One doesnāt have to be a baseball fan to believe that with every spring comes a rebirth. Last yearās won-lost record is wiped clean. Everyone has a chance to be this yearās champion. So it is with books and articles on the topic of leadership and management. There is always hope that the next book will open oneās mind to new beginnings and new insights to improve public education. That continuing search is represented in this chapter. What is not needed is a recipe for success, for, even if there were such a thing, it should be resisted, in part because context matters. We should follow ideas grounded in our own experiences rather than slavishly follow and deliver someone elseās pet solution. Wheels can be reinvented if done so smartly, building on the many good ideas of others who help us to see familiar things differently.
The truth is that most educational leaders work under a lot of pressure and they want to be good and make a difference; nearly all have the desire somewhere inside themselves to change the world, for if not, why would they struggle every day? Another reality is that there is a whole lot written on leadership and management and wading through it, even superficially, can be daunting. Itās best not to accept anything written on education uncritically, whether Franklin Bobbitt on scientific management, Joseph Murphy on standards, Thomas Sergiovanni on the moral leadership and the managerial mystique, Roland Barth on improving schools, even the lead editor of this guide, Fenwick English, on critique. These are movers and shakers in the field of educational theory and practice, along with many individuals cited and not cited in this chapter. But oneās own experiences and instincts are the only arbiter of truth about oneās professional self.
Uncertainty and the Language of Scientific Management
According to English (1994), American educational administration was captured by the language and ideas of scientific management shortly after the beginning of the 20th century. These remain firmly entrenchedāif not in its theories, then in its practice. English wrote that scientific management promotes the illusion that leadership knowledge is objective and that there are specific managerial behaviors that produce results that are true and of value. The big questions this raises are: (1) true for what purpose? and (2) of value for whom? (Bogotch, Miron, & Biesta, 2007).
Schools can be judged any number of different ways. For example, they can be assessed on indices of āfinancial efficiency, student attendance, student enjoyment of education, future student participation in education, student aspiration, preparation for citizenship, and so onā (Gorard, 2011, pp. 745ā746). And of course they can be assessed using achievement tests, which measure one dimension of within-school learning. However, the critical issue with this latter criterion is, as Elliot Eisner (2002) reminds us, āthe function of schooling is not to enable students to do better in school. The function of schooling is to enable students to do better in lifeā (p. 369).
Sergiovanni (1992) said the reason we forget this is due to (1) trained incapacities and (2) displacement of goals (pp. 4ā5). Trained incapacity is the ātendency to focus knowledge, attention, and skills so narrowly that principals and teachers become incapable of thinking and acting beyond their prescribed rolesā (p. 5). And, through goal displacement, principals and teachers ālose sight of their purposes, allowing instrumental processes and procedures to become ends in themselvesā (p. 5). Together, these two concepts make up āthe managerial mystiqueāāa phrase Sergiovanni borrowed from Abraham Zaleznik (1989) of the Harvard Business School (p. 3).
To counter this managerial mystique, we would need to focus on āpersonal and social development, creativity, social justice, democratic awareness or lifelong learning, reminding us that different stakeholders have varying expectations of what schools are and what they should, and should not, doā (Townsend, MacBeath, & Bogotch, in press). To which it could be asked, āDo the numbers measure the quality of teaching, learning, and leadership or rather the frequency or correlated frequencies of behaviors? Do the numbers measure learning or performance on a multiple choice examination?ā (Bogotch et al., 2007, pp. 102ā103).
The work of statistician Nate Silver is instructive here. Silver (2012) developed a system (PECOTA, Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) to forecast baseball performance. According to Silver, a lot of numbers are just noise (i.e., random patterns) and only a few numbers signal meaningful events and actions to which we ought to pay close attention. For Silver, the signals are underlying truths behind a statistical problem. Nowhere in his book does he talk about education or school. Nevertheless, Silverās argument is that we must interpret data in context, not just as patterns found in the data, but also in what is happening outside the data. All too often, organizations seek to maintain and sustain themselves as they are. As a result, large organizations, especially, tend to define their successes based on the needs of the systemās hierarchy and protocols, ignoring signals.
This, according to Sir Ken Robinson (2006), is one reason why alternative ideas in education remain on the margins as alternatives. Robinson has said many times that schools need to reframe alternative ideas that work in practice as the new norm. Silver explains why we donāt; he says that our data are based on what we know, not on what is unobservable or at present unknown. We narrow our thinking and choices to within-school variables on which we have a whole lot of data, but about which we cannot make accurate predictions. While most of us can imagine better schools and better futures for students, we donāt act on these imagined ideas because they represent an unknown. But Silver reminds us that they are really known unknowns.
So what does this have to do with management and leadership? Silver makes the case for analyzing existing data in order to establish probabilities of outcomes, not certain solutions. In fact, probabilities admit that we are uncertain of the results. Or, in his words,
Our brains process information by means of approximationsā¦. With experience, the simplifications and approximations will be a useful guide and will constitute our working knowledge. But they are not perfect, and we often do not realize how rough they are. (Silver, 2012, p. 449)
School administrators instead select specific programs and materials and put all their hopes for school improvement on that set of practices supported by existing within-school correlational data. To do otherwise might be mistaken for weakness, and what we tell ourselves and the public is that we need to have strong educational leaders. In other words, āthe problem comes when we mistake the approximation for the realityā (Silver, 2012, p. 450) and act accordingly. The progressive educator John Dewey (1909) asked us to make tentative hypotheses and to learn from our mistakes. In many contexts, however, to do so might get an administrator relieved of his or her position. Further, it might stain the reputation of a school improvement researcher. What is central to a status quo mindset is the belief that a product will lead to certain results in neat and easy-to-follow steps (Thrupp & Willmott, 2003, p. 54). Both administrators and researchers want to be viewed as being certain and right.
To help differentiate the issues involved, Silver (2012) makes a distinction between two concepts that all leaders face: risk and uncertainty. Silver says that risk is āsomething that you can put a price onā (p. 29), as in a bet in a poker game. In the game or in life, you know the odds and can account for them. Uncertainty, however, is hard to measure because you have only āsome vague awareness of the demons lurking out thereā (p. 29). The problem arises in all human endeavors when we mistake uncertainty for risk. That is, we calculate that which is incalculableāat present. Encouraging a school leader to take a risk without calculating the odds of success is dangerous advice, but that is precisely what many authors, experts, and trainers do in the name of innovation and improvement.
This discussion of Silverās ideas on risk and uncertainty helps us see how scientific management and similar approaches substitute certainty where there is none and why; for English, these approaches create an illusion, if not also a deception. The illusion is that each successive school reform will improve public education. In fact, existing data tell us that there is a persistent pattern of sameness in public schools across generations adding up to a century that now inscribes sameness into the theories and practices (including biases) that make up the field of educational administration.
And yet, just maybe, our understanding of uncertaintiesāalong with calculated risksāmay also be the source for us to create opportunities to develop different strategic mindsets and new actions for changesāif and only if we are willing to struggle against sameness and develop new alternative patterns, starting small and with ourselves as the primary unit of analysis. Thus, the ideas and concepts presented here are meant to make the familiar, that is, the sameness of public schools, strange so that we can rethink and reposition ourselves as public educators to enhance social, political, and economic opportunities and not just work hard to raise standardized test scores (Duke & Landahl, 2011).
