Captains of the ships: an allegory about moral leadership in school systems during times of turbulence.

Superintendents function in an environment of nearly continuous turbulence challenged by concerns and pressures that compete for their attention and resolution. The turbulence is inescapable. Today it constitutes the natural--but not the exceptional--environment of school board politics, local interest-group concerns and heightened accountability demands.

With little down time to step back and focus on the big picture, well-intentioned school system leaders may postpone the critically important moral task of evaluating the quality of the schools' core work of teaching and learning against the social and political horizon of globalization because they are sucked into addressing the most pressing operational and political problems.

Yet their sense of moral leadership demands that superintendents make an honest appraisal of what is lacking and what is needed.

A Global Storm

Using an allegory of a captain guiding a ship or fleet of ships, we can imagine how this turbulent environment might focus a superintendent's leadership concerns solely on keeping the ship afloat rather than keeping the ship afloat while navigating the ship forward on its mission.

Some captains, fearing the storm's turbulence, will cause their ships to capsize, trying to ride out the storm. They trim the sails and allow the storm to blow the ships off course.

But today's globalized storm system is not going to blow itself out. It affects every continent and every ocean on the planet and represents a momentous transition from national covenants of competition to a global covenant of cooperative management of the earth's resources and political systems.

Coping with a storm of this magnitude and duration will require new interpretive frameworks, new learning, new attitudes, new institutional and professional identities and most of all, a new sense of communal moral responsibility from the captain, the officers and the crew members. The whole community of the ship must come together to refit the ship.

Under the captain's leadership, the ships must maneuver through the thick of the storm knowing that the fair skies they could always count on to return are nowhere in sight. They must sustain their momentum by developing a new collective intelligence, a moral solidarity and a commitment to their collective destiny. In this storm-driven journey they must develop new navigational skills, new mappings of storm dynamics, and new technical, political and cultural inventions to eventually tame the storm's destructive aspects.

At Ship's Helm

This allegory of superintendents and leaders of other major social institutions as captains of ships may help us understand the leadership challenge facing superintendents.

This challenge represents a moral challenge even more than it does a technical or managerial challenge. It calls on superintendents to take a profound responsibility in seeking to find an educational value in the storm. This challenge will require that leaders develop a more authentic and socially responsible kind of learning in schools. The new learning would go well beyond the rudderless and superficial learning schools too often impose on young minds to involve all learners in the ships of schools, from the officers to the youngest members of the crew.

In earlier storms, many crew members were blown overboard because they lacked the proper training and understanding of basic seamanship skills. In the present turbulent environment, that is no longer allowed. "No child overboard" has been adopted as fleet policy. Given the scarcity of competent officers, the captains also had to adopt the policy of "No teacher overboard." Too many already have been blown out to sea by the lack of mentoring and continuing learning opportunities. They also lacked a sense of solidarity with the crew.

The captains aren't sure how to read the storm's dynamics with its diverse and multilayered external forces that present internal challenges to the organizational operations and technologies of the ships of schools. The captains are learning that they and their crews are all in this together. Survival depends on pooling resources to make the ships more adaptable and more seaworthy. Survival requires ideas be sought from all groups on board and from consultants and the admiralty.

Survival also depends on keeping in touch with other ships in the fleet and with other fleets caught up in the storm. Sharing ideas across ships and fleets enables the best ideas to surface for adaptation to the conditions of each ship.

Although survival will depend on generating a new understanding of storm dynamics, new ideas for refitting and reorganizing the ships of schools, and new technologies of navigation, the captain's leadership also will involve developing a greater collective sense of responsibility among all members of the crew. The crew members must be engaged in learning more about the storm, in mastering the traditional skills and technologies of seamanship and in applying these to the new conditions of turbulence they face.

Furthermore, they must grow in their ability to trust and rely on one another. They will need to find their own strength in relationship to the communal strength of the whole crew and develop friendships through sharing their common acceptance of the burdens imposed by the turbulence.

Superintendents cultivate this collective sense of commitment to survival through learning from and teaching one another. This moral leadership is embedded in the leaders' own involvement in learning, in their solidarity with the crew and in their efforts to establish networks of learning within the ship and across the ships of schools.

Anchored Ships

Stepping outside of the allegory for a moment, we may enjoy the image of superintendents wearing the full uniform, with epaulettes, sword and the tri-cornered hat, pacing the afterdeck in deep concentration, occasionally lifting their eyes to the horizon to calculate the wind and the clouds.

