New Capabilities for Cyber Charter School Leadership: An Emerging Imperative for Integrating Educational Technology and Educational Leadership Knowledge

40 TechTrends • July/August 2009 Volume 53, Number 4 Volume 53, Number 4 TechTrends • July/August 2009 41

Cyber-charter schools:An imperative for imaginingnew leader capabilities

North American, Australian, and United Kingdom education systems are growing quickly within three sectors: (1) the public system, with 48 million, or 87%, of American children attend-ing public schools; (2) 6.5 million, or 11%, of American pupils attending private schools; and (3) voucher-using and charter schools, attract-ing 1.23 million, or 2%, of American students. The third sector is a new and fascinating inno-vation (Cooper, 2008, p. 17). In 2008, 44 states offered significant online learning options for an estimated 1,030,000 students who are enrolled in online or blended full-time and supplemental courses. This represents a growth of 47% since 2006 (Picciano & Seaman, 2007, 2009). Some estimate that the K-12 online learning popula-tion will grow 30% annually (INACOL, 2008, p. 2). Cyber charter schools (CCS) are an impor-tant new part of this growth. In January 2007, 73 United States cyber charter schools served 92,235 students in 18 states (Spelling, 2008, p. 3). Cyber charter schools benefit from a grow-ing public belief that most public school systems cannot personalize student learning well and that they cannot offer sufficient access to rural schoolchildren (Tucker, 2007, p. 2).

With good leadership, this growth is ex-pected to continue (Picciano & Seaman, 2007, p. 26). In fact, an overwhelming number of cyber school reports suggest that developing leaders for these systems will be an essential element of continued growth (Barbour & Reeves, 2008; Sol-omon, 2005, p. 5; Tucker, 2007; Watson, 2008, 2005). This author also finds sparse research on cyber school or cyber charter system leaders,

board members, teachers or educational tech-nology leadership (Barbour & Reeves, 2008, p. 402; Tucker, 2007) while at the same time U.S. Department of Education research findings predict a fundamental sea-change in education with one of five national Secretary of Educa-tion recommendations calling for a renewed investment in cyber school leadership and pro-fessional preparation (Spelling, 2008).

Cyber charter schools and cyber schools may soon become the most “disruptive innovation” in the education system (Christensen, Horn & Johnson, 2008) so this author urges educational technologists to take up the imperative to devel-op new administration knowledge among our students along with edu-cational technology skills to support future cyber and cyber charter schools (Kowch, 2005b). To begin, the paper sum-marizes mainstream administration thought trends for non-administrators. On that foun-dation, the author then sets out some major cyber-charter issues and trends along with a host of new organizational, policy, and instruc-tional leadership capabilities for the next gen-eration of CCS leader hybrids.

The classical/scientific education leader-ship era: Focus on functions (1950 - ?)

Education leadership theories (also called administration theories) have evolved as re-sponses to the limitations of a previous theory (Spector & Anderson, 2000; Willower & For-

New Capabilities for Cyber Charter School Leadership:

An Emerging Imperative forIntegrating EducationalTechnology and Educational Leadership KnowledgeBy Eugene Kowch

“Theorists are turning to more adaptive, network-like organizational perspectives by studying our responses to technology and globalization.”

42 TechTrends • July/August 2009 Volume 53, Number 4

sythe, 1999). It is amazing how educational technology thinking has changed along objec-tive-to-subjective paradigms the same way that school leadership thought has changed over the past 60 years (Kowch, 2003). If we look closely, we see branches from the same roots.

The education administration field emerged in the 1950s in reaction to pressure for a “rigor-ous knowledge base for the profession…when pitted against the folk wisdom of practitioners” (Evers & Lakomski, 1996, p. 2). In the 1950s, a classical leader set out a goal (ends) and of-fered a contingent intervention (means) so that she could expect predictable school outcomes. Teachers were counted as part of a set of work transactions within machine-like school or-ganizations (Hoy & Miskel, 1991). A classical leader would discover some interventions that evidence showed as predictable, but when most interventions did not result in predictable out-comes, classical leadership came into doubt (Griffiths, 1964). Administration theorists re-sponded by shifting to include human psychol-ogy while still seeing the teacher as someone having personal needs that were independent of organizational needs. In the late 1950s, focus on organization structure and personnel functions (structural functionalism) dominated. If you look closely around you, you’ll see some of this leadership thought in education systems today.

The social system education leadership era: A focus on transactions (1960s - ?)

