Caring as Career: An Alternative Perspective for Educational Administration

The primary purpose of this article is to describe how school administrators operating from an ethic of care conduct their daily practice and how that practice differs from administrators operating solely from traditional leadership models. Via a secondary analysis of data that were gathered in our previous work with career assistant principals, we show how the practices of these assistant principals do not fit traditional administrative theories. Instead, the ethic of care was evident. Because it is difficult to separate administrative practice from organizational structure and professional norms, a secondary purpose of this article is to identify how the demands of both the organization and the profession interfere with enactment of caring.