Future Alternatives for Educational Leadership

Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Democracy

Deborah M. Netolicky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367674847
• eBook ISBN: 9781000423341
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book offers provocations for what's now and what's next in educational leadership, simultaneously bringing the field both back to its basics—of equity, democracy, humanity, and education for all—and forward to productive, innovative, and necessary possibilities. Written during the pandemic reality of 2020, this collection shares the global voices and expertise of prominent and emerging leaders, scholars, and practitioners in education from the UK, the United States, South America, Canada, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. The authors engage with the complexities and uncertainties of leading in education. They examine research, reflections, and real stories from which school leaders, education system leaders, policymakers, and researchers in the field of educational leadership, can learn, and in which they will find honesty, authority, and inspiration to guide the future of the field.

The new perspectives and hopeful alternatives presented in this outstanding book are essential to researchers, school leaders, and policymakers, and are key to advancing education into positive and democratic futures.

PART 1

Knowledge and theory of educational leadership

1

Back to the future

Recuperating educational administration?

Pat Thomson

DOI: 10.4324/9781003131496-3

You know those times when you write an abstract for a chapter and at the time it seems like a good idea. But things happen, and when you go back to the abstract it doesn’t look like something you ought to write at all. Well, this. Since my initial idea for writing something about recuperating educational administration the pandemic happened. And the educational leadership world moved enough for us to see, perhaps more clearly, its fundamental problems, premises, and potentials.

I had initially thought I would write about how educational fields become stuck places. I wanted to think about how shifting terminology—away from leadership and management and back to administration—might help us to unstick, perhaps even to unlearn and forget. I knew I’d have to demonstrate stuckness, and that this argument could be read as a semantic game. Nevertheless, I wanted to go back to the idea of administration as a philosophical approach, administration as a thinking-led practice which addresses questions of power and justice. I’d imagined going back to the work of Richard Bates (1983, 1987, 1993), to ask what his writing might offer, now, to the schools, colleges, and universities charged with educating citizens in uncertain times (see also Bates, 2005, 2006). That discussion would set the scene for addressing educational futures.

But, in between the abstract and the writing: COVID-19. During the pandemic, schools and universities were variously open and closed. Education was put into a rather peculiar form of administration.

The term ‘administration’ is used to describe what happens when a struggling business is on the verge of going out of business. When an organisation is put into administration, all decisions, as well as the development of long-term plans for survival and recovery, are handed over to a specialist administrator. Staff are often required to follow new rules and meet new performance measures and accountabilities at the same time as maintaining core services/functions. Not dissimilarly, the pandemic saw governments move educational organisations out of their usual ways of being, and doing. Schools, colleges, and universities were put into a form of administration which brought new urgencies, risks, and imposts, new ways of being and working as teacher and student.

This chapter discusses England and schools, referring to lessons that might be learnt from this period of disruptive administration. While my ambition is to speak more broadly to other places and other phases of education, the specific examples I discuss will vary from location to location. And the line of argument I pursue may not have traction in some parts of the world. Like any discussion, this chapter is situated in a specific place and time.

It is important to say just a little about the English case which features in this chapter. The English school system has a very particular organisational structure (see Ball, 2018; Gunter et al., 2016; Reay, 2017; Thomson, 2020). The school sector is a mixture of public, charity, and private providers (Ball, 2007). Over three decades, various English governments have contracted out much public provision, so that both public and private, philanthropic, and commercial interests coexist within the public sector, including in education (Ball, 2012). Part of this move has been the shift from locally managed state schools to autonomous, publicly funded schools, legally constituted as charities, the academisation programme (Courtney, 2016). While Local Authorities still run the majority of primary schools, three quarters of secondary schools are run by academy trusts. Schooling is regulated through highly centralised measures of student and school performance including school inspections, standardised testing, and national examinations. Schools compete for enrolments and prestige. High degrees of school and academy trust autonomy afford local responsibilities for budget, staffing, and procurement and create the potential for distinctive educational offers. However, there is considerable critique of this education policy agenda, particularly about whether it has produced the dramatic shift in standards that government claims (e.g. Bhopal & Myers, 2018; Edwards & Parsons, 2020; Hutchings & Francis, 2018).

But is this a system in need of dramatic change? I address this question first of all, considering the school system that went into administration during the pandemic. The second section considers how shifts made during lockdown might help us think about the ways that schooling might be redesigned. The chapter concludes with some key issues for redesign. In other words, this chapter starts with education in administration and moves towards setting an agenda for educational administration.

Does the school system need to be redesigned?

Let me start by alleviating concerns. Redesign does not mean starting from scratch. Redesign works with existing designs and recombines them into new forms (The New London Group, 1996). Redesigning schooling does not mean ‘de-schooling’, undoing schooling as a social institution (Illich, 1973). Nor does it necessarily mean that schooling’s ‘grammar’ (Tyack & Tobin, 1994) is expected to change dramatically in a very short space of time. Redesign is slow, careful work. The emphasis in design, and in redesign, is always to focus on the ‘brief’ first of all. A design brief covers the intent and scope of the project, as well as its production, timing, and budget. A great deal of care and time is spent on the initial stages of developing any design brief—development usually involves extensive and systematic conversations, investigations, and trialling. Redesigning thus necessitates a deep investigation of both the purposes and practices of schooling.

