This paper is a summary of Thomas J. Sergiovanni's proposal
that virtue and morality, as essential components of professionalism, are the keys to improving schools. In two articles written in 1992, Sergiovanni contends that leadership, as it is most often practiced, is frequently responsible for reducing individual responsibility for making educational systems effective. Instead of the corporate model, he suggests a method of administration he calls "moral leadership" which relies on building a sense of community within the school. Sergiovanni believes that this will create a climate in which teachers will embrace professional virtues, work together to help one another, commit themselves to ongoing professional development instead of having it imposed on them, and focus on the overall effectiveness of the school's work, rather than simply worrying about their individual classrooms. Although some of his points are disputable, moral leadership does offer a promising approach and has been shown to work often enough to prove a useful concept.
Sergiovanni contends first that schools should consider themselves to be communities rather than organizations. He proposes that the concept of an organization, like that of leadership, is something that is imposed instead of coming naturally from within the school environment. In his opinion, this is appropriate for corporations, where the focus is on the bottom line, but is not especially useful in education. He suggests that the community model, with its sense of shared values and commonly agreed upon goals, is the first step toward moral leadership. He advocates an environment in which everything teachers do works toward achieving values they have themselves helped to define. He writes, "A learning community suggests a kind of connectedness among members that resembles what is found in a family, a neighborhood, or some other closely knit group, where bonds tend to be familial a...