The allegory dramatizes the complexity of the superintendents' role and yet simplifies it. In reality, superintendents rarely enjoy a walk around each ship to evaluate its speed, direction and position relative to the whole fleet. The allegory suggests, however, they need to make time to do just that.

Two aspects of the allegory need clarification.

First, the ships of schools are not yet out in the middle of the global storm; they are anchored in the relative safety of a harbor, unlike institutions such as the Department of State and the Department of Commerce and trade commissions, immigration authorities and environmental research centers that are already out on the oceans, negotiating the storm of globalization.

Nonetheless, the officers and crew of the ships of schools should be studying the cultural and political forces swirling about in the storm as well as the long-range strategies employed by national and international agencies. They should be probing the natural forces energizing the storm such as climate, water, hazardous chemicals and nuclear waste, endangered species, endangered cultures, endangered economies and endangered identities.

The academic curriculum of the ships of schools ought to be evaluated in relation to the turbulence generated by these major weather patterns. Does this curriculum take the global turbulence into account? Does it communicate any useful understanding of that turbulence?

For the captains of the ships of schools to pretend that the storm is not gathering in intensity on the global high seas is to abdicate their responsibilities to prepare their crews for the journey. Their inaction or opting for obsolete standards of navigation and seamanship is a moral failure. The intelligence reaching port from the high seas is clear and unmistakable: Refit not only the ship, but also prepare sailors for a wholly new kind of navigation and help them understand the nature of the storm.

Storm Elements

The second aspect needing clarification is the nature of the storm itself. Captains must study the nature and causes of the storm. The turbulence is really composed of human forces. There is the macro storm gathering force outside the harbor, and there is a micro storm latent in the harbor. The makings of the storm are right there in front of the captains. If humans make the storm, then humans can find ways to deconstruct the storm, thereby recognizing their own part in its making.

Humans, however, have to accept their responsibilities to reduce the turbulence, harness the positive forces and transform the journey. While the ships of schools are in the relative safety of the harbor, their crews and officers need to explore the fundamentals of a new kind of navigation, drawing on lessons available from the sciences and humanities.

Furthermore, the officers of the ships of schools need to insist that those navigational inventions involve not only the external invention of new maps, new sails, new water purification technologies and new compasses, but the whole crew must collaborate on creating new interior maps and compasses and invent human technologies for purification of the toxic waste in their hearts. The navigation skills they are developing are not simply for greater security and efficiency in delivering cargo. Those skills are also for navigating life, navigating relationships, navigating uncharted waters of human fulfillment and realizing untapped potential.

By exploring both the external challenges presented by the turbulence of this long storm of transition as well as the internal challenges of creating new maps and compasses to guide the human journey, the ships of schools will be fulfilling their mission. That mission is to prepare the next generation for the voyage by recognizing that navigation begins in the lessons they learn while still in the harbor.

The ships of schools are graduating large numbers of learners whose knowledge is paper thin, insufficient for the challenges and responsibilities of the voyage. The captains of these ships of schools who knowingly tolerate inauthentic and irresponsible learning reveal their leadership as educationally and morally bankrupt.

Difficult Odds

Reacting to this allegory, some superintendents will realize the ships they direct are leaking, obsolete hulks. The captains of the ships at sea, on the other hand, have the most up-to-date radar and sonar and satellite positioning technology, not to mention a computerized monitoring system that puts them into immediate contact with every unit on board. They don't have to prowl the afterdeck to get a sense of the speed, direction and weather. That information is continuously available right at their desks.

Furthermore, all the ships' officers have similar monitoring systems, and the crews have recently been through intensive training for working with the new navigational systems.

Meanwhile, the captains of the ships of schools, faced with diminished funds and rising public criticism, struggle to refit their ships and crews for a voyage the ships' passengers don't understand and feel no obligation to take. Besides, the admiralty accepts its memorization of obsolete navigational maps, technologies, principles and definitions as sufficient grounds for a promotion to work on the real ships of life with little or no reference to the global storm those ships must negotiate.

Despite obsolete facilities and technologies and inadequate funding, captains of the ships of schools need to communicate with their officers and crews, as well as their harbor masters, their ships suppliers, the admiralty and their staffs, and certainly with one another about the conditions on board and the needed changes in the curriculum and in the assessments of student learning.

Moral leadership begins with an honest appraisal of what is lacking and what is needed and then steers a steady course through sometimes treacherous waters.

Robert Starratt is a professor of educational administration in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. E-mail: [e-mail]. He is the author of Ethical Leadership (Jossey-Bass).