Christian School Leadership

In the field of leadership, the Platinum Rule encourages leaders to do unto others as they would have you do unto them. When applied to the K-12 school setting, this would suggest that educational leaders—administrators, principals, department chairs, etc.—should consider the preferred leadership style of those under them. Because every individual has a unique background, determining how each person wants to be treated is a difficult task. Numerous studies have looked for trends in teacher leadership style preference based upon groupings of gender, teaching experience, and highest earned degree (e.g., Bird & Wang, 2013; Eddins, 2012; Greiman, Addington, Larson, & Olander, 2007; Martin, 2015). However, these categories are broad and may not

Despite its many years of growth, the number of students enrolled in Conservative Christian schools in the United States dropped from 954,360 in 2005 to 707,100 in 2013, a lower enrollment than in any of the previous 15 years (NCES, 2014). Christian schools today face the challenge of fulfilling parents’ desires for a solid Biblical foundation and academic excellence for each student. It is this “dual responsibility of spiritual development and academic excellence in a Christian school” that effective Christian school leaders must strive to attain (Banke, Maldonado, & Lacey, 2012, p. 255). The level of influence principals and other school leaders have on learning is significant: the “leadership characteristics of school principals directly and very significantly affect the organizational trust, commitment and citizenship felt at the school especially by those working in schools, the culture and climate of the school and the quality of education and training” (Avci, 2015, p. 2765). Specifically, Christian school principals are responsible for maintaining a Christian climate and culture within the school, ensuring the highest standards of student academics, and developing the full potential of faculty and

Falokun (2016) surveyed middle school teachers in South Texas, concluding the analysis of the data “suggested a statistically significant positive relationship between job satisfaction and transformational leadership style” (p. 140). There was no relationship between transactional or passive leadership styles and job satisfaction. Leithwood (1992) concluded transformational leadership increases teacher collaboration, while transactional leadership has little influence on teacher change. However, these results were again “quite limited” (p. 12). The weak relationships repeatedly found between leadership style and teacher job satisfaction may be the result of attempting to analyze large groups of teachers, typically by school, rather than accounting for individual preferences. Different leadership styles may be more effective if selected based on individual teacher preference and the specific