In the 1960s, school leaders realized that managing the outcome of “work flows” meant knowing more than rules and work struc-tures in schools. The social systems approach emerged as a response that “classifies collec-tion of interrelated parts into general empiri-cal qualities” (Evers & Lakomski, 1996, p. 3). Schools were conceptualized as closed systems separate from their environment. Later in that decade, school organization study findings were conclusive that schools are more like social or-ganisms because of the strong relationships they had with their external environment (Katz & Kahn, 1966). General systems theorist Ber-talanffy (1968) and others developed open sys-tems theory to describe school boundaries and processes as input and output processes housed within both formal and informal organizations. Early social system leaders existed atop a verti-cal power pyramid to monitor transactions and efficient teaching and administrative practices and committees (Hanson, 2003; Scott, 1983). A school principal working from this approach would consider community and internal school organization inputs about teacher communica-tion deficits prior to offering teachers profes-

sional development programs on communica-tion.

By the 1970s, school leaders shifted their focus from efficient work related transactions within schools because systems after a kind of linear work orthodoxy emerged in the classical era where leaders tended too much to maintain the status quo of the “machine” (equilibrium). This resulted in leader inabilities to change along with the more rapid-change (unsteady state) so-cial and technological influences over the de-cade (Silins, 1994).

In the 1980 and 1990s, two major approaches predominated: instructional leadership and then transformational leadership (Hallinger, 2003). Stemming from Barth’s effective schools model for better classroom teaching, the instructional leadership approach blended classical human relations and organizational theory principles to refocus principals on school goals, curriculum alignment, safe school environments and class-room teacher instruction (supervision) as ele-ments of school improvement processes (Blasé & Blasé, 1996; Hallinger, 2002). But research found that student achievement did not increase as expected, so school culture/ community the-ory emerged in the late 1980s, promoting leader value relations more than systematic social pro-cesses (Bates, 1982; Sergiovanni, 1989). Around this time, social constructivist learning environ-ment theory emerged in the educational tech-nology field (Jonassen, 1991).

The instructional leadership approach may have “run aground” because overloaded prin-cipals’ bureaucratic duties clashed with their leadership duties and that might have limited instructional improvement results (Cuban, 1988, 24). In fact, the supervision of instruc-tion (teachers) perspective was a lot less effective than leadership for teaching, say by developing instructional design and development knowl-edge in teachers. The administration field re-sponded by introducing transformational mod-els for leadership (Leithwood, Aitken, & Jantzi, 2001). These leaders could arouse human poten-tial, satisfy higher needs, and raise the expecta-tions of both leaders and followers to motivate followers to higher levels of commitment and performance (Sergiovanni, 1989).

The subjective contingency education lead-ership era: A focus on complexity (2000 - ?)

There was and is “an emerging conscious-ness of the overwhelming leader-centrism in the education administration field” (Gronn, 2002, p. 661). Transformational leadership models should have solved our earlier dependencies on rational organization structure models (transac-tions) because older cause/effect or power-based


structured human relational models fall so short of describing what actually happens happening in post-industrial era schools (Hallinger, 2003; Sackney & Mitchell, 2002). Theorists are turning to more adaptive, network-like organizational perspectives by studying our responses to tech-nology and globalization because school lead-ers, especially distance school leaders are much more connected globally (Carr-Chellman, 2005; Clegg, 2006; Hassard & Parker, 1993). Today, some leadership scholars argue that most ad-vanced organization and policy theory is now more subjective and relational, and less struc-ture or power oriented, such as in tomorrow’s innovative charter schools (Christensen et al., 2008). Gronn suggests knowing leadership anew as a combination of organizational, political, social and leadership domains within a distrib-uted leadership model where the group is more the focus than “the transformer” (Gronn, 2002). Distributed leadership is a holistic collaboration that spreads the burden of overall school deci-sion-making when leaders: (1) engage sponta-neous collaborative forces; (2) realize emergent interpersonal synergies that bind people, and (3) organize, knowing that a variety of structural re-lations and institutional structures only attempt to regularize distributed action (p. 656). In this model, key stakeholders coalesce from a constel-lation of interested people via complex relational networks to continuously build capacity and the critical autonomy in their environment to lead (Kowch, 2008).

Trends and futures: Interdisciplinary lead-ership in the 21st century?

