Leadership for Mortals

Developing and Sustaining Leaders of Learning

Dean Fink

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781412900546, 9781412900539
• eBook ISBN: 9781446231098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

?Overall, and as one has come to expect from Fink, this is a readable text that thinks outside the box of leadership theory... I have no doubt that the text will be welcomed by many readers for an engaging style that places human interest at the heart of the discourse in the field? - Mark Brundrett, writing in Educational Management Administration and Leadership

?It is a ?must read? for those in educational leadership roles in schools, both to gain invaluable insights and to draw on a framework for individual reflection? - Professor Brent Davies, University of Hull

`I enjoyed reading this book. The combination of critical reflection of his experience in the light of relevant literature makes for a lively and thought-provoking book. I was going to say "little" book, because at times I would have liked to have read more. But on the other hand, it is the sort of book one - the academic and the leader - could read in one sitting, enjoy and come back to for some ideas. I recommend you to do so? - ESCalate

`This book provides a refreshing alternative to the rhetoric about ?superheads?, and ?mavericks? that has been prevalent in some of the recent discourse about leadership. Dean Fink draws heavily upon the work of Andy Hargreaves, Michael Fullan and his own research with Louise Stoll so some of the ideas are familiar. However, what makes Leadership for Mortals interesting is the way in which he untangles the complexities of leadership by using genuine examples alongside the theory. Dean Fink?s writing is accessible and his anecdotal style should resonate with his intended audience of current and prospective leaders? - LDR, The Magazine for School Leaders

`This book is a welcome antidote to the notion of school leaders as heroic figures. Dean Fink?s commitment to enhancing the life chances of young people shines through the pages? - Kate Myers, Times Educational Supplement

`With great wisdom and insight, Dean Fink invites us into his leadership stories to masterfully illustrate that school leadership is no longer a person but an intricate network of ?mortals? working together to enhance learning experiences for students. They are truly leaders of learning, where commitment to successful learning for all students is the locus of their passion, perseverance and persuasion. Balanced with connections to respected leadership literature, this lucid and eloquent book will inspire current and future school leaders to reflect and develop their leadership practice to higher levels of effectiveness. An outstanding and optimistic read for all school leadership mortals, practitioners and scholars alike. I enjoyed it immensely? - David Eddy, Director, First-time Principals Programme, The University of Auckland

`Practitioners will find this book at the same time reassuring and challenging. Fink includes stories of leadership that highlight effective strategies and some approaches that have gone wrong. They are real and ring true and therefore credible and instructive? - Ken Thompson Principal, Gladstone Park Secondary College, Australia

`A great story about schools and their leaders progressing towards a knowledge driven world and the roads they choose to travel. Building sustainable communities of practice and the credible and varied examples of how the combination of leadership behaviour and enabling and disabling processes can make or break a successful school are clearly illustrated in Leadership for Mortals. A significant read for all aspirant and accomplished leaders? - - Jenny Lewis,Executive Officer, Australian Council for Educational Leaders

?Dean Fink brings together a wealth of learning from his own experience as a leader and learner to provide some powerful messages. This is a well-informed book with a strong theoretical basis but it is also personal and real, making sense of educational leadership in a way that is both profound and down-to-earth. School leaders in the UK and elsewhere will find inspiration, reassurance and challenge in this book? - Steve Munby, Chief Executive, National College for School Leadership

?Grounded in solid knowledge base and profound lived experience, Dean Fink?s Leadership for Mortals provides deep insights on how ordinary practitioners could become great and sustainable leaders of learning. Fink?s book is not a "quick-fix" how-to-do-it manual. It stimulates us to reflect on education leadership both as a personalized, value-laden journey and an art as well as reminds us of the imperative issues of extraordinary commitment, effort and determination in making a difference on leading students and teachers? learning. This is a must-read book for aspiring and serving leaders in the field of education? - Professor John Chi-kin Lee, Dean of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

?Its style is conversational and unpatronizing, yet it makes powerful statements about the key components that contribute to successful leadership. It is always practical, and readers will come away from this book knowing they have learned something that they will be keen to try out for themselves...Readers will recognise leaders good and bad that they have come across, at times being reassured that they are getting it right and at others despairing as they identify situations in which they, too, got it wrong. Fink?s writing makes it clear that leadership is not exact science! He reminds us that, although we are mortals, with good mentoring and better training our own potential has a better chance of being realised, and that this is the best way to enable our students to achieve their own potential.?

Journal of Research in International Education

Leadership in recent years has become a growth industry. Politicians demand more of it, academics decry the lack of it, and potential school leaders are deciding ?to hell with it? …..we are making the business of leadership so complicated that we seem to need John Wayne at his mythological best or Xena the Warrior Princess to run a school.

