Creating Great Schools: Six Critical
Systems at the Heart of Educational
Innovation (Jossey Bass Education
Series) by Phillip C. Schlechty
The Last Hope For Our American Democracy
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.
Personal Review: Creating Great Schools: Six Critical Systems
at the Heart of Educational Innovation (Jossey Bass Education
Series) by Phillip C. Schlechty
As a school principal who has been guided by the framework of Dr.
Schlechty for a dozen years, I truly believe that those who roll up their
sleeves and do the work in schools everyday know that to move a school
"from good to great", each of these systems need to be in place. Not an
"easy read" by any means, Phil Schlechty continuously causes the reader
to really think about the importance of the engagement of students and
staff in the design of the learning process. To become a learning
organization, the values, beliefs, roles and relationships of those involved
must be clearly defined at the highest level. Schools can no longer
metaphorically reflect a hospital, factory or prison model to survive the next
decade, much less the next century. Leadership and engagement must
occur at every level of the organization, whether it be an individual school
house or a school system.
Our current politicians who use the rhetoric of "no child left behind" to
define schools, need to sit up and take note that it was a "free and public
education for all" at the grass roots from which our democracy has been
able to sustain and flourish, not one that promotes an elitest system driven
by government. I recommend this book as a tool for everyone who has the
passion and heart to see that our children are prepared to survive in the
world in which they will live. Conversation about and the action of these six
critical systems must occur throughout communities for the survival of
public education itself.
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