The central lesson now evident is that sustained improvement in student outcomes requires a sustained effort to change teaching and learning practices in thousands and thousands of class-rooms, and this requires focused and sustained effort by all parts of the edu-cation system and its partners (Levin & Fullan, abstract, 2008). If you know what to look for in schools to-

day it is easy to recognize current school leader-ship and educational technology practices that we can describe as inclusive of more than one of the “thought eras” outlined in this paper. For the future, we need a brand new leadership thought trajectory for developing new leaders in educa-tion (Hanson, 2003; Jonassen, 1991). The edu-cational technology discipline has responded to similar issues in the past (i.e., a mixture of classically objective and subjective approaches to theory and practice) when we considered change beyond transformations and practice beyond mere prescription (Levin and Fullan,

2008; Reigeluth & Garfinkel, 1994; Visscher-Voerman & Gustafson, 2004). Today educa-tional technology leaders encounter classical technological determinism more often than you’d expect when school leaders understand technology and technologists as tools and technocrats, for example (Kowch, 2008). Our responses are also shaped by both the pace of technological change and by persistent and seemingly unaccounted power tensions across school systems and communities (Carr-Chell-man, 2007, p. 82; Wiley & Edwards, 2002). CCS leaders work across patterns of co-de-pendent influence relations among school sys-tem leaders, community leaders, politicians and other school systems within a new kind of complex that requires a new understanding of education institutions (Crowson, Boyd & Mawhinney, 1996).

In the last two decades Russell Ackoff, Peter Senge, Bela Banathy, Frank Duffy and Charles Reigeluth have worked to create holistic social and organization systems models, urging us to rethink school systems as nonlinear, open and unsteady-state systems (Duffy & Reigelu-th, 2008; Carr-Chellman 2007; Kowch, 2005). These researchers are developing a more sub-jective paradigm for school system leadership in the information age by characterizing school systems as complex systems where change in one part of the system affects changes across the entire system. To imagine such change with the full power of learning technology in mind some researchers are extending the systems change idea to empower leaders to consider brand new, enterprise-type, personalized learn-ing super-technologies as part of the solution to leading seemingly infinitely complex school systems in the future. Reigeluth et al. (2008) proposes such a highly integrated IT, admin-istration and instructional concept for future school leaders. The challenge for CCS leaders can only be solved through continued careful integration of disciplines and skills in teaching and leading practiced in a much larger, more complex, and distributed ecosystem surround-ing more than one school (Duffy & Reigeluth, 2008; Spector & Anderson, 2000). History tells us that educational technology experts must of-fer a lead in this new work (Donaldson, Smaldi-no & Pearson, 2008; Heinich, 1984; Wiley and Edwards, 2002). So how do we begin?

Developing Four New Capabilities for Future Cyber School Leaders

“Change forces” sculpt how we take up the idea of leading complex education systems and those forces often emerge as pressures or issues facing school systems (Fullan, 2008). Research


evidence is clear that neither classic learning technologist nor classic leader roles prepare new leaders best to lead technology involved schools in the information age (Christensen et al., 2008; Kowch, 2003, 2005a, 2005b). CCS leaders re-quire new capabilities and paradigms for “see-ing ahead” (Reigeluth, 2008) to do good work. In this section the author sorts the most im-portant issues and trends facing cyber schools into four categories or “lenses” through which future cyber school leaders can see their lead-ership praxis: (1) organization, (2) policy and governance, (3) instructional leadership and (4) change leadership. Specific leadership capabili-ties are suggested for each category. 1. Leading distributed organizations

Issues and trends. Growth in cyber school charter enrollment is an expression of public in-terest and it is very likely that this growth will continue (Russell, 2004). Leading these growing organizations will be important to cyber-school leaders and learners. Alas, such research is in its infancy (Cavanaugh, 2004, p. viii), perhaps in part because the very concept of cyber school (charter or otherwise) is “agreed on only in broad terms” (Russell, 2004, p. 3).

The trends and issues in this paper demon-strate the likelihood that successful cyber char-ter schools will become complex organizations, regularly facing issues that often arrest larger public school systems. Those issues include market schooling, competition, disaggregation of governance power, changing funding poli-cies, changing macro policy and politics along with new public preferences for regulation, big system competition, new learning technologies and, if CCSs are clever, the best in education-al design and development. They are already working in more disaggregated, open institu-tional frameworks:

The vast majority (82.5%) of the [public] school districts are selecting multiple online learning providers…. They may develop their own online courses, partner with another provider to offer a course, contract with a vir-tual school for a course that they are not able to offer, or might rely on a postsecondary institution…. The use of multiple vendors makes sense and allows the school districts to be most flexible in meeting the specific needs of their students (Picciano and Seaman, 2009, p. 21). In these more co-dependent organizations,

leaders will need skills for creating, maintain-ing, and adapting more open, relational orga-nizations/systems to survive constant change

(Levin & Fullan, 2008). Open environments are critical spaces for leaders to ensure better ac-cess and choice for rural learners—and access is arguably the most important issue facing fu-ture cyber charter school leaders (KPMG, 2001; Russell, 2004; Tucker, 2007; Watson, 2008). If a cyber charter organization is a closed system it will surely seem complicated but will not be complex—so it cannot share its influence or knowledge outside its boundaries let alone across states quickly (Duffy & Reigeluth, 2008; Picciano, 2009). We need new leadership capa-bilities for this future (Kowch, 2005a, 2005b).

