Content area
Full Text
Keywords Human rights (law), Ethics, Equality, Leadership, Students, United States of America
Abstract Shapiro and Stefkovich in their 2001 book on ethics propose a framework for examining ethical dilemmas. At the heart of this conceptualization is "the best interests of the student. " Yet a review of the literature reveals this term is interpreted broadly and few systematic attempts have been made to define it. In response to this lack of clarity, the authors of this article construct a model for determining what is in the best interests of the student when making various types of ethical decisions in schools. This "Best Interests" model is based upon a new conceptualization of the three Rs. Here, the correlates are rights, responsibilities, and respect. By applying this model to the fact patterns of several US court decisions, the authors illustrate the application of the ethical paradigms of justice, care, critique, community, and the profession.
Callahan, in his 1962 book, The Cult of Efficiency, criticized policy makers of the public education system for concentrating too much on methods of making schools more efficient. This paper builds on Callahan's (1962) contention that schools and the education system in general must focus on more than just efficiency. We propose instead to focus on the ethical dimensions of educational leadership as they relate to the student's best interests and then apply this model to legal decisions. This approach is appropriate in our view because in the USA school leaders, in pursuit of efficient solutions, often turn to legalistic approaches to resolve what may essentially be ethical dilemmas.
With these issues in mind, this paper is divided into four sections. The first section provides an introduction and background to the purpose of this paper. The next section describes the conceptual basis underlying both the ethical and legal perspectives combined in this paper and how these two perspectives converge around what is in the "best interests" of the student. The following section presents a model for determining what actions are in the best interests of students. The next section illustrates the application of this model to several legal cases.
Introduction
Within the past decade, in the USA as well as other countries such as Canada, there has been recognition of the need,...