Prelims

Half Title Page

Leading Under Pressure

Series Title Page

Transforming Education Through Critical Leadership, Policy and Practice

Series editors: Stephanie Chitpin, Sharon Kruse and Howard Stevenson

Transforming Education Through Critical Leadership, Policy and Practice is based on the belief that those in educational leadership and policy-constructing roles have an obligation to educate for a robust critical and democratic polity in which citizens can contribute to an open and socially just society. Advocating for a critical, socially just democracy goes beyond individual and procedural concerns characteristic of liberalism and seeks to raise and address fundamental questions pertaining to power, privilege and oppression. It recognizes that much of what has gone under the name of “transformational leadership” in education seeks to transform very little, but rather it serves to reproduce systems that generate structural inequalities based on class, gender, race, (dis)ability, and sexual orientation.

This series seeks to explore how genuinely transformative approaches to educational leadership, policy, and practice can disrupt the neoliberal hegemony that has dominated education systems globally for several decades, but which now looks increasingly vulnerable. The series will publish high-quality books, both of a theoretical and empirical nature, that explicitly address the challenges and critiques of the current neoliberal conditions, while steering leadership and policy discourse and practices away from neoliberal orthodoxy towards a more transformative perspective of education leadership. The series is particularly keen to “think beyond” traditional notions of educational leadership to include those who lead in educative ways – in social movements and civil society organizations as well as in educational institutions.

Title Page

Leading Under Pressure: Educational Leadership in Neoliberal Times

Edited by

Stephanie Chitpin

University of Ottawa, Canada

And

Robert E. White

St. Francis Xavier University, Canada

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Editorial matter and selection © 2022 Stephanie Chitpin and Robert E. White.

Individual chapters © 2022 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80117-359-9 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-358-2 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-360-5 (Epub)

About the Contributors

Erin Anderson, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver. Erin worked for five years as a research assistant and research associate for the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA). Her research focuses on policy and standards for principal preparation as well as planning, leading, and implementing continuous school improvement.

Douglas Archibald, PhD, is a white cisgender man. On his father's side he descends from Scottish settlers who came to Canada in the late eighteenth century. On his mother's side, much more recently, as she immigrated from England in 1958. He humbly helped write this chapter from a position of privilege. He has not faced discrimination or racism in his years growing up and in his adult life. His lens is of an Anglophone male teacher, school administrator, and university professor. He has taught mainly in inner-city schools of Boston, Massachusetts; Ottawa, Canada; and in the ethnically diverse suburbs of Toronto, Ontario. He currently teaches and supervises health professions educators at the University of Ottawa.

Lynn Bosetti is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research and teaching has focused on faith, identity, and the common school, planning alternative futures for education, issues related to school choice, and charter schools. More recently, university leadership in the new economy. She has held SSHRC grants for projects related to Leadership in the New Economy and School Choice.

Preface

There is very little left to be said about the shambles that the world finds itself in at the beginning of 2022. This planet of ours has borne witness to all manner of cataclysms and catastrophes, many of them Biblical in proportion. We have seen raging forest fires and disastrous floods, not to mention volcanoes and earthquakes. Now, these calamities occur on a fairly regular basis around the globe and, in normal times, they are pretty much accepted as normal. However, what marks these times as abnormal is the frequency and severity of these natural occurrences, combined with shifting weather patterns and rising sea levels, to mention but a few issues that we are bearing witness to. It does not take a lot of pondering to recognize that things are not like they used to be.

However, this is not the entire picture. There is more. Equally as damaging as natural global calamities are those issues that humankind has been responsible for. In fact, even to the most cynical readers, humanity has played a part in the advent of many of these “natural” tragedies. So, what happens when we follow the all-too-obvious trail? Where does it lead? Many people believe that the fault lies with leadership. This may be true, at least in part – but there is more, much more. Who are our leaders? All of them are products of the society from which they emanate. This is but the beginning, and an obvious beginning at that.

As we may already know, the best leaders do not lead. If they are in leadership positions at all, they tend to lead by example, not by mandate. If truth be told, potentially good leaders are in notoriously short supply simply because the best leaders are too smart to take on this thankless task. As the old adage suggests, “Leaders need to be smart enough to play the game, but dumb enough to think it is worth it.” So, for all of us who are dumb enough to think leading is worthwhile, many leaders around the world are products of a globalized, neoliberal society. We share more similarities than differences. But, why is this problematic? It is not problematic if leadership were aimed at positive societal change. However, so much leadership has become conscripted by neoliberal values. We see evidence everywhere. We see it in the university scandals where socialites have illegally enrolled their very average scions in top-tier universities through significant gifts and endowments or by claiming talents that these young hopefuls do not and never will possess. This is an example of the wealthy protecting the wealthy, at any cost – literally. And that is where it matters – cost becomes everything. Money makes the world turn. Neoliberalism has managed to infiltrate all levels of society, all within the past half century.

