My Response To The Question: Should There Be A Separate Code Of Ethics For School Principals?

Instead of an ethical code, why not seek to hire the ethically fit from the start? As Waldo stated in his essay on Public Administration and Ethics: A Prologue to a Preface, we are
living in a morally complex age. I believe we must insist that individuals who become administrators, whether in a school or other organizations, must also be individuals who have "tolerance for ambiguity." Applying a set of ethics specific to school administrators only layers on another set of rules in a situation silly with rules already.

I believe that there are far too many rules and regulations being implemented in education these days in order to ensure that schools radically transform themselves. It's true that the way we educate our children is out of step with the needs of society in an information age, but will forcing educators to change through ethics and laws really get the results we need? I think we should rather instill a sense of urgency in educators to motivate them to review their own practice, best practices, and research and trust them to do the work necessary to implement school reform.

For the most part, people who become educators have the right heart for the job and want to do what's best for children; that is the price of admission, so to speak, to the education workforce. Do we really need to write that down and insist people adhere to it? They already do. So, if educators already have the "right" frame of mind and motivations for making sure students are successful, I think that we only need to point them in the right direction. Dictating down the line what educators must do, think, and believe in order to be successful removes the professional discretion of educators from the equation; we are asking them to not think for themselves, when that is the essential skill of a knowledge-based economy. Do we really want automatons teaching our children how to think for themselves? It just doesn't make any sense.