New capabilities. Leading growth is effective when strategic and operational planning pro-cesses exist to integrate teaching, budgets, and both human and technological capital (Kowch, 2005a; Norris, 2004). Future CCS leaders must look beyond near-term goals to set matching, measurable, and multiple long term tactical and operational goals, especially when their systems will be in unsteady growth or contraction states (Levin & Fullan, 2008). Our strategic plans in-tegrate and align what we do as organizations by aligning goals with capabilities with opera-tional plans that map out how we’ll do that with resources at hand. Too often technologists and leaders discuss both strategy and operational planning at the same time because we see the world differently in terms of what we do vs. how we can organize interests. This is causing com-plex organizations to fail (Kowch, 2003, 2008).

Leading a distributed organization is work “stretched over the social and situational con-texts of a school” via the interaction of many leaders; this moves us beyond classic principal/leader task foci to collective decision making foci (Spillane et al., 2000). In a distributed leader system, multidisciplinary, interdependent team leaders “team up” to zoom in on each other’s competencies. These new leaders share what they know to find solutions—and move on. Teams like this are clusters that coalesce, act, and disperse. To clarify this skill set, Gronn (2002) outlined these types of distributed leader team behaviors:• Intuitive work relation teams (i.e., a teaching

hospital where we “know” each other’s spe-cialties)

• Institutionalized practice teams where we ne-gotiate our roles (i.e., co-principals working within several schools)

• Collective intuition teams where we combine similar working-relation folks who intuitively understand each other (i.e., instructional de-signers and cyber school charter program de-signers)

• Collective institutionalized practice teams


where members of social movement organiza-tions are collected (i.e., educational technol-ogy advocates and educational leadership ad-vocates)

2. Leading policy and governanceIssues and trends. Most literature about cyber

charter schools points to a serious need for lead-ers and governors (school boards, states, nations) to improve policy, which must be seen more now as a proactive response to issues, not as code-books (Kowch, 2003). “It appears that Wyoming, Hawaii, and a few other states have learned from the cyber charter experience of states such as Colorado, leading them to address online learn-ing policy issues before the lack of such policies became a problem” (Watson et al., 2009, p. 39). Because CCSs are chartered by states or school districts they can seem to have more indepen-dence from many education regulations and the “shackles of geographic boundaries” but on close examination leaders realize that CCS are char-tered schools and they are not charters (Bogden, 2003, p. 33; Watson, 2005; 2008). This means that CCS system leaders will increasingly negotiate and develop statures and charters between and across states, regions, countries, districts, stu-dents, and even entire populations. As well, CCS leaders work within a funding system that was created for geographic student catchment and revenue models based on public representation, not pan-geographic and co-located learner pop-ulations based on market conditions; they will face tremendous pressure to develop new policy and governance arrangements as these systems grow quickly.

These variables and the degree of cyber char-ter policy variation out there today (Hill, 2002) coupled with a critical lack of policy research (Barbour & Reeves, 2009) makes policy analysis per se impractical here, however we can con-clude without doubt that such leaders will need new capabilities to address at least the following four emerging policy/governance issues:1. Accountability for school level student

achievement and organization fitness (Pic-ciano & Seaman, 2009; Spelling, 2008; Watson & Ryan, 2007).

2. Accountability for the quality of courses, re-lated development costs with more free choice for families to access programs (KPMG, 2001; Picciano, 2009; Watson, 2009).

3. Increasing competition with school districts (Russell, 2004, p. 20)

4. Teacher development: A need for e-pedagogy programs (Cavanagh, 2004; Tucker, 2007).

New capabilities. Leader accountability for a CCS will be important. Hill offers guidelines for school governors and leaders (2002):

1. School boards “need to steer, not row” by assessing their actions as strengthening in-struction or not (p. 89).

2. Seize the external accountability demands as an opportunity to lead, rather than as a men-ace to avoid. Create close partnerships with parents, teachers, authorizers and especially state governments (p. 93)

3. Work with the federal governments to change public education policy to fit smaller contexts where all programming (i.e., spe-cial programming) is not mandated.