Most educational leaders are not ?heroic? but rather ordinary people who through extraordinary commitment, effort, and determination have become extraordinary, and have made the people around them exceptional. Educational leadership is more art than science; it is more about character than technique; it is more about inspiration than charisma; it is more about leading students and teachers? learning than the management of things

This resource for prospective and practising school leaders:

- motivates and inspires

- addresses the challenges of contemporary school leadership

- presents a model for leadership development, selection and succession

- challenges existing and prospective leaders to develop and live by a set of core values based on students? learning

- describes and explains the ?learnings? required by effective leaders of learning

- describes the intellectual ?tool kit? that leaders can develop

- describes the trajectories through which leaders proceed, and the ?learnings? required at each stage of the leaders evolution

- presents a template for leadership development and succession.

1

Challenge

It is symbolic that the first animal that scientists cloned was a sheep – the famous ‘Dolly’. Sheep are extremely obedient animals, easily controlled, compliant, and behave in quite predictable ways. A sharp bark from an assertive and single-minded sheep-dog directs the sheep in whatever predetermined direction the dog’s owner dictates. The sheep-dog is the ultimate technocrat. It is single-minded, and uncompromising in responding to its master’s bidding, methodical, intense, controlling and meticulous in the execution of its duties.

Sadly, the mind of the technocrat appears to drive the current standards/standardisation agenda that has infected educational jurisdictions world wide, and has propagated a type of leadership that is more interested in producing politically attractive test scores than enhancing students’ learning. Technocrats choose the technical side of an issue over the social and human consequences and want passionately for reason to crush emotion. Pamela Pitcher¹ has developed a composite picture of the organisational technocrat based on extensive research in an international corporate conglomerate. She produces a portrait of technocrats who value followers like ‘Dolly’ who never question authority, obediently follow orders and adhere to ‘standard operating procedures’. Technocrats always feel the past was simple and their own times more complex so they distrust the experiences of others who do not share their values. They know the management literature better than anyone and can use the rhetoric of decentralisation, empowerment and ‘participative management’, but rarely decentralise, empower or allow meaningful participation. They are strategic about human relations. Technocrats if they value anyone value other technocrats, so they produce organisational leadership clones, and when things go wrong as they inevitably do, the fault always resides with someone else. The ascendancy of the technocrat in education has paralleled the emergence of New Public Management (NPM) as the dominant model of policy development in many western educational jurisdictions.² By looking at New Public Management in relation to two other policy trends that have dominated the past thirty years we can begin to understand the evolution of different educational leadership approaches.

Traditional Public Administration

Until recent times, those of us who have worked in publicly funded education were part of large, highly centralised organisations such as school districts or Local Education Authorities. Administrators, including school leaders who worked within what might be described as Traditional Public Administration (TPA), were ‘rule-driven bureaucrats executing and maintaining norms of integrity … in a neutral way with the common good in mind. This perspective emphasises reliability, consistency, predictability and accountability’.³ These bureaucracies focused on the common good of all children and were organised to promote the consistency and reliability of results. Like most educators up until the early 1990s, I spent most of my working life within a traditional management structure.

Central government, in my case the government of Ontario, determined student diploma requirements and teachers’ and principals’ certification standards, produced curriculum guidelines, and contributed to a greater or lesser extent to the funding of schools. The actual administration of schools fell to a school district directed by a locally elected policy board (Local Education Authority or school district) that through its appointed officials fashioned second generation detailed curriculum documents, hired and fired principals and teachers, allocated resources, and interacted with the district’s community. Principals, for example, were accountable to the senior officials above them in the hierarchy and these senior officials were in turn accountable to the elected school board. A major focus for these systems was on equity and a concern for the common good. For the most part, all schools were treated the same. The school district allocated money on a per student formula, paid teachers based on seniority, and assigned principals as determined by the system and an individual school’s needs. Where these demands conflicted, system requirements usually prevailed. Changes tended to be incremental and schools did not stray too far from district procedures. Schools that became too innovative such as model or lighthouse schools usually regressed to the mean in short order.⁴ As long as schools and school leaders adhered to approved processes and procedures, the system allowed their leaders considerable leeway in the daily operations of the schools.

While it is dangerous to generalise, educators for the most part saw themselves as public servants who tried to balance the needs of individual students and parents and the collective aspirations of the larger community. For example, as an area superintendent⁵ with responsibility for a number of schools, one of my greatest challenges was to administer the school system’s optional attendance policy. This policy required students to attend their neighbourhood primary or secondary school for their first year of enrolment. After one year they could move to any other school in the system with no questions asked. The theory behind the policy was that a student or parent could not know a school until the student had at least attended that school. It was believed that only then could they make an informed choice. Once students attended their designated school, we found that they almost invariably stayed. From a system’s point of view this policy enabled administrators to balance enrolments so that all schools could offer broad academic, athletic and arts programs for all students, not just programs for an elite.

