The New Work of Educational Leaders

Changing Leadership Practice in an Era of School Reform

Peter Gronn

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761947493, 9780761947486
• eBook ISBN: 9781446238295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

`If there in one word to describe the issues addressed by Peter Gronn in The New Work of Educational Leaders it?s "timely" And if there is one book that education policy makers, system CEOs and education ministers should find the time to read, this is it? - Educare News

`This book is essential reading fro those involved in educational leadership and policy development. This work is also valuable for those interested in the locally organized and interactionally achieved context of institutional work? - Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics if Education

`Though based in Australia, Peter Gronn shows familiarity with the British education system, and this boo is relevant to those in the compulsory and post-compulsory sectors interested in the themes of education leadership? - Learning and Skills Research

In The New Work of Educational Leaders, Peter Gronn provides a new framework for understanding leadership practice. The work of leaders will increasingly be shaped by three overriding but contradictory themes: design; distribution; and disengagement. These are the `architecture? of school and educational leadership.

Designer-leadership is the use of mandatory standards of assessment and accreditation for school leaders, such as the National Qualification for Headship (NPQH) in the United Kingdom and the (Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) standards in the United States. Distributed patterns of leadership have developed in response to the intensification of school leaders? work under policy regimes of site-based and school self-management. Disengagement describes a culture of abstention, in which school systems anticipate leadership succession problems, such as projected shortages and recurring recruitment difficulties.

 

PART 1

THE ARCHITECTURE OF LEADERSHIP

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1	Designing Leaders^1

Since their establishment, public school systems have experienced periodic pressures for reform in numerous countries. The latest wave of reform during the last two decades, particularly in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, has emphasised the need for school restructuring along with a renewed focus on teaching and learning. For many current reformers, the key ingredient in the success of restructured schools is leadership, in particular the leadership of principals. From the inception of mass schooling in the late nineteenth century, the provision and replenishment of cohorts of principals and other school leaders has been accorded a high policy priority by governments and public school authorities. Unlike previous eras, however, the current reform period has yielded a qualitatively different approach to the formation of school leaders. This new view of leader formation, which is the subject of this chapter, may be termed the production of leaders by design or the idea of designer-leadership.

Central to the notion of designer-leadership is the determination of sets of standards and competencies for the preparation and development of educational administrators, both as a precursor to the certification of prospective principals and others as suitable or fit for employment, or for the purposes of contractual renewal and the professional upgrading of incumbent school administrators. The creation of designer-leaders forms part of the ideology of the new managerialism, known as the new public management (NPM) (Hood, 1995), which now legitimates the overwhelming bulk of global public school sector reform. Moreover, the adoption of standards as a model for the accreditation of an individual’s fitness for school administration parallels a similar movement from the late 1980s for the definition and implementation of standards for classroom teachers. If the solution proffered by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, for the attainment of a world-competitive British economy, following the accession to office of the Labour government in May 1997, was said to be ‘Education, education, education ...’ , then ‘Standards, standards, standards ...’ is fast becoming the mantra of school reformers. As Elmore (2000, p. 12), suggests, for example, ‘standards-based reform has a deceptively simple logic: schools, and school systems, should be held accountable for their contributions to student learning’.

At the heart of the discourse of the new managerialism is an apparatus of governance comprising indirect steering rather than direct supervision, in which control of employees is achieved through a policy regime and a culture of performativity. Previous direct modes of control of employee performance through traditional, interventionist bureaucratic line management approaches have been superseded by quasi-autonomous, self-managing institutions subject to discursive disciplinary and surveilIance rubrics of quality assurance and performance targeting. Standards for school leaders are central to the notion of performativity. As such they embody detailed expectations of preferred (as opposed to best) practice, yet they differ from traditional scientific management understandings of effort norms, for (as I show) they are grounded in a discourse of desirability rather than a Taylorite calculus for the measurement of bodily exertion. On the other hand, the significance of standards is that they provide new modalities of regulation and control (Anderson, 2001, p. 203). In this sense, they are vehicles for the steerers of systems to micro-manage the day-to-day work of institutional personnel by seeking to ensure adherence and conformity to officially sanctioned codes of conduct (BalI, 1998).

