This presentation explores the inextricable relationship between organizational leadership, culture, and change management relative to public education systems. The nation’s public education framework and infrastructure face increasingly complex challenges that demand transformative approaches. Whether addressing achievement gaps, implementing new curricula, or adapting to technological and societal changes, public education professionals confront social, administrative, and economic pressures that resist simple solutions. Leadership, culture, and change are frequently treated as distinct disciplines in the educational literature and instructional practice, siloed and segregated, resulting in muting the dynamic interrelatedness between these elements’ foundation to public education. Drawing on the work of Edgar Schein’s cultural model, Kouzas and Posner’s Leadership Challenge, and Daryl Conner’s orientation to change, and framed in Stoic philosophy and psycho-analytic theory, this presentation posits that Leadership, Culture, and Change are not separate disciplines, but an integrated system providing public education professionals with a path for Creating the Future of Public Education Today.
