmodern conclusion, and indeed
one shared by various critical theorists, is that social truth and power relations
are variations on a theme, and that theme is constructed historically but also
in the interests of differentiated class structures.
A postmodernist perspective suggests that much of our social reality is
constructed through established narratives. Such narratives enter into mainstream consciousness because those who tell them are the inheritors of
power. The power displayed, in turn, reinforces the truth of the narratives. I
will return to the grand narratives that Postman identified, but I also want to
mention those smaller narratives that occur in the field of education. All of us
could come up with many, but the ones I want to mention are these. First, we
have the narrative of standards; this is tied into a narrative of global competitiveness, economic dominance, and nationalistic pride. Then, there is the

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180 Educational Administration Quarterly

narrative of curriculum where arguments of what is to be taught dominate.

Third, there are narratives concerning the leadership of schools.
In constructing such national narratives, the localism inherent to the
democratic process has become usurped by a cadre of like-minded, wellrewarded, and self-appointed representatives of the profession. Perhaps this
is to the benefit of the profession at large; however, it is not far-fetched to suggest that a critique of this movement should indeed be mountedone that
might suggest that these standards are simply a new narrative that has been
developed and one that affects the democratic formulation of leadership in
the profession. Standards, then, can often be seen to have their origin in the
drive to create school systems that produce effective workers who can compete ably in a global economy. Having productive workers is not a bad end in
and of itself; however, when it drives out other valuable ends, it becomes
much more problematic. And it does drive out other ends.
These narratives, then, shape a society and reflect those dominant themes
and issues that help to define who we are and how we give meaning to our
lives. These narratives, for Postman, are the gods we worship, and they include the gods of technology and of economic utility. It is these that the educational establishment worships. The god of economic utility
offers a covenant of sorts with [students]: If you will pay attention in school,
and do your homework, and score well on tests, and behave yourself, you will
be rewarded with a well-paying job when you are done. Its driving idea is that
the purpose of schooling is to prepare children for competent entry into the
economic life of a community. (Postman, 1996, p. 27)

He goes on to say, in a following passage, that the story goes on to preach

that America is not so much a culture as it is an economy, and that the vitality
of any nations economy rests on high standards of achievement and rigorous
disciplines in schools (Postman, 1996, p. 280).
Postman (1996) has identified, I think, a severe problem with the institutional system of education we have: that an economic ethos has pervaded it
and that educators must be, are required to be, responsive to that. And, thus,
one turns to standards.
Meier (1995), in commenting on the reform efforts in education in the last
few decades, found that in the 1990s, having discarded the changes proposed
in the earlier decades, reformers turned to a new set of initiatives:
This newest major reform initiative rested on a very old idea: increase the
power of professional experts at the state and federal levels to require reforms
through the institution of a uniform national curriculum (or standards) backed

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Foster / DECLINE OF THE LOCAL 181

by national high stakes tests. The other solution, also available by legislative
mandate, was to abandon public control altogether. (p. 75)

It seems clear, then, that the standards movement has been a response to
the perceived inability of students to compete globally in an international
economy, that it has been driven by professional experts who have decided
that their view of the economic situation and the state of schooling is indeed
the right one, and that the answer to the problems of schooling has to do with
the development of more rigorous standards, not only for teachers but for administrators. What the adoption of such standards does is to remove local decision making and place it in the hand of experts. In turn, these standards tend
to adopt a clinical model of preparation, one that confuses in many ways the
idea of training with that of education. A clinical model provides training in
accepted practices and strategies; an educational model is designed to
broaden and deepen the mind. The purveyors of standards are caught in
something of a no-mans-land dilemma; the standards themselves call for an
educational model, because they refer to leadership, involvement, appreciation of diversity, and so on. Yet they hope to assess these through a clinical
framework depending on tests constructed by a large testing service and similar to the taking of boards. One solution, of course, is to remove university
programs and to locate the credentialing process elsewhere. A probable result might simply be the recreation of current attitudes and practices that led
the cry for school reform in the first place.
The standards movement also has an impact on the classroom fueled by
the high-stakes testing environment. Teachers have commented to me that
they lack control over the curriculum, that lesson plans have to have check
marks next to the standard they are attempting to meet, and that variety, creativity, and simply spending time with a child have all been affected. Gordon
and Reese (1997), citing Gilman and Reynoldss (1991) study of Indianas
high-stakes testing program, reported there was indirect control of local curriculum and instruction, lowering of faculty morale, cheating by administrators and teachers, unhealthy competition between schools, negative effects of
school-community relations, negative psychological and physical effects on
students, and loss of school time (p. 347). Similar results were found in
other states; however, Gordon and Reeses study focused on the Texas
Assessment of Academic Skills. In their study, they found that teachers
would often teach to the test and that students would be trained not only in
answering questions but also in filling in the bubbles on answer sheets. Perhaps one of the worst results was that schools of high socioeconomic status
(SES), which tended to score well, were rewarded by state incentives,
whereas low-SES schools, tending to score lower, were penalized by the

