6. School leaders take prompt action to get at and deal with the root causes of racial and ethnic conflict among faculty or students.
Just as tensions and conflict exist among different racial and ethnic groups in communities, they also arise in racially and ethnically diverse schools. Action to prevent and deal fairly with conflict is an obvious responsibility of school leaders. Henze (2000, p.2) found that effective leaders, when they identified issues that did or could result in conflict..."tended to reframe the problem, recognizing overt conflict as a 'symptom' and underlying tensions and root causes as an illness."
Dealing with conflict requires open discussions of real and imagined racial and ethnic tension. This topic is covered extensively in the "Shared Beliefs and Commitment" section of the survey.
