Fenwick W. English

The Unintended Consequences of a Standardized Knowledge Base in Advancing Educational Leadership Preparation

Background: The quest for a “knowledge base” in educational administration resulting in the construction of national standards for preparing school leaders has brought with it an unexpected downside. Purpose: It is argued that instead of raising the bar for preparing educational leaders, the standards have lowered them, first by embracing only a limited set of the actual responsibilities of school leaders, resulting in programmatic reductionism, and permitting the licensing of school leaders at sites outside the purview of the university, by definition a form of deprofessionalization. The standards also assume the existence of a static knowledge base tied to a static social system. Current skill sets contained in the standards are in their essence antichange and antidemocratic. Conclusions: The major assumption that must be questioned is the notion or requirement of a stable knowledge base that is a political necessity in accreditation and licensing practices but the hallmark of a dead field of studies empirically.

Pssssst! What does one call a set of non-empirical beliefs required to be accepted on faith and enforced by authority? [Answer: a religion, aka the ISLLC standards]

The ISLLC (Murphy, Yff and Shipman, 2000) standards simply are not entirely what they claim to be, i.e., ‘what research and practitioners have told the ISLLC representatives are critical components of effective leadership’ (ETS 1997: 4). Some dispositions and performances which comprise the standards are neither scientific (research based) nor empirically supportable. The standards are ambiguous and not without internal contradiction. When such a doctrine is proposed to be nationally applied in the training, preparation and licensing of educational administrators embraced by the political power of the state for enforcement, we are about to embark on what Michel Foucault (1980: 32) has aptly identified as a ‘regime of truth’. Such regimes are politically repressive to all other possibilities. Given the looming national implementation and test based on the ISLLC standards, it is my position that such a doctrine deserves the most serious and sustained interrogation.

On the Intractability of the Achievement Gap in Urban Schools and the Discursive Practice of Continuing Racial Discrimination.

The “achievement gap” between African American and Latino students and those of their White counterparts continues to evoke national cries of consternation and condemnation of the public schools, particularly those in urban areas. This article posits that the achievement gap will never be resolved because it is an artifact of the process of measurement in which flawed tests have been used to assess pupil progress. In particular, IQ and its derivative achievement tests cousins have always shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is a crucial variable in explaining test score variance. SES is part of the concept of cultural capital, and this form of capital is a potent predictor of student success.

From Simplicism to Complexity in Leadership Identity and Preparation: Exploring the Lineage and Dark Secrets.

This article challenges the largely Western, functionalist and unitary notion of the self which underlies contemporary international approaches to educational leadership preparation. It locates an alternative concept of the self as simultaneously singular and multiple in deep‐rooted and persisting mythic, religious and metaphysical thinking. The article suggests that identity is self‐ and co‐constructed to achieve a sense of coherence, worth and belonging, primarily through ongoing narratives and relationships. As a consequence, a leader must construct an identity performance to take up the role of leader, develop narratives and adapt identities to the ongoing surveillance of an accountability audience. The article suggests that preparation, in focusing on the acquisition of technical craft skills related to administration and socialization into a generally uncontested set of values and norms, evades and miniaturizes the performance of leadership. The preparation of leaders for complex, uncertain and ambiguous roles may be supported by focusing on the mythic narratives of self and context, thereby examining how the many fluid and constantly mutating intersections of conscious and subconscious selves may be utilized to enact a self‐aware leadership.

Using Film To Teach Leadership in Educational Administration.

As a field, educational administration has long been permeated by views that ignore human interiority in favor of impersonal structures and forces at work in schools. Contemporary concerns with moral leadership have served to reveal the limitations of behaviorism in dealing with the topic because morality is determined by inner beliefs and values. Abundant film and video archives offer a rich and inexpensive repository of depictions of leaders from a variety of occupations and ages and can restore to the study of leadership the balance between inner perspective and the impact on followers. The advantages of film/video as a powerful teaching tool are presented along with a discussion of their use in graduate curricula. A partial list of 10 useful films portraying multicultural leaders, male and female, is described for possible use in the graduate classroom.

