Educational Leadership

Theorising Professional Practice in Neoliberal Times

Steven Courtney, Ruth McGinity, Helen Gunter, Steven J Courtney, Ruth McGinity, Helen Gunter, Steven Courtney, Steven J Courtney, Ruth McGinity, Helen Gunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317217350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educational Leadership brings together innovative perspectives on the crucial role of theory and theorising in educational leadership at a time when the multiple pressures of marketisation, competition and system fragmentation dominate the educational landscape. This original and highly thought-provoking edited collection is a much-needed counterbalance to the anti-theoretical trends that have underpinned recent education reforms.

Contributors employ a range of theories in original and innovate ways in order to reveal the lived experiences of what it means to be an educational leader at a time of rapid modernisation, where the conceptual terrain of 'modern' has been appropriated by corporate and private interests, where notions of 'public' are not only hidden, but also derided, and where school leaders must meet the conflicting demands of competing accountabilities. Drawing on research projects conducted in the UK, Educational Leadership presents convincing evidence that the need to consider theory crosses national borders, and the authors discuss changes to professional identities and practices that researchers around the world will recognise.

This detailed and insightful work will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education and sociology, as well as those with an interest in organisational and political theory. The topical subject matter also makes the book of relevance to practitioners and policy-makers in education and the public services more generally.

1 Introduction

Theory and theorising in educational leadership

Steven J. Courtney, Ruth McGinity and Helen M. Gunter

Introduction

Public education in England is experiencing intense, sustained and far-reaching reforms in order to “modernise” its purposes, structures and cultures, as well as the identities and practices of professional practitioners. These reforms are the instantiation in England (see Courtney, 2015b, 2017; Gunter and McGinity, 2014) of an international privatisation agenda (Anderson and Donchik, 2016; Gunter et al., 2016; Jabbar, 2015; West, 2014), fundamental to which has been the construction of ‘reform-ready’ educational leaders who do leading as the mechanism to ‘secure local reform delivery’ (Gunter, 2012a, p. 4). While educational is often used, in reality leaders, leading and leadership are disconnected from teaching and learning. Together, they constitute a form of organisational leadership that focuses on data as integral to effective and efficient school, college or university leadership. Correspondingly, such forms of organisational leadership have been normatively positioned as both necessary and axiomatically transformational, capable of being instructional and distributed to enable total and totalising reform to take place. Our use of the term educational leadership is intended to capture this form of performative organisational leadership.

In this edited collection, we make important contributions to the study and practice of leaders, leading and leadership within educational organisations and services by engaging critically with these reforms and illuminating their effects on professional practice and identities. We report on a range of research projects whose insights into educational leadership are generated and explained through novel and critical engagements with social theory. This collection has developed from the scholarship and projects of members or associates of CEPaLS (Critical Education Policy and Leadership Studies), whose central concern is to ‘examine how power works through policy and within the working lives of professionals and children in schools and wider communities’ (Gunter, 2016, p. 179). The book has evolved from a series of CEPaLS seminars, discussions and presentations that have been funded by and co-ordinated through its status as a Research Interest Group within the British Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society (BELMAS). The book is located empirically within England, which, as an internationally renowned ‘laboratory’ of neoliberal reform (Finkelstein and Grubb, 2000, p. 602), is illuminative of broader global patterns.

The focus of the contributions is consequently on the role of critical theory and theorising in researching into and for educational leading and leadership, where the body of scholarly work in which this research is located is conducted through a socially critical lens, and where theories may be deployed in ways which challenge interpretations whose legitimacy, indeed, their discursive dominance, derives from their claim to be value and theory free (see, e.g., Courtney, 2016; Eacott, 2011; Fuller, 2013; Gunter, 2012a, 2014; McGinity, 2014, 2017). In this way, the explicit use of theory is productive and useful for researchers as well as practising professionals in making sense of the interplay between policy, agency and structure. In this introductory chapter, we first explore what we mean by neoliberal times. We then discuss the field of educational leadership and its immanent tension and contradictions in regard to theory and how CEPaLS and this book are positioned in relation to this.