4. Work with everyone to develop standards for measuring learning and system success.

Clearly, CCS district and state leaders will need good capacity to develop policy. Public policy is defined as any response to an issue (Pal, 2006); future CCS leaders will need these new capabilities so that they can organize in-terests among complex and codependent net-works of people and institutions around them (Kowch, 2003; Pal, 2006). We haven’t tradi-tionally taught policy development this way in leadership schools, but in the last decade re-searchers have been testing new institutional (school system) policy leadership models by combining social and policy network thinking for technology-enhanced school system lead-ers and governments. Findings are conclusive that these models can describe and help pre-dict the characteristics and dynamics of dis-tributed organizations (Kowch, 2003). CCS leaders need to create agile, autonomous, high capacity policy-making networks or distribut-ed teams with the ability to organize issues and interests toward action. (For a full exploration of this approach to network and distributed team building, see Kowch, 2003 and 2005b). The following table lists the characteristics and capabilities of highly autonomous, policy deci-sion- making networks in distributed organi-zations (teams, staffs, districts, states):

Imagine the potential of CCS policy lead-ers once they develop these ways to understand and design complete influence networks—compared to the classical leadership ways.3. (New) Instructional leadership informed

by the educational technology disciplineIssues and trends. Cyber charter instruc-

tion quality concerns and online teacher prep-aration continue to emerge (Cavanaugh, 2004; KPMG, 2001; Tucker, 2007). New leaders need new ways to address these issues beyond the instructional leadership literature, which was found lacking due to a classical focus on the supervision of instructors/teachers more than with the leading of the instructional process (design and development, as we know it). Out-


sourcing of instruction and content in cyber school contexts today means new instructional leadership is part of a critical knowledge set for future CCS leaders. We know conclusively that the integration of good online teach-ing practice with good instructional design and development is essential to e-learner and teacher success, yet the leadership canon does not address this (Carr-Chellman, 2005; Garrison and Anderson, 2003; Jonassen, 1999; Simonson, Smaldino, Albright & Zva-cek, 2003). Cyber charter leaders can’t just lead instructors, they must lead teachers and instruction by know-ing at least some principles from the educational technology field. This new capability will be necessary for leading distributed, changing schools systems that are so learner-technology laden.

We need to remedy a serious knowledge gap for cyber charter school instructional leaders or edu-cation leaders of any kind who pos-sess a relative lack of awareness of an entire education discipline dedicated to the integration of learning, teach-ing, and technology-enhanced learn-ing systems. These systems are by the day becoming more dispersed, more powerful, and more useful for personalized learning achievements (Reigeluth et al, 2008). Personal and professional development issues will preoccupy CCS leaders in the next while: “Many [cyber school] educa-tors have no training on how to teach an online course, therefore there is a critical need for on-going training on how to convert instructional materials

to an online format, use advanced mul-timedia tools and integrate technology resources into course content” (Hinson & Bordelon, 2004, p. 152). These issues and trends point to a clear imperative for new collaboration between leader-ship and technology fields in teacher preparation, graduate schools, and school systems. Failure to do this will put CCS leaders in very difficult situ-ations where they won’t have the capa-bility to lead in the coming education environments.

The predominance of personal-ized learning objectives in CCS sys-tems means leaders must also have the capability to understand personalized learning (Barbour and Reeves, 2009; Cavanaugh, 2004). Coupled with a big increase in blended learning in supple-mental cyber school programs, care-ful imagining and design of personal-ized learning will be essential for CCS success (McCoombs, 2008; Picciano & Seaman, 2009). In 2001 a study of state cyber charters found that most contract out to third-party curriculum vendors for their instructional online programs, resulting in mostly text based learning (KPMG, 2001). When we realize that many cyber schools do not provide their own online learning services, educational technologists and leaders immediately notice a separa-tion from the capability to design and deliver key services—and that’s an enormous problem for growing cyber charter systems in the coming eco-nomic environment (Picciano & Sea-man, 2009, p. 20). There is a pressing need for cyber charter school leaders to develop capabilities to facilitate teach-ing and learning systems design and distributed leadership across a more (genuinely) collaborative school envi-ronment.

New capabilities. As discussed earlier, a powerful method for leading change is emerging with regard to both education administration and leader-ship theory. In concert, new holistic in-struction environment leadership ideas (Spector & Anderson, 2008) Duffy and Reigeluth (2008) propose a school sys-tem transformation (SST) protocol for school system leaders that is on-trend with more the more subjective, distrib-uted, and shared approaches to cyber

charter school leadership. Their ap-proach integrates policy, organization, and some instructional leadership as parts of system-wide school district changes. They suggest that informa-tion-age school leaders must first de-velop a capability to understand three paradigm shifts:

1. Rethink the primary work processes in school systems to focus on personalized stu-dent learning and attainment.

2. Rethink the school’s organi-zation culture, communica-tion practices and reward structure from command-and-control to participa-tory design (Carr-Chellman, 2007).