Taking a look at neoliberalism, it has been said that it is the unholy union of politics and commerce. Many seem to view this as a happy marriage, but it may not be the reality in every case. Some pundits claim that neoliberalism is a failed experiment because governance is local and commerce is transnational, while others point to the fact that national borders are becoming increasingly porous. It is almost as if a corrosive substance were at work, dissolving the very frameworks of society that we have come to know and value.

Neoliberal thought has even infiltrated the halls of education, and this is where the trail of breadcrumbs, or dollars, if you will, leads. Neoliberalism seems to have begun with Margaret Thatcher and was continued and promoted by people such as Ronald Regan. The basic thrust of educational neoliberalism is that it is outcomes based. Nothing matters but results. What counts as results are increasing “achievement” scores on standardized tests. However, any test is a proxy for what educators believe their students have learned. Any test score is a proxy for what educators believe that their students have demonstrated what they have learned.

Unfortunately, much like the gold reserves in the treasury, a dollar no longer represents a dollar's worth of gold, held in reserve. Education has similarly been hollowed out. Educators and politicians, who are increasingly making policy for educators, have come to believe that standardized test scores are the same as knowledge acquired, as if test scores actually measure knowledge as opposed to information. Herein lies the problem. To date, several generations have graduated from schools and universities with little knowledge, less wisdom, and high test scores. As noted by at least one pundit, the scores are going up but the students remain ill-equipped to take the reins of leadership. As these individuals take their place in society, as the heads of various companies, political organizations, or other institutions, they must rely on experiential knowledge, imperfect though that may be.

Simply put, educational policy is no longer being developed for educational purposes, but education is increasingly being manipulated as an experiment in social engineering. This is where our book begins. In an otherwise increasingly hostile political, commercial, and natural environment, there are some rays of hope. For example, teachers still know what it is that their students need and strive to provide that in spite of mandates that try to create consumers of us all. Educational leaders are caught on the horns of a dilemma – to follow and inscribe policies they do not agree with or to “go rogue” and do what they know is needed. Leading under Pressure: Educational Leadership in Neoliberal Times, we believe, is aptly titled, as there is significant pressure being placed on school leaders at any stage. And, the pressure comes from our neoliberal society that seeks outputs, outcomes, and results rather than engaging with processes, developmental and incremental learning, and the transmutation of knowledge into wisdom.

This book is divided into three sections, the first of which seeks to explore social contexts of educational leadership. The second section explores the experiences of a variety of educational leaders in various contexts, while the third section of this volume looks at some of the consequences, unintended and otherwise, of the neoliberal commodification of education.

The first chapter, written by Cameron Hauseman, explores those workplace conditions that contribute to the emotional labor common to educational leaders. This is followed by a call for equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the education of medical students, written by Amanda Larocque, Denice Lewis, Parisa Rezaiefar, Maddie J. Venables, and Doug Archibald. The third and final chapter of this section is written by Christopher G. Vieler-Porter and is concerned with the persistent issue of underrepresentation of race and ethnicity in leadership in neoliberal times.

The second section of this book is dedicated to educational leaders who strive to move the education project forward. This part of the volume begins with a study of the value of small schools. Scott Eacott, Felipe Munoz Rivera, and Aline Raad explore the value and necessity of the small school. The following chapter, written by Olfa Karoui, describes how the oft-taken-for-granted Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) maintains a marginalizing stance with respect to some of society's most marginalized members, food-insecure students. Chapter Six, by Erin Anderson, analyzes how neoliberal policies perpetuate structural inequities in the day-to-day activities of schools by describing how district choice and accountability policies marginalize students of color in low socioeconomic positions. The final chapter of this section is written by Teerawat Luanrit, Eisuke Saito and Vorachet Saejea and explores how one school leader helped to avoid further collateral damage at his school, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged Thailand.

The third and final section of this book features a look into the foreseeable future. Dean Fink, Jeremy Hannay, Suzanne Lazenby, and Warren Marks illustrate current and future difficulties that will be experienced by educational leaders as they attempt to negotiate increasingly difficult policy initiatives while striving to offer the best possible education to their students, often at great personal cost. Nathalie Sirois follows with a chapter dedicated to exploring school leadership patterns in equity and social justice through the lens of adult development. The final chapter, by Troy Heffernan, speaks to leadership at the modern university and notes how universities around the globe are becoming more and more neoliberal in terms of policies, procedures, and practices.

The very success of the neoliberal juggernaut is summed up by Nicholas Maxwell in an epilogue that is dedicated to identifying how all of this went so terribly wrong. The problem, according to Maxwell, is that, since the Enlightenment, we have used science to accumulate knowledge devoid of wisdom. He