The Individual School and Its Principal: Key Setting and Key Person in Educational Leadership.

The article presents an argument to support the thesis that individual schools, over any other organizational unit, are the natural settings for initiating educational change, and then goes on to identify the concerns that must be encompassed by the principal in assuming his leadership role. The individual classroom, the natural spot for improving daily instructional practices, is not the best organizing center for effecting far-reaching educational revision. The individual school unit has an organismic wholeness. It is educationally complete, in the sense that it has all it needs to function as an adequate agent of change. The individual school has a body politic made up of parents and pupils; a professional team of teachers with a designated leader; the necessary accoutrements such as buildings, equipment, and materials. Community structure supports the organismic wholeness that is the individual school. Lay people view the school their children attend as "the school." There are exponents of leadership who claim that leaders lead on the basis of the authority invested in them.