3. Rethink the school system’s environment from an isola-tive to a collaborative, proac-tive holistic process (p. 43).

4. Leading changeAddressing most of the issues and

trends in CCS literature as well as edu-cation leadership and education tech-nology literature, the SST model offers phases for leaders to identify: • State or district level culture and vi-

sions • Political support (interest organiza-

tion) • Transformation via trust building

networks • Sustaining policy building activities• Formative evaluation processes as

part of a continuous cycle of future-minded change (Duffy & Reigeluth, 2008; Kotter, 2007)

This paper outlines new ways for future leaders to imagine and lead a distributed organizational vision, to create policy and to build high capacity teams as networks of great educators. Leading change in this way will be-come an imperative for future school leaders.

In this paper we have explored a movement and projected a learn-ing environment that has evolved from classical leadership and media in schools to suggest more social, less transactional distributed leader ca-pability development for both educa-tion administration and educational technology. The leadership schools in education have fallen short of provid-

Characteristics of High Capacity Interest Organizers/Policy Networks 1. A clear concept of its role in policy

making2. A supporting value system3. A unique, professional ethos in the

field4. A capability to generate information

internally5. A capability to maintain cohesion6. A capability to organize and manage

complex tasks, leading toward the creation of a response

7. A capability to rise above near term self interest


ing information-age principal develop-ment in our graduate schools, and we have overlooked the importance of the shifts in leadership schools of thought because we have not blended infor-mation age teaching and learning for these new environments. By shifting the classical role of educational tech-nology to integrate with a more com-plete, informed sphere of instructional leadership we can imagine how cyber charter leaders can leap ahead of other systems—to imagine student learning and teaching results that we could only dream of a decade ago (Reigeluth et al., 2008). Such renewal is an imperative for the coming decade that says we can no longer create school leaders from silos of knowledge within education faculties. AECT’s FutureMinds initia-tive and the Systemic Change Divi-sion helps school systems reach these goals by considering paradigm change, system change, and as this paper sug-gests–developingnewleaders.

ConclusionThis paper explored cyber char-

ter school contexts for future school leaders and educational technologists. By reviewing the history of education administration issues and trends that have shaped leadership thought, this author predicts a more subjective, dis-tributed leadership trajectory for suc-cessful cyber charter school leaders in the coming decades. Those leaders will need to develop four new capacities to lead distributed teams, facilitate com-plex policy and governance systems, and imagine instructional-design en-hanced learning environments across their education and community sys-tems. Those changes will be forced by powerful competitive pressures and issues from traditional education sys-tems that will likely increase public demand for access, accountability, and the simultaneous development of per-sonalized learning with high quality learning outcomes. All the while tech-nologies will change even more rapidly. The paper concludes that a systemic change mindset and knowledge of both educational and administrative tech-nology disciplines are prerequisites for developing integrative, holistic school leader capabilities so essential for cyber

charter innovators in the coming de-cades. The future could be quite dark for school leaders, superintendents, and state policy makers who remain in classical leadership mindsets. The future could be very bright for smaller, leaner, quicker cyber charter school system leaders who can imagine the entire system and the issues shaping their trajectory toward distributed, inclusive, codependent learning envi-ronments of choice.

Like fighter pilots escorting an air-liner headed into high-risk airspace, this author believes that there is an im-perative for educational technologists to take charge of integrating the sweep of educational technology knowl-edge with the trajectory of leadership knowledge. Precious “passengers” in dynamic, changing school systems de-serve no less.

Eugene Kowch holds a doctorate in Education-al Administration (organization and policy the-ory) and a Masters of Education (instructional design) from the University of Saskatchewan. With over 20 years engineering and corporate strategic leadership within multinational ener-gy companies where his responsibilities includ-ed international merger and acquisition project planning, development and implementation. Dr. Kowch has also been a K-12 teacher and principal and a deputy superintendent of edu-cation. As an associate professor at the Univer-sity of Calgary Faculty of Education, he teaches and supervises leadership and education tech-nology graduates students whose research inter-ests also include organizational, policy and in-structional design theories. The work focuses on developing frameworks for large system learn-ing organizations of the future where large new education system designs will be informed and performed by a new kind of educational tech-nology/administration change imagineer. Dr. Kowch holds national awards in Canada for his research, he sits on several boards including a roles as an officer in the Change Division at AECT with responsibilities as a TCT member in the FutureMinds initiative. He is chairing the planned 2010 FutureMinds/AECT Summit on the Future of Education.

References Barbour, M. K., & Reeves, T. C. (2009). The

reality of virtual schools: A review of the literature. Computers & Education, 52, 402-416.