In this chapter, I consider a range of problems and possibilities inherent in the adoption of standards-based preparation for school leaders. The discussion has four aims. First, with a view to clarifying the distinctiveness of standards-driven preparation, as part of a broad developmental survey, it compares the attributes of this most recent approach to school leader formation with its historical precursors -namely, an initial historical reliance on the vagaries of individual character and virtue, and their subsequent abandonment in favour of formally codified professional knowledge. Second, it compares the various approaches currently being taken to standards determination in a number of educational systems, in particular the UK and the USA, where adherence to the idea of designer-leadership is strongest, and also Australia. Here it will be shown how the evidentiary sources from both the agencies responsible for, and the interests which seek to promote, standards-driven preparation programmes, reveal two contrasting approaches: a profession-driven view of leadership standards in the USA, and a national government-driven approach in the UK. Third, I analyse a number of problems with the heroic leader paradigm which is embedded in the discourse underpinning the machinery of standards and capabilities, and I review a range of empirical data on standards implementation. Fourth, I conclude with a discussion of a number of general issues associated with the global implications of the move to standards-based administrator preparation. These concern aspects of leadership development and succession planning, in particular the unintended consequences of the introduction of standards for leadership careers and the recruitment of school leaders, the subject of Chapter 3.

Standards and the Regulation of Conduct

We inhabit a world of standards. Standards are a type of social technology which comprises a discursive apparatus of codified, abstract rules or norms. Standards give voice to intentionality in that they purport to govern and legitimate modes of human conduct, and the production of material objects. Leaving aside material objects, commentators normally see the governance of standards-mediated conduct as encompassing the domains of morality and epistemology, and possibly aesthetics (Bowker and Star, 2000, p. 148). With regard to the morality of conduct, Baer (1987, p. 533) notes that standards articulate ‘a profession’s view on the appropriate distribution of societal resources under its “authority” and the values underlying their allocation’. Yet, while such moral authority may be generated by a particular professional group, it may equally be imposed on a profession by an external agency (e.g., government), as with teachers and administrators in the recent past in the UK. In regard to the second dimension, standards-based knowledge, Baer (1987, p. 533) defines this as ‘formalized and codified decision rules that join professional knowledge to action’, with the main consequence of the act of codification being that ‘expert knowledge is “stored” in the standard and not in any person’ (Jacobsson, 2000, p. 45).

The production of standards creates an intimate relationship between standards and standardisers. Standardisers are sets of agents, representing key political and professional interests, who are authorised to define and apply standards. Standardisers define standards for a range of economic and cultural activities associated with the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of valued goods and services. A key feature of standards production is that there is an inherent bias in the act of standard-setting. When standardisers define standards, they decide, in effect, which components of activities shall be visible and which shall be invisible. Their criteria for distinguishing between these visible and invisible dimensions may be explicit and publicly accessible, or implicit and tacit. A significant effect of making some dimensions visible is to create a public agenda of admissibility. Thus, ‘every standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another’ (Bowker and Star, 2000, p. 156).

Three particular features of the relationship between standards of admissible conduct and practices in the workplace are worthy of comment. First, the link between standards and contexts of work is a paradoxical one. Ostensibly, the rhetoric of standards is separated from work practice by virtue of its decontexualised character. That is, standards are not generally derived from, nor grounded in, what counts as acceptable conduct that is idiosyncratic or peculiar to particular locales of work (e.g., Mrs Smith’s Year 7 at High School X), because standards are meant to be immune from the exigencies of localism. An important exception to this first point, as will be seen later on, is Louden and Wildy’s (1999a, pp. 417, 418) vignette-based approach to the development of standards for Western Australian school principals, which is ‘grounded in the context it describes’ and which also reflects ‘the common-sense knowledge of principals’. Atthe same time as standards are divorced from contexts, however, they bear an intimate relation to them. This is because the precepts which they embody are intended to secure relationships of conformity in every set of circumstances which is deemed to fall within the remit or brief of a particular standard.