Bourdieu's misrecognition: why educational leadership standards will not reform schools or leadership

This article examines the concept of misrecognition as advanced by Pierre Bourdieu in the development and implementation of educational leadership standards in the USA and in England. The line of argument advanced is that leadership standards were promulgated as an agenda to control and dominate a contested field in both countries by certain individuals and agencies. The analysis proffers that the steps involved in the creation of national leadership standards will not lead to reform since they are embedded in reified current roles and practices. The net result explains why a nations educational leadership standards cannot become excellent via standardisation, and why significant educational reform is highly unlikely as a result of the processes employed to construct and impose them on practitioners, universities, schools, and school systems.

What paradigm shift? An interrogation of Kuhn's idea of normalcy in the research practice of educational administration

The discourse of modernism posits that logical change is a fundamental process in its internal makeup. The rhetoric of modernism is replete with stories about the use of the scientific method in gathering data, developing theories that are testable, and proving or disproving them. Despite the fact that a close analysis reveals that the use of the scientific method is at best a rhetorical feat and at worst pure fiction (Beveridge, 1950, The Art of Scientific Investigation (Vintage), Geison, 1995, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (University of Princeton Press)), these revelations have not discouraged the idea that progress is inevitable within its metanarrative (Nesbit, 1980, The History of the Idea of Progress (Basic Books)). Within the context of modernism is Kuhns parallel idea of paradigm and paradigm change. This article shows how paradigms preclude considering certain forms of change which threaten their borders as a meta-discourse. Because of this continuous centring and re-centring, paradigm shifts as posited by Kuhn are not changes at all because they are inherently commensurate, a condition which Kuhn believed to be impossible between paradigms. We have therefore a mistaken notion of change that envisions mutations and gradualism for fundamental ‘paradigm shifts’. ‘New theories’ are simply ‘old theories’ made over and renamed. The alternative is to consider conceptual diversity by abandoning the idea of a paradigm itself and with it the need for a singular field of theory and practice.

Understanding Leadership in Education: Life Writing and its Possibilities

Biography and other forms of life writing were once considered vital sources of information on leadership. However, early in the establishment of the pursuit of a ‘science of leadership’ in the first quarter of the last century, they were abandoned as too subjective and hence unreliable. Recently, however, as scholarship regarding leadership has shifted to understanding the intention and meaning of the actions of leaders in context, their value has been re‐appraised. Twelve forms of life writing are described as possible sources of understanding the meaning of the decisions and actions of leaders. The major obstacle to the use of most forms of life writing in preparation programs for educational leaders is sociological theory, which effaces the human variable in organizational life in a quest for generalizability laws which are context‐free, or in attempting to impose patterns of behaviors or standardized tasks which erase situational novelty.

Leadership as lunacy : and other metaphors for educational leadership

For millennia people have been profoundly interested in leadership, but the way they have tried to understand it is cognitively more sophisticated than through right brain only rational language. Metaphors function through unstable comparison of two things which are both like and unlike. Consequently metaphors have been used as a kind of thinking to provoke uncertainty and tension and so stimulate creative and innovative understanding of leadership. This book sets out to provide stimuli in a standard free zone and to use metaphor as a heuristic, a tool of human development. The book adopts an interdisciplinary focus and draws on a range of disciplines such as philosophy, sociobiology, anthropology, humanities and literature, intending to inspire reflection on leadership in education and what acting as a leader might entail.

De‐constructing the logic/emotion binary in educational leadership preparation and practice

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to de‐construct the traditional bifurcation of logic and emotion in the preparation of educational leaders which, following regnant business planning and management models anchored in economics, focuses almost exclusively on social science methodology and the tenets of normative decision theory in formal university based‐preparation programmes in the UK and the USA. This dominant approach has many drawbacks and does not reflect how educational leaders actually engage in decision making.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a conceptual/logical analysis of the apparent weaknesses in traditional preparatory curricula as well as a report of preliminary qualitative research derived from a non‐probability, convenience sample of 13 interviews in the UK and the USA of middle‐level managers in institutions of higher education.Findings – The major findings lie in the development of an initial schematic that challenges the dominant binary in considered decisions in educat...