Bates, R. J. (1982). Towards critical practice of educational administration. Studies in educational administration, 27, 1-21.

Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General system theory: Foundations, development, applications. New York, NY: George Braziller.

Blase, J. R., & Blase, J. (1996). Micropoliti-cal strategies used by administrators and teachers in instructional conferences. Al-berta Journal of Educational Research, 42, 345-360.

Bogden, J. (2003). Cyber charter schools: A new breed in the education corral. The State Education Standard, 4(3), 33-37.

Carr-Chellman, A. (2005). Global perspectives on E-learning: Rhetoric and reality. New York, NY: Sage.

Carr-Chellman, A. (2007). User design. Mah-wah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cavanaugh, C. (Ed.). (2004). Development and Management of Virtual Schools: Issues and Trends. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Inc.

Christensen, C., Horn, M., & Johnson, W. (2008). Disrupting class. New York: Mc-Graw Hill.

Cooper, B., & Randall, E. (2008). Fear and privatization. Educational policy, 22(1), 204-216.

Crowson, R., Boyd, W., & Mawhinney, H. (Eds.). (1996). The politics of education and the new institutionalism. Washington DC: Falmer Press.

Cuban, L. (1988) The managerial imperative and the practice of leadership in schools. Al-bany, NY: SUNY Press.

Donaldson, J. A., Smaldino, S., & Pearson, R. (2008). Managing. In A. Januszewski and M. Molenda (Eds.), Educational technology (pp. 1750-195). New York: Lawrence Erl-baum Associates.

Duffy, F. (2007). When is systemic change not systemic? Duffy Reports, May 2007: http://thefmduffygroup.blogspot.com/search?q=systematic+change

Duffy, F., & Reigeluth, C. (2008, July-August). The school system transformation (SST) protocol. Educational Technology, 48(4), 41-48.

Evers, C., & Lakomski, G. (Eds.). (1996). Ex-ploring educational administration: Coher-entist applications and critical debates. New York, NY: Pergamon.

Fullan, M. (2008). The six secrets of change: What the best leaders do to help their orga-nizations survive and thrive. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Garrison, R., & Anderson, T. (2003). E-learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice. London: Rout-ledgeFalmer.

Griffiths, D. E. (1964). The nature and meaning of theory. In D. E. Griffiths (Ed.), Behavioral science and educational administration,(63rd Yearbook of the Na-tional Society for the Study of Education). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Gronn, P. (2002). Distributed leadership. In K. Leithwood and P. Hallinger (Eds.), Second international handbook of educational lead-ership and administration (pp. 653-697). London, UK: Kluwer.

Hanson, E. M. (2003). Educational adminis-tration and organizational behavior (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Hallinger, P. (2003). Leading educational change. Cambridge Journal of Education, 33(3), 329-351.

Hallinger, P. (Ed.). (2002). Second internation-al handbook of educational leadership and administration. London: Kluwer.

Heinich, R. (1984). The proper study of in-structional technology, Educational Com-munications and Technology Journal, 33(1), 9-15.

Hill, P. T., Lake, R. J., & Celio, M. (2002). Charter schools and accountability in public education. Harrisonburg, VA: R. R. Donnel-ley & Sons.

Hinson, J. M., & Bordelon, R. S. (2004). Pro-fessional development recommendations for online course designers. In C. Cavana-ugh, (Ed.), Development and Management of Virtual Schools: Issues and Trends (pp. 135-156). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Inc.

Hoy, W. K., & Miskel, C. (1991). Education Administration: Theory, research and prac-tice. New York, NY: Random House.

INACOL. (2008). Fast facts about online learning. Retrieved January 10, 2009, from http://www.inacol.org/press/docs/nacol_fast_facts.pdf

Jonassen, D. (1991). Objectivism versus con-structivism: Do we need a new paradigm? Educational Technology Research and Devel-opment, 39(3), 5-14.

Jonassen, D. H. (1999). Designing construc-tivist learning environments. In C. M. Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional-design theo-ries and models: A new paradigm of instruc-tional theory (Vol. 2, pp. 215-239). Mah-wah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Katz, D. & Kahn, R. (1966). The social psychol-ogy of organizations. New York: Wiley.

Kowch, E. (2005a). Do we plan the journey or read the compass? An argument for preparing educational technologists to lead organizational change. British Journal of Educational Technology, Special Issue on Change and Educational Technology, 35(6), 1067-1075.

Kowch, E. (2005b). The knowledge network: A fundamentally new (relational) approach to knowledge management & the study of dependent organizations. Journal of Knowl-edge Management Practice, 6, 13-37.