It was the job of the area superintendent to adjudicate parental appeals for exemption from this policy. My colleagues and I tried to weigh parental needs against those of the school and the total student population. I would on occasion get a parental request for a son or daughter to attend a non-designated school that, according to the parent, had a ‘better class of students’ – which could be translated as, ‘I want my child in a school without students from minority backgrounds’. If I had acceded I would have created a stampede of ‘white flight’. From my point of view a negative decision in a case of this nature was rather easy, but many situations were not so straightforward. One of my upper-middle-class schools offered Latin as an option. A number of parents used this as a reason to get their son or daughter into the more socially prestigious school. It was much harder to decide whether the student really wanted to take Latin or whether this was a ruse to ‘beat the system’. I suspect in this age of ‘the customer is always right’ that my example sounds like bureaucratic interference, but the rights and opportunities of all the students and their parents seemed to me to be a more defensible and more ethical operating principle. As slowmoving and rule-bound as school systems might have been within TPA, there was a genuine attempt to attend to the needs of all parents and students, not just the affluent, the knowledgeable, the pushy, or the influential.

While these bureaucracies may have moved slowly, they did change, especially as regards the role of leaders. In my early years in education as I worked my way up the hierarchy, school districts tended to look for leadership candidates with strong managerial skills, especially at the secondary level where school leaders had to construct timetables. In the 1970s as the politics of education became more turbulent, the school districts expected their administrators to possess not only managerial and organisational skills but also people and political skills. The pervasiveness of the school effectiveness and school improvement movements in the 1980s meant that leaders now must also have expertise in teaching and learning. The term ‘instructional leader’ became current, and school systems expected their leaders to assume this mantle. In my own school system an effective schools project⁶ and the University of Toronto Learning Consortium⁷, among other professional enriching programs⁸, involved leaders in supporting each other by addressing ways to enhance students’ learning. Like many school districts in Ontario in the 1980s, this focus on student learning was beginning to provide significant payoff.⁹ By the mid-1990s, however, these innovative and professionally enriching activities came to a screeching halt, as school jurisdictions turned to New Public Management (NPM) as a way to energise purportedly moribund educational systems.

New Public Management

Born during the Thatcher years in Britain and the Reagan years in the United States, New Public Management promised to usher in a new era of low-cost educational reform, and a remedy for the long-held belief that TPA was ineffective and too slow-moving to respond to the pressures of a globalised economy and the shrinking of time and space through technology. While few would argue with this appraisal of TPA, the solutions offered by NPM, were to say the least, problematic. The renowned management expert Henry Mintzberg¹⁰ has described NPM as merely a new label for “old corporate values”. Government he adds ‘is not business; treating it as such demeans it. As for treating us like customers, I expect a lot more from my government than that, thank you. I am a citizen, not a mere customer.’ NPM in education promised significant improvements in educational results while offering dramatic savings in taxes through market driven accountability. It was argued that competitive business markets successfully produced excellent, low-priced products, therefore, why not apply this market technology to education? Similarly, governments adopted the prevailing business philosophy that advocated decentralisation of decision making based on the premise that the best decisions are made at the level in the organisation where the decisions have to be carried out; budgets should be devolved to schools through site-based management (or local management of schools in the UK).¹¹

The final cornerstone of NPM in education was community involvement. To this end, some jurisdictions, like New Zealand and New Brunswick in Canada, totally eliminated school districts (LEAs) or, as in the cases of the United Kingdom and Ontario, reduced their powers drastically and devolved considerable responsibilities previously held by school districts and their administrators to councils of locally elected (or appointed) school governors. Some of these local councils, such as school governors in the case of the UK, have the power to hire and fire, reward and discipline principals (school heads)¹² and teachers and can wield considerable influence on daily operations within schools. While the rhetoric of these moves has focused on local democracy, a more cynical view is that the elimination of school districts removes a strong political impediment to a central government’s agenda. How democratic these local councils are is also a matter of dispute. As Mortimore and his colleagues found in their study of British primary schools, local elites of more affluent parents often dominate these local councils and create divisions in the school community between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’.¹³ For school leaders and particularly principals, this move has required them to develop or polish their political skills and spend more time in ‘the care and feeding’ of local politicians and less time attending to teaching and learning in their schools.

As NPM became the policy process of choice, governments across the western world initiated a wave of reform in the late 1980s and well into the 1990s. Educational jurisdictions engaged in a race to impose a new educational orthodoxy¹⁴ on their schools that demanded new and tough curriculum standards for students to ensure that these nations, states and provinces were economically competitive in the globalised economy. Lurking behind this agenda was a distrust of educational professionals in general and their unions in particular, and a view that any opposition to or criticism of this ‘orthodoxy’ was the work of self-serving interest groups.

While few people would oppose the goal of improved educational achievement, in reality these standards have tended to become standardised into national, state or provincial curricula, supported by standardised tests to ensure accountability and customer information to help ‘consumers’ make informed choices about schools, and including increasingly standardised teaching strategies or ‘best practices’. This very rational, linear and technocratic approach to educational change has run into one fundamental roadblock however – the students are non-standard, and teaching and leading are often non-rational activities. As a colleague once proclaimed, “the parents keep sending the wrong kids.” Not only do students’ needs, interests, abilities, learning styles and learning rates differ, but also so do their genders, ethnicities, religions, first lang...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Alma Harris
• Introduction
• 1 Challenge
• 2 Commitment
• 3 Values
• 4 Qualities
• 5 Learnings
• 6 Trajectories
• 7 Succession
• Conclusion
• Author Index
• Subject Index