A second general effect of the introduction of standards to spheres of activity is to standardise experience within those activity realms by eliminating variations in the conduct of practice. The result is that standards can be characterised as solutions in search of problems, in that they prescribe anticipated, legitimated and programmed responses to societal and organisational possibilities yet to be realised. As solutions to problems, standards embody a number of presumptions. One is a presumption of superiority, in that persons other than practitioners (i.e., standardisers) are deemed, or deem themselves, to know better or to know best. Another is that uniformity of conduct is considered preferable to differences and variations in performance. The third feature of standards is that they become a source of predation for a whole range of interests. This consequence occurs because the introduction of standards creates a regime of compliance and an industry of verification. Compliance and verification tum on the issue of correspondence, or the extent of the conformity between workplace operations and the standardised stipulations which they are supposed to mirror. Compliance with standards and verification of compliance give rise to the monitoring of conduct. The result is an incipient game of infinite regress in which groups of experts (governed by their own sets of standards?) are constantly checking up on other groups of experts who are required to provide ‘auditable accounts’ (Power, 2001, p. 10).

In some respects, standard-setting and standardisation can be seen as the final pieces in the mosaic of the new managerialism (e.g., significant downsizing of the public sector; the privatisation of public instrumentalities; the contracting out of service delivery; the introduction of outcome-based performance targeting and appraisal). Much of the groundwork for control by standards had already been laid in the post-Keynesian political climate of the 1980s. In this decade, a variety of salaried professionals (e.g., nurses, teachers, social workers, university academics and civil servants) were ferociously derided by Hayekian, neo-liberal governments for their alleged ‘provider capture’ of the Welfare State (Perkin, 1990, pp. 483–95). Much earlier, the playwright, George Bernard Shaw, had chided the professions generally with his witty aphorism that they were ‘conspiracies against the laity’, but the claim that the interests of client and beneficiary groups had been betrayed signalled an abandonment of public trust. As a means of bringing these allegedly recalcitrant occupational groups to heel, in order to make them responsive to client interests, and to discipline their work performance in the pursuit of advantageous national positioning for a competitive knowledge economy, standards regimes proved irresistible to governments.

Standards and the Design of Leaders

This repositioning of interests along market lines, with a view to privileging the demand side rather than the supply side of the relationship, represents a form of customising the production and delivery of services. A corresponding mode of customisation also applies to the production of school leaders. In school and educational leadership, the adoption of standards is the most recent of three broad historical solutions to the enduring problem of leadership succession faced by societies, systems and institutions. This is the problem of how to produce individuals fit for leadership roles and to guarantee the production of successive requisite cohorts of institutional-level leaders. ‘Fitness’ here entails some form of evidence of capacity to fulfil role responsibilities and duties. The process of determining such fitness is known as leader formation. Judgements about fitness for office have generally encompassed the search for evidence of either or both a particular candidate’s presumed suitability and eligibility. In some cases, the criteria for selection on each of these grounds have been explicitly defined, whereas in others they have been left implicit.

Over (roughly) the last two centuries, three historically sequential sets of ruling assumptions concerning fitness for leadership have underwritten the preparation and development of educational leaders. These are the norms of ascription, merit and customisation. In nineteenth-century England and Europe, and their colonial offshoots, ascriptive leadership was broadly coterminous with the prototype of the gentleman. The principal claim here was that key individuals (overwhelmingly high-status males) were somehow naturally endowed or fitted for leadership. With industrialisation, the expansion of higher education and the emergence of an urban middle class, ascriptive assumptions in these societies began to yield to (although they were not entirely replaced by) demands for evidence of merit and achievement. Increasingly, fitness for leadership came to mean being formally fitted. But in the new millennium, a number of governments, employing authorities and professional associations are claiming that the credentialism afforded by the assimilation of esoteric knowledge no longer provides sufficient evidence of capacity to lead communities of learners. Instead, these agencies are customising their requirements by accrediting individuals according to standards-determined profiles of preferred leader types. Hence the characterisation of this approach as designer-leadership. With the adoption of standards regimes, leaders may be said to be suitably fitted. These three leader formation modes are considered in turn.²