Kowch, E. G. (2003). Policy networks and pol-icy communities in three western Canadian

universities and two provinces: A neo-in-stitutional approach to a pan-institutional issue. University of Saskatchewan, Saska-toon. Unpublished doctoral dissertation.

Kowch, E. G. (2008, November). Character-istics of high capacity, semi-autonomous teams – are you ready for this? Paper pre-sented at the meeting of the Association of Education Communications and Technol-ogy Annual Conference, Orlando, FL.

KPMG Consulting. (2001). Pennsylvania Department of Education cyber charter schools review. Retrieved January 2009, from http://www.pde.state.pa.us/char-ter_schools/lib/charter_schools/cybercs-revfinal.pdf

Leithwood, K. A., Aitken, R., & Jantzi, D. (2001). Making schools smarter: A system for monitoring school and district progress (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Leithwood, K., & Jantzi, D. (2005). A review of transformational school leadership re-search 1996-2005, 4(3), 177-199.

Levin, B., & Fullan, M. (2008). Learning about system renewal. Educational Man-agement and Leadership, 36, 289-304.

McCombs, B. L. (2008). From one-size-fits-all to personalized learner-centered learning: The evidence. The F. M. Duffy Reports,13(2) 1-12.

Norris, D. & Poulton, N. (1991). A guide for new planners. Ann Arbor, MI: Society for College and University Planners.

Pal, L. (2006). Beyond policy analysis. To-ronto: Thomson-Nelson.

Picciano, A. G., & Seaman, J. S. (2007). K-12 online learning. CUNY, NY: Sloan Con-sortium.

Picciano, A. G., & Seaman, J. S. (2009). K-12 online learning. CUNY, NY: Sloan Con-sortium.

Reigeluth, C. M., & Garfinkle, R. J. (1994). Envisioning a new system of education. In C. M. Reigeluth & R. J. Garfinkle (Eds.), Systemic change in education. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publi-cations.

Reigeluth, C. M., Watson, W. R., Watson, S. L., Dutta, P., Zengguan, C., Powell, N. (2008). Roles for technology in the infor-mation-age paradigm of education: Learn-ing management systems. Educational Technology, 48(6). 32-40.

Russell, G. R. (2004). Virtual schools: A criti-cal view. In C. Cavanaugh (Ed.), Develop-ment and management of virtual schools: Issues and trends (pp. 1-26). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Inc.

Sackney, L., & Mitchell, C. (2002). Postmod-ern expressions of educational leadership.

In K. Leithwood & P. Hallinger (Eds.), Second international handbook of educa-tional leadership and administration (pp. 881-915). London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Sergiovanni, T. (1989). The leadership need-ed for quality schooling. In T. Sergiovanni & J. Moore (Eds.), Schooling for tomorrow, Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Silins, H. (1994). The relationship between transformational and transactional leader-ship and school improvement outcomes. School Effectiveness and School Improve-ment, 5(3),272–298.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., and Zvacek, S. (Eds.). (2003). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Solomon, G. (2005). Setting up an e-learning system. Technology and Learning, 1(7), 44-46.

Spector, J. M. & Anderson, T. (Eds.). (2000). Integrated and holistic perspectives on learning instruction and technology: Un-derstanding complexity. Boston, MA: Klu-wer Academic Publishers.

Spelling, M. (2008). Harnessing innovation to support student success: Using technology to personalize education. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Spillane, J. P., Halverson, R., & Diamond, J. B. (2000). Investigating school leadership practice: A distributed perspective. Educa-tional Researcher, 30(3), 23-28.

Tucker, B. (2007). Laboratories of reform: Virtual high schools and innovation in public education. USDOE Education Sec-tor Reports. Washington, DC: U.S. Depart-ment of Education.

Visscher-Voerman, I. & Gustafson, K. (2004). Paradigms in the theory and practice of education training design. Edu-cational Technology Research and Develop-ment, 52(2), 69-91.

Watson, J. F., Gemin, B. & Ryan, J. (2008). Keeping pace with K-12 online learning: A review of state-level policy and practice. Naperville, IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

Wiley, D. A., & Edwards, E. (2002). On-line self-organizing social systems. The decentralized future of online learning. The Quarterly Review of Education, 3(1), 34-46.

Willower, D. J. & Forsythe, B. (1999). A brief history of scholarship on educational administration. In J. Murphy & K. Louis (Eds.), Handbook of research on educa-tional administration (pp. 1-25). San Fran-cisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Documents

New Capabilities for Cyber Charter School Leadership: An Emerging Imperative for Integrating Educational Technology and Educational Leadership Knowledge