There are many reasons for not only thinking that schooling needs to be redesigned but also that the design brief must be subject to informed and democratic debate. For me, the most compelling reason is that schooling is not equally beneficial for all students. Despite decades of effort, the nexus between school success and the family wallet remains stubbornly fixed (Dorling, 2014; Thompson & Ivinson, 2020; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). Of course, schooling cannot create a more equal society, cannot ensure that there are enough jobs to go around, cannot ensure decent housing for all, but schools can make some difference. However, even though some schools have shown that it is, under the right conditions, possible to provide an education which allows young people to take advantage of the opportunities that are variously on offer to them, ‘scaling up’ these approaches has proved very difficult (Thomson, 2014).

Existing socioeconomic inequities were exposed and, arguably, increased during the pandemic. For this reason, some (e.g. Horton, 2020) suggest the term ‘syndemic’ is more appropriate than pandemic, as it denotes the differential and inequitable viral impact on existing disparities of class, gender, race, location, and age. For example:

• Because working-class BAME communities were/are four times more likely to die from the virus, the realities of particular lives and schools in particular places were unmasked.
• Pivoting schools to provide lessons at home drew public attention to the numbers of children living without access to the Internet, without a computer, and without space to work at home.
• The A level exam results debacle—an initial faulty algorithm that discriminated in favour of students who studied in small classes in schools that historically did well—revealed as never before the ways in which assessment was not meritocratic, but something much more arbitrary.

As well, the four million children living in poverty in England, one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, became news. Discussions of food poverty made national headlines. Public debates about whether school dinners were responsible for a national obesity crisis shifted rapidly to the ways in which school dinners were an essential welfare provision. When the government decided not to provide school dinners during school holidays, a public outcry—led by Marcus Rashford, a high-profile, black footballer who had himself benefited from school dinners—immediately erupted. The government was forced to acknowledge the harsh and unjust reality of English society and it is an optic they struggle to come back from.

A recent survey of school leaders and teachers suggests that, despite some children thriving in lockdown learning, the already serious gap between the most disadvantaged children and their peers has become even more extreme (Sharp et al., 2020). But, despite the plethora of blog posts, radio and television interviews, and op-ed pieces, it has been difficult for anyone to explain quickly and succinctly how the complex historical nexus of class, race, place, and schooling produces ongoing hierarchies of educational attainment. Public explanations of pandemic-exposed inequities have tended to focus on family and community problems, lack of government trust in the teaching profession, as well as the potentials for data to create wildly unjust and/or inaccurate exam results. This specific pandemic difficulty evidences the long-standing argument that better problematisations might lead to different policies with more equity traction (Bacchi, 1999, 2009). Understanding the structural-cultural effects of schools and other interrelated areas of public policy, while at the same time acknowledging that previous sincere efforts to improve schooling have had limited results, could lead to a more comprehensive public policy agenda. However, addressing inequity without resorting to the divisive debates and defensive spin that have characterised the last decade of English education policy is a challenging prospect.

What’s more, some equity problem formulations may also work against better explanations and thus rethinking and redesign. Gert Biesta, for example, suggests¹ that the focus on ‘the learning gap’ shifts attention away from what should be learnt/taught, and the wider purposes of schooling – in his words, these are:

• Qualification: Providing students with the knowledge, skills and dispositions that equip them for meaningful action in the world.
• Socialisation: Providing students with access to the many practices and traditions, ways of doing and ways of being, that have been developed over the centuries, and helping them to find their place within these.
• Subjectification: Encouraging and supporting students to be(come) subjects of their own lives, and not remain or become objects of influences outside of them.

However, the disruption caused by the pandemic has arguably allowed these wider questions to come into view, at least for some.

The first post-lockdown move back into schools brought calls for short-term changes – a ‘recovery curriculum’² which addressed students’ loss of routine, structure, friendship and social interaction, opportunity, and freedom. This proposition was popular with schools, as it brought welfare, resilience, and wellbeing to the fore and made them the basis for teaching/learning. There was also support for a curriculum that attended to creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, teamwork, meta-cognition, communication, and information literacy (e.g. Fullan et al., 2018; Griffin et al., 2012; Wan & Gut, 2011), building on teachers’ innovative uses of technology during lockdown.

But there were also arguments made for rethinking schooling in the longer term. Mick Waters, formerly responsible fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: What’s now and what’s next in educational leadership
• Part 1: Knowledge and theory of educational leadership
• Part 2: Diversity and inclusion in educational leadership
• Part 3: Systems and structures for educational leadership
• Index