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182 Educational Administration Quarterly

state. What this high-stakes testing system seems to do is to limit leadership

in significant ways; one of their respondents said, A large amount of time
and money has been spent on TAAS [Texas Assessment of Academic Skills].
Our principal has said if theres anything you see that we can use, well find
the money (Gordon & Reese, 1997, p. 361). This type of accountability, and
of governmentality, limits the cultural influence of leadership in a school
setting.
GLOBALIZATION
Schooling, once considered as the means for the development of the educated and liberal person, has increasingly come to be seen as the venue for increasing the economic competitiveness of the state. Standards have little or
no reference to the development of an educated person nor do they refer to the
purposes of schoolingwhy, indeed, we attempt to educate our young.
There is little reference to the raising of political consciousness or to the formation and reformation of democracy. Although a close reading of the educational standards in various fields will yield some reference to preparing
students to function in a democracy, the standards are woefully inadequate in
centralizing the democratic project as their main focus. Accountability measures, including the testing regime imposed on students, have similar
failings. These limits to democratic leadership are international in their
scope.
Spring (1998) has written persuasively about how in much of the world
schooling has come to be seen as a tool of the economy. Drawing on examples taken from Japan, Singapore, Europe, the United States, the United
Kingdom, and other areas, he showed that the development of a global economy has indeed driven state intervention into educational programs to advance the economic progress of the state at issue. Spring showed clearly how
business in the global economy has come to dominate educational rhetoric.
In one poignant passage, he asked,
How did the paradigm for schooling become education as work leading to
more work? How did the accountants and economists gain control of educational discourse? How did the language of schooling become laced with terms
such as measurement, standards, accountability, human capital, human resources, social investment, and marketability? (Spring, 1998, p. 150)

He then went on to find that,

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Foster / DECLINE OF THE LOCAL 183

Beginning in 1983 with the National Commission on Excellence in Educations A Nation at Risk, report after report has proclaimed the necessity of educating students for the global labor market. Each report is written under the patronage of major corporations. Each report demands closer relations between
education and the needs of business. Each report demands more measurement
and accountability. (Spring, 1998, p. 151).

The call for standards and accountability, then, seems to be linked inextricably to the needs of business; this becomes problematic for those who might
see the nature of schooling otherwise. Spring (1998) found that,
In trying to measure education, economics and accountants influence policymakers. This influence results in school policies that generate data that can be
used by accounting methods. As a result, educational decisions are now guided
by national standards and testing, accreditation, efficiency, and labor market
needs. (p. 22)

THE LIMITS OF LEADERSHIP

The limits of leadership are closely tied to global and national tendencies
to exert control over the technologies of thought and to limit the expression of
attempts at cultural leadership. Through the development of national and international programs, through the development of state-mandated testing
and accountability programs, and through the development of corporate testing programs (such as done by the Educational Testing Service), local initiatives to develop cultural leadership are inhibited by rules, regulations, and
state controls. Not that these are ill-intentioned; they, however, tend to follow
a politically inspired mandate inspired by business needs for competent
workers thereby disregarding the schools role in developing a democratic
polity. These technologies of thought, developed through an increasing and
now global network of administrative control over schools and the educational process, affect the exercise of leadership in a local setting: setting standards of performance, culpability, and responsibility that limit any exercise
of leadership over a schooling culture.
This emphasis on the economic dimension of schools in preparing students for the workplace seems to be missing a number of what might be considered to be important dimensions. Such standards have, indeed, resolved an
age-old question without even bothering to ask it: What is the end of education? Do we educate to produce an effective workforce? Or is there more to
be accomplished? There should be no mistake here: Such national standards,
as general as they are, lead, and have led, to much more specific programs of