Ascription: Naturally Fitted Leaders

In the European version of ascription, the male offspring of a socially exclusive stratum were selected and segregated at a young age for later elite roles (Armstrong, 1973, p. 20). The selection criteria included heredity, family status and an aristocratic outlook. The quintessence of European ascriptive leadership formation was the English public boarding school which was prominent in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. The classical, Platonic assumptions which legitimated this schooling informed the world views of the English policy-making and opinion-forming elites, including those within state secondary schooling until the comprehensivisation of the mid-1960s (McCulloch, 1991). Moreover, in the 1980s, the persistence of gentlemanly power assumptions and their alleged negative cultural influence on Britain’s underperforming economy prompted one leading Conservative cabinet minister to promote a new entrepreneurial Britain as an antidote to the so-called ‘British disease’ (Annan, 1988).

The English public schools were Anglican, fee-paying and boarding, and competed with one another at games. They stood for ideals of religion, character, culture, team games and service. Their male pupils experienced institutionalised paternalism in the boarding houses, occasional inspiring and intellectually challenging teaching in the sixth form, and were prepared for public life through membership of societies and clubs (e.g., debating). A gentlemanly disposition, the outcome of the translation of these ideals into practice, comprised a combination of godliness and good learning. Other components of this ascriptive infrastructure included an upbringing comprising a ménage à trois of parents, children and nannies, followed by preparatory schooling at age eight before entry to a boarding school. The hegemony of the classics was the hallmark of the public schools, a situation reflecting the perpetuation of an aristocratic style in the moulding of character, which was cemented by subsequent attendance at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

In the early nineteenth century, compared to their brothers, English gentlewomen were educated in the ‘accomplishments’: dexterity in music, languages, dancing and drawing etc. These activities provided desired models of female elegance, grace, style and moral rectitude. Critics dismissed the accomplishments as, at best, education for subordination or, at worst, servility. Eventually, for middle-and upper middle-class girls, the accomplishments were replaced by education at public boarding and day schools. Reformers emphasised public duty and middle-class family values, ‘a curious amalgam that bore slight resemblance to either the boys’ school or the Victorian family, in spite of the ideological borrowings from both’ (Vicinus, 1985, p. 164). Until well into the twentieth century, the opportunities for public leadership roles for educated English women were confined to high-minded, practical, good works in such spheres as philanthropy, voluntary work (e.g., in settlement houses), religion and charity (e.g., church communities, temperance reform), and to employment in the helping professions (e.g., nursing, school teaching and social work).

Achievement: Formally Fitted Leaders

Recognition of ability as the basis of leadership capacity paralleled a wider acceptance of meritocracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the rise of the professions in modernising societies (Perkin, 1990). The assumption was that leadership could be learnt, which signalled the eclipse of being ‘born to the purple’, the idea that a privileged class or stratum with an inborn instinct to rule should monopolise leadership. Instead of personal attributes, birth and heritage, appeal was made by rising occupational strata, such as salaried managers (Burnham, 1962, pp. 78–93), to impersonal evidence of requisite individual capacity. In this way, knowledge and ability substituted for pedigree, and higher education became an instrument for preparing managers and leaders. There were three important aspects of this development. First, an enduring tension emerged in university-based programmes between the advancement of knowledge and the application of knowledge. The former idea fostered the proliferation of graduate schools, and the latter the expansion of training outside {he university sector. Second, university-based programmes, symbolised by the Master of Business Administration (MBA), diversified rapidly. Third, degree programmes became stratified...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Author details
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Archapitecture of Leadership
• 1 Designing Leaders
• 2 A Distributed View of Leadership
• 3 The Disengagement of Leaders
• Part 2 The Ecology of Leadership
• 4 What do Leaders do?
• 5 Leaders’ Committees and Meetings
• 6 Leadership Teams
• 7 The Emotions of Leaders
• 8 Leadership as Greedy Work
• References
• Index