Educational Administration in a Pluralistic Society.

Education Administration in a Pluralistic Society looks at the continuum of school administration and leadership.

Editor Colleen A. Capper, an assistant professor of educational administration at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and other authors challenge the reader to examine the basic assumptions on how we think about schools and how the schools relate to the members of traditionally oppressed groups.

They urge school administrators not only to reexamine the inherent weaknesses of the traditional school management paradigm of structural functionalism (bureaucracy), but also to reframe the many issues that impact the education of an increasingly diverse and pluralistic school population.

The chapters include articles that deal with gender equity in schools (Charol Shakeshaft), school reform and the impact of race, culture, and ethnicity (Pedro Reyes, William Velez, Robert Pena), schooling in rural and small-town America (Patricia and Richard Schmuck), values and ethics in administration (William Greenfield), and students with disabilities (Kathryn Bishop, William Foster, Kimberlee Jubala).

Capper's treatment of the hard human issues of reform in schools spurs the reader to reflect on our basic assumptions about schooling, reevaluating, and redefining what educational reform in the 1990s requires.

(Educational Administration in a Pluralistic Society, edited by Colleen A. Capper, State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y 12246, 1993, 323 pp., $19.95 softcover)