Creating Great Schools: Six Critical Systems at the Heart of Educational Innovation

In Creating Great Schools, Phillip C. Schlechty—one of the nation’s best-known experts on leadership and change in schools—offers a hands-on primer that will help arm school leaders with the tools they need to buck the system from within. Creating Great Schools shows educational leaders how they can sustain continuous innovation and improvement in order to create truly great schools. Schlechty outlines the six critical systems that define the norms and expressions of the school’s organizational culture¾recruitment and induction, knowledge transmission, power and authority, evaluation, direction, and boundaries¾and shows what it takes to lead effective systemic change in order to sustain new values and direction. The book is filled with effective strategies and offers guidelines for introducing the “disruptive innovations” that are necessary to change the fundamental norms of an educational organization and truly revitalize a school. He offers suggestions for working through the thorny issues that arise from the efforts to introduce new norms and provides school leaders with valuable insights of the critical rules, roles, and relationships in schools.