Living up to Your School Mission Statement

Alan C. Jones is an educational consultant specializing in curriculum, instruction, and instructional leadership. Jones has been a teacher, principal of an award-winning high school, professor of school administration, and has written numerous articles and books on school reform.

School leaders devote a great deal of time attending to the managerial routines of the organization without regard to how these routines might advance the mission of the school. As Alan Jones reports in Living Up to Your School Mission Statement, when preoccupied by managerial duties, school leaders seldom pursue intentionally the high-minded goals identified in a school’s mission statement. With this important book, Jones notes differences across managing, leading, and championing. He illustrates graphically how the preoccupations in the main office and the practices in the classroom often proceed without regard to what a mission statement identifies as the central endeavors of the school. For the committed school leader, Jones identifies a pathway for moving beyond recurring managerial tasks and devoting energies to the pursuit of the significant goals that a community has embraced as the mission of a school.

• IntroductionChapter One: The Goal MazeChapter Two: ChampioningChapter Three: Main Office CChapter Four: Silver BulletsChapter Five: Following ThroughChapter Six: The Crisis of the DayChapter Seven: NoticingChapter Eight: Tools in the ToolboxChapter Nine: Getting to YESChapter Ten: Restoring the Why to Schooling