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184 Educational Administration Quarterly

action on the state and local level. They influence the way policy makers
think about education and provide a moral agenda for those in positions of
power. But there are options, if educators are allowed to provide them.
Burrello, Lashley, and Beatty (2001) suggested,
School leadership is advocating for teaching and learning by articulating and
working to achieve a school-communitys shared educational commitments.
(p. 183)

They quote Cherryholmes (1988) in suggesting a critical pragmatism, or a way

of viewing the situation through a critical, but sympathetic, lens to see what
strategies and programs might work best. They also suggest that leadership
programs should be engaged in the creation of public intellectuals
individuals who can engage in sophisticated analyses of social problems and
provide responses to them. Such individuals engage in a practice that MacIntyre (1984) defined as
any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the
course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate
to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human
powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods
involved, are systematically extended. (p. 187)

Burrello et al. used the concept of a practice to suggest that educational institutions should create ways to enhance the practices of leaders in those institutions so that they enjoy both the external and internal rewards that are there to
find excellence in their conduct of the profession. They go on to say,
The call here is for a public intellectual to take up the critical project and its sophisticated analysis of society and culture. Public intellectuals use their knowledge to create new vocabularies and frameworks that emphasize notions of ethics, power, personal agency, and the common good. They merge theory and
discourse to construct practices, policies, and programs that address important
social problems and foster democratic participation as their central task.
(Burrello et al., 2001, p. 191)

The practice of cultural and institutional leadership needs to be rethought,

and potential leaders need to be educated in the values and purposes of selfgovernance in a democracy. The technologies of thought that serve governmentalities obscure this need, yet it is a real one indeed.
What seems to be occurring is an emergence of a new managerialism (Pini &
Anderson, 2002) where cultural spaces and borders are obscured in favor of

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Foster / DECLINE OF THE LOCAL 185

mandated regulatory standards taken to be in the national interest. The leadership of the public intellectual at a local level becomes so circumscribed that
it is hardly visible. Whereas leaders are charged with transforming a culture
and public intellectuals with renewing a culture, the technologies of thought
developed by the new, bureaucratic managers seem to get in the way. Economic globalism has eroded the local initiative of leaders and has established
rules and procedures that are counterproductive in renewing local control of
schools and in reinventing democratic processes.
School leaders are, of course, everywhere. They practice their leadership in many, often unnoticed ways. They make strides in developing school
cultures that value diversity, knowledge, and personal growth. Yet, at the
same time, their actions and potential have become limited; the localism that
leadership demands has been constrained by the drive for economic
dominance.
AN ALTERNATIVE SCENARIO
MacIntyre (1984) developed a new argument that might counteract the
bureaucratic regimes that lead to such measurement. His argument suggests
that it is in the development of the virtues, rather than rules, that we should
live our lives. He suggested that it is through the formation of character that
virtues are developed, and character is dependent on particular friends, families, and communities. He wrote,
What we have to learn from heroic societies is twofold: first that all morality is
always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except
as part of a tradition in which we inherit them from a series of predecessors in
which series heroic societies hold first place. (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 127)

The achievement of excellence in, for example, schools depends not on

adding value or changing cultures but on the development of a community of
practitioners who encourage virtuous activity in each other. The modernist
agenda, however, tends to counteract communitarian efforts at achieving
practices of excellence because of emphases on individualistic achievement
driven by economic forces. MacIntyres (1984) work asks us in many ways to
examine how our communities of learningof promoting virtue and denying the viceshave been compromised by a modernist moral agenda.