Neoliberal times

Neoliberalism is a concept characterised by tensions, contradictions and ambiguities. A commonly held, shorthand definition is summarised by Connell (2013, p. 100): neoliberalism is ‘the agenda of economic and social transformation under the sign of the free market. It also means the institutional arrangements to implement this project that have been installed, step by step, in every society under neoliberal control (Connell, 2013; Harvey, 2005).’ Gerrard (2015) takes up this notion of neoliberalism as a political, ideological and social ‘project’, noting how ‘[n]eoliberalism is touted as encroaching and dismantling the public education institutions of the post-Second World War welfare states of the ‘west’, and it is through a claim to public education that many articulate their alternatives to neoliberalism’ (p. 857). Gerrard is calling attention here to how neoliberalism is positioned both as a rupture with a more “public” past and as a shibboleth through which scholars locate themselves within particular epistemic communities. This demands more conceptual coherence of neoliberalism than perhaps it can bear: Rowlands and Rawolle (2013) point out that ‘although neoliberalism is often used as a generic descriptor for right-leaning, negative phenomena, this is not particularly helpful because such usage implies that neoliberalism is a unitary concept which belies the complex and contested nature of the phenomenon’ (p. 261). Here, Rowlands and Rawolle (2013) follow Ong (2007), who argues that ‘neoliberal logic is best conceptualized not as a standardized universal apparatus, but a migratory technology of governing that interacts with situated sets of elements and circumstances’ (p. 5). In light of these questions concerning neoliberalism’s mutability and incoherence over time and place, it seems reasonable to ask, following Rowlands and Rawolle (2013), how neoliberalism can be said to provide sufficient explanatory or even descriptive power to justify its use, or as is more common, its invocation. It is not only the assumed unitary nature of neoliberalism which has received scrutiny; Gerrard (2015) argues against the construct of neoliberalism-as-rupture through noting how it originated in ‘capitalist reform and adaptation amidst diverse and contested political discourses, which included the adaptation and co-option of progressive critiques of Taylorite industrial capitalism and the welfare state’ (p. 862). In other words, for Gerrard, neoliberalism is merely a more recent manifestation of capital’s continual need to shift in form and focus in order to survive and prosper.

These are important points to bear in mind when deciding how or whether to engage with neoliberalism as a conceptual and ideological framework for thinking about education and its leadership. We do not see or use neoliberalism as a deterministic interpretive framework: rather, and somewhat despite Gerrard’s (2015) claims of continuity, we see the signifier neoliberalism in England as performing useful historical and heuristic functions. So, first, we follow Connell (2013) and others (e.g., Ball, 2008; Apple, 2011) in noting that the period in education since the mid-1980s is distinctive through being characterisable by increased private-sector involvement in formerly public services; by the fetishisation of the market as a mechanism for regulating social as well as economic relations; and by the privileging of private-sector knowledge over professional knowledge. Second, and as mentioned, we intend on deploying the term neoliberalism also as a heuristic whereby questions are prompted concerning this historical moment through our engagements with the field; this is through our empirical work and through our use of social theory. Indeed, we suggest that the use and role of theory are important elements that help demarcate and differentiate what we are calling neoliberal times, particularly in relation to educational leadership as a field. Further, we consider a principal product and signifier of neoliberal times to be the advocacy of theory that is not theory, and the marginalisation of theory that is theory. We will now explore what we mean by this in relation to the field of educational leadership.

The field of educational leadership

The field of educational leadership in the UK originated as educational administration ‘in professional training and postgraduate programmes’ (Gunter, 2012b, p. 340) and was closely linked to the needs of professionals and then, mediating those, to the wider policy agenda. Field members consequently comprise professionals in educational organisations and services; interests such as faith groups, business and philanthropists, and government institutions and parliament. The field’s tight coupling with the reform movement partly explains the seductiveness and conceptual collocation with what Raffo and Gunter (2008) have typologised as functionalist research and knowledge production. Functionalist studies:

focus on the presentation of solutions to identified problems, and this can be descriptive through empirical work that leads to understanding … and/or normative through the promotion of a particular idea about how a problem should be solved.

(Gunter, 2012b, pp. 338–339)

Raffo and Gunter (2008) contrast this with socially critical scholarship, ‘where assumptions about what is “normal” are challenged and new questions are asked that relate professional practice to structural inequalities’ (p. 339) including gender (Blackmore, 2013; Fuller, 2013), sexual orientation and identity (Courtney, 2014), class (Grace, 1995) and race (Johnson, 2016). These structural features are interplayed with theories of power to ‘to describe, understand and explain changes in education, and to take action in working for a more socially just educational experience’ (Gunter, 2012b, p. 342). Despite the seeming plurality, functionalism dominates in the field of educational leadership, and this has had consequences for how theory is used and understood. For example, specific claims are made concerning how pragmatism is preferable to critical theory (Teddlie and Reynolds, 2001). In order to illuminate this de-privileging of theory, James (2010) recalls a conversation he had with ‘an experienced teacher’ (p. 243) whom he calls Margaret:

She said that she had heard about a range of criticisms in the 1990s, and about deliberate and concerted efforts since then to make such research more accessible and relevant to practice. Yet, she complained, it was still ‘too theoretical’ and did not signal clearly enough to policy people and practitioners what they should do. Margaret went on to argue that she knew why this was. For her, most educational problems could be solved by the application of common sense coupled with a greater trust in professional teachers, so did not need ‘theory’ and certainly did not need specialist researchers. Furthermore, she thought, the main reason people used theory was to try to justify their own existence as academic researchers, to dress things up to look more complicated than they really were.

