In this text, Starratt enters the national conversation among educational administration scholars and practitioners about what constitutes the core of their knowledge and practice. In part one, he develops three main themes - cultivating meaning, community and moral responsibility - which he then positions against national themes about the core of educational administration: school improvement, democratic community, and social justice. Rather than focusing on the routine managerial tasks normally associated with school administration (budgeting, personnel and legal problems, time and resource management), this text asks aspiring school leaders to reflect first on the underlying philosophical and sociological perspectives that constitute the substance of administrative work in education.
Centering Educational Administration provides: a unique perspective on leadership - it views leadership as organically related to teaching and learning, as concerned with internal capacity building in response to state-imposed accountability pressures, and as an existential process of writing one’s autobiography through their day-today work; an interdisciplinary view of education administration - it asks educational administrators to bring contemporary philosophical, ethical and anthropological issues, as well as learning theory, social theory and political theory into their thinking about the daily operation of the school; a unique perspective on school improvement - it asserts that school improvement narrowly defined as improving results on high-stakes tests can likewise place the nation at risk; and exercises in reflective practice - it challenges the reader to use the ideas of each chapter to analyse the current practices in their school and to propose concrete changes to improve the teaching and learning environment of their school.
