Identifying the assumptions of the dominant, functionalist paradigm in considerations of educational administration as inadequate, this study proposes an alternative paradigm: a politics of schooling that can both describe administration and organization and contribute to the development of leadership as praxis. Criteria for an adequate theory of educational administration are explanatory, social, and critical. However, orthodox theoretical models of administration, organization, and leadership fail to address these criteria adequately and have the managerial and rationalistic bias of the functionalist paradigm. Alternatively, a politics of schooling embodying a radical perspective may be theoretically adequate, rich, and critically aware. Two major research directions can contribute to the understanding of organization, administration, and leadership within the context of a political economy: theoretically based ethnographies of schools and the development of biographical accounts of school administrators. The study suggests that administrators will learn more from a social theory that stresses the critical impact of the school in creating our society than from research based on some behavioral science model. (PB)