(p. 243)

James’ (2010) observations may be applied equally to educational leadership, owing to what Gunter (2012a) has identified as its construction as the means of operationalising the neoliberal-inspired global education reform movement. This conceptualises children as markets, with fixed and differentiated talents and abilities, and education as the process by which they are made ready for their future hierarchised role in the global economy (Courtney, 2015a; Saltman, 2010).

If theory is used at all within neoliberalism, its role is limited to finding effective and efficient ways of implementing an agenda that furthers the nation’s economic interests. For instance, the UK Secretary of State for Education from 2010 to 2014, Michael Gove, framed theorising as a matter of insiders and outsiders, adopting a normative position in relation to domains and traditions of knowledge production (Gunter, 2016):

But in the last decade there has been a much more rigorous and scientific approach to learning. Instead of a faddish adherence to quack theories about multiple intelligences or kinaesthetic learners, we have had the solidly grounded research into how children actually learn of leading academics such as E.D. Hirsch or Daniel T. Willingham.

(Gove, 2010, unpaged)

What this reveals is a purposive elision of approved theorist and reformer, whose purpose is ideological:

The data of what happens in individual classrooms with individual practitioners has been analysed by reformers from John Hattie to Sir Michael Barber, so the lessons of what works can be shared more effectively than ever before.

(Gove, 2010, unpaged)

In this paradigm, then, the purpose of theory is reducible to finding and articulating ‘the lessons of what works’: those critical theories that contain the means to trouble the epistemological foundations on which this conception of educational purposes rest are stigmatised or rendered irrelevant. How, for instance, might critical theorists (who ask for whom the present or normative arrangements work and do not work) contribute to debates where the educational leadership knowledge that counts is explicitly corporate? The U.S. Secretary of State for Education from 2009 to 2016, Arne Duncan, exemplifies the international character of this corporatising discourse:

Everywhere I travel, I meet visionary corporate executives committed to investing and scaling up the most innovative and effective programs for improving education.

(Duncan, 2011, unpaged)

Nike is committed to investing in innovation. But it is also committed to bottom-line results. Already they’re seeing that their initiative is boosting high school readiness, improving student reading and writing skills, and strengthening school leadership.

(Duncan, 2011, emphasis added, unpaged)

The leadership of education is here conflated with that of businesses in order to perform an ideological function, where corporate leaders are constructed through neoliberal discourse and policy as being best placed to improve education and its leadership (Courtney, 2015a). Here, theory is a distraction from the business of securing the delivery of quantifiable educational outcomes. These outcomes are thereby constructed as neutral, both value and theory-free. We suggest that through this, educational leadership operationalises this hegemonic, neoliberal project, its key mechanistic and ideological functions occluded by both the ‘banality’ observed by MacLure (2010, p. 278) and this iteration’s immanent lack of critical practitioner reflexivity with regards to purposes (rather than simply implementation). We suggest that it is only by not thinking too hard, or theoretically, about it that educational leaders can fulfil their role in enabling an increasingly totalitarian performative regime (Atkinson, 2000; Courtney and Gunter, 2015).

If field members, as researchers, are not to collud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figure
• Common series foreword
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: theory and theorising in educational leadership
• 2 Theory sex to leadership heteroglossia: using gender theories to surface discourses of headteacher compliance and transgression
• 3 Re-figuring the world of educational leadership: struggles with performance, disenfranchisement and critical consciousness
• 4 Theorising senior leader identity in schools in areas of economic hardship
• 5 Negotiating meaning in multiple communities of practice: reconciliation and dis-identification in the identity work of headteachers leaving Anglican primary schools
• 6 Leadership and the power of others: re-thinking educational leadership with Magical Marxism and Spinoza
• 7 Re-thinking governmentality: lessons from the academisation project in England
• 8 Creating expert publics: a governmentality approach to school governance under neoliberalism
• 9 Hannah Arendt, judgement and school leadership
• 10 Interpreting historical responses to racism by UK Black and South Asian headteachers through the lens of generational consciousness
• 11 Behind and beyond “moral purpose” in contemporary school leadership reform: the challenges for critical research?
• 12 Conclusion: educational leaders and leadership re-theorised for the present and beyond
• Index