The process of school-empowerment ultimately may be intellectual: an awareness and understanding by schools as unique collective learning communities that new school structures, roles, and relationships are necessary in the first place. First, preliminary results from field studies of schools undergoing restructuring are used to show that school players lack an understanding of the theoretic bases for changing the three essential relationships in schools: principal-teacher, teacher-teacher, and teacher-student. Second, the works of Dewey, Glasser, and Giroux are examined to exemplify theoretic underpinnings useful to practitioners as analytic, transformative tools for reconceptualizing school relationships. The product of intellectual empowerment used by learning communities is an agenda for action, or informal theory: making implicit human interests and ideologies explicit within the practitioner context. It is concluded that, until school personnel become empowered intellectually, they will continue to look for answers from "above," e.g., research centers, universities, think tanks, just as they have received mandates and instructional procedures from local and state education agencies. Schools will remain infertile grounds in which the adoption and implementation phases, but not the institutionalization phase occur. Finally, two suggestions are made for principal preparation programs in: (1) recruitment and program design; and (2) setting a new cultural orientation between professors and graduate students. (Contains 51 references.) (Author)