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186 Educational Administration Quarterly

THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNITY

The school organization has come to be seen in an almost totally instrumental way: as a tool to achieve those social goals deemed important in a particular period but almost always focusing on the development of a productive
and employable citizen. This instrumental view would, then, often relegate
schools to being tools of the economy, and although education itself seemed
to remain universally valued as an inherent good, the school-as-organization
became valued for what it could or should accomplish in relation, largely, to
the economy.
This situation, of course, was not unique to schools as institutions. Rather,
it seemed to be a phenomenon inherent in the development of the modern,
Western state and has been commented on by thinkers as diverse as Toennies,
Durkheim, Weber, and Habermas. Each of these suggested, in some fashion,
that a bureaucratic society advanced an instrumentalist notion of being and
that, further, this often leads to anomie and disenchantment. MacIntyre
(1984) went so far as to suggest that the bureaucratic/instrumentalist orientation has, in fact, corrupted moral language entirely.
The instrumental orientation is also a contractual one wherein the use of
persons for instrumental ends is achieved through the establishment and
enforcement of contracts. This reflects the type of gesellschaft society
Toennies (1957) wrote abouta society based in enforced obligation. Gemeinschaft, the contrast he used, becomes a condition attenuated by the everincreasing dominance of instrumental and contractual social logic. The
gemeinschaft condition, of course, refers to the community spirit that pervaded most social groupings prior to the industrialization of the world.
One can imagine a time in history when the term community was not problematic; taken for granted and a part of the cultural landscape, there was no
need to create or build community. But the apparent erosion of community in
much of our world has us look to define it and, by naming it, develop it. There
are multiple ways of investigating the term, and it has become common to use
it somewhat indiscriminately, particularly with regard to building a school
community.
WAYS OF LOOKING
Approaches to community build upon philosophical foundations, and notions of community have a history based in particular philosophical and even
metaphysical assumptions. In administration, in particular, the idea of community has had several orientations and expressions. But it is important to

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Foster / DECLINE OF THE LOCAL 187

note that community is determined more by social structure than by administrative fiat; the best administrative intentions can be inadequate to overcoming the structural properties of large systems. Merz and Furman (1997) made
this point when they observed,
Simply thinking of schools differently, as communities rather than as organizations, does not alter the deep structures of the school as organization, structures
that are institutionalized and that help create the gesellschaftlich climate of
schools. (p. 86)

Indeed, the structural variable of size itself might be an overriding consideration in the establishment of community (Merz & Furman, 1997).
As complex systems increase in size, organizational theorists tell us that
mechanisms for both differentiation and integration are required (Burns &
Stalker, 1961). These, in turn, can diminish the face-to-face vitality of communities by establishing hierarchies of distance (e.g., central office, local
control) or create artificial ways of bonding and loyalty formation (e.g., creating corporate culture through performance awards).
This is not to say that educational or other administrators cannot participate significantly in the reformation of structure and to, in fact, provide conditions for the emergence of community, but this may take a substantial
reworking of basic administrative and organizational assumptions and not
just the renaming of organizational characteristics. It may take both rethinking and proaction.
Rethinking suggests the reconceptualization of schools, not as organizations but as communities. This is to say, to consider changing our metaphors
in use regarding schools as Sergiovanni (1994) and others have suggested.
Adopting the metaphor of community to describe schools has, of course,
enormous implications. Among these could be included a restructuring of
classroom organization, a redefinition of the role of administration, and a
review of the relationship between stakeholders.
Restructuring classroom organization along the lines implied by a metaphor of community might mean that, for example, age-graded classrooms,
originally begun to facilitate bureaucratic efficiency (Goodlad & Anderson,
1987), would be recast in terms of service dimensions. Various options, such
as those explored in Meier (1995), could be investigated. These could include
teachers who stay with pupils beyond the one grade level, students grouped
according to criteria other than age, and a curriculum determined by community standards.
Redefining the administrative role is also a complex endeavor. The historical development of administration has been a reflection of systems of

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188 Educational Administration Quarterly

control, and the legacy of scientific management is not unimportant in

attempting to understand the field. It could be claimed, with some legitimacy,
that the field has been founded on some base assumptions of the importance
of efficiency, the value of impartiality, and the dominance of individualism.
Efficiency has been an end state of the administrative initiative as Tyack
(1974) and others have shown. This means that the role of administration was
not the articulation of values but their implementation in the most efficient
manner: Administrators put into practice what policy makers decree, and
they do so in a rational (some would say rationalistic) manner where rationality is the most efficient/effective path of moving from the current state to the
desired one. This, in many ways, is inimical to a communal focus on value
articulation and the often-necessary subversion of means to endsthat is, to
often take the more inefficient path if its meanderings seem to accomplish
more important results.
Administration, as this has emerged as a discipline, has not only been
committed to efficiency but has also valued the idea of impartialitythat is,
there are no special cases and an ethos of equal justice is the goal. This, as
Perrow (1979) has noted, is a hallmark of bureaucratic systems and establishes the basis of systemic rewards on achievement rather than ascription. It
tends to prevent, for example, nepotism and attempts to provide for equal
opportunities for success within large-scale systems. This, in a word, reflects
an ethos of justice (Gilligan, 1993). The impartiality of such an endeavor can,
however, substitute rules and procedures for personal judgments. In so
doing, the ethos of care can be devalued. Formulating an ethic of care as a
guiding principle is not necessarily to abandon rules of procedure but, rather,
to prioritize systems so that administrative judgment takes precedence over
the universal application of rules. Such normative standards, it could be
claimed, provide a framework for those communal environments, for example, the family and the neighborhood, that administer justice in a caring way.
They also provide, certainly, the basis for a theological orientation that allows
for forgiveness and redemption. To redraw administration upon this particular template is, however, a daunting task given both the historical orientations
of the field and the characteristics of the greater system of which it is a part.
And the system of which it is a part is one that values (beyond, perhaps,
what is necessary) the concept of individualism. Individualism is expressed
in educational systems, of course, through many ways including norms of
achievement, reward structures, career paths, and other sociologically dense
phenomena. Individualism is not necessarily contra community; however,
the values and norms of systems can be affected by the way the terms are
nested, and for the most part in this age, the community concept tends to be
nested within a more dominating notion of individualism. The building of

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Foster / DECLINE OF THE LOCAL 189

communitythe we factorhas always been in a contest with the building

of the personthe I factorand, thus, this tension is not unexpected nor
entirely unwelcome, for communities can be as domineering and disenfranchising of the person as the person can be over communities. When, however,
entire systems are devoted to the advancement of the individual, with the subsequent fragmentation of the community, then the programmatic development (by which I mean the funding and implementation of particular programs often associated, interestingly enough, with well-known individuals)
of communities faces certain obstacles and their success (often measured,
again, by individualistic norms) is jeopardized.
Adopting a metaphor of community in place of that of organization, then,
is beset with a number of issues. None are insurmountable, for it is possible, I
believe, both to learn from the past and to reconstruct the future. Thus, organizational structures that have been created can be changed and administrative preparation programs modified. But perhaps more problematic is the actual substitution of metaphor itself, for it is metaphor that resides in the deep
structures of thought and that guides, often, our action. The reorganization of
thinking to reflect a more communal orientation is in itself a political quest,
yet this often remains unacknowledged. Sergiovanni (1994), in a chapter designed to encourage us to change our theory of schooling, raised these
important questions:
As we seek to build community in all three of its forms [kinship, place, mind],
we might ask: What can be done to increase the sense of kinship, neighborliness, and collegiality among the faculty? How can we become more of a professional community where we care about each other and help each other to be
and to learn, and to lead more productive work lives? What kind of relationships need to be cultivated with parents that will enable them to be included in
our emerging community? How can we help each other? (p. 7)

But underlying these questions about community and how it is to be

achieved are basic political and economic issues. Each question presupposes
the prior resolution of such issues and this, indeed, is something of a stretch.
In much of the community-building literature aimed at school administrators, there is hardly, if any, mention of politics, even though the classic form
of communal thought is basically a political statement.
THE LOCAL
There has occurred in our societies a decline of the locala movement
away from community input into the conduct of our lives and to the regula-

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190 Educational Administration Quarterly

tions of the state through standards, high-stakes testing, funding, and so on.
How should we respond if this is an important issue? The decline of the local
in the conduct of the affairs of institutions such as schools is a decline in the
promise of a truly democratic regime. Although a balance certainly has to be
sought between what Sergiovanni (2000) called the demands of the lifeworld
(driven by norms of community, affiliation, and mutual interaction) and the
rules of the systemworld (driven by standards of productivity, economics,
consumerism, and technology), it appears to many that the systemworld is
driving out the ability of the local to develop virtuous citizens who care about
their children and the environment in which they are raised.
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Professor Foster died of cancer on April 22, 2003, in Bloomington, Indiana, where he served as a
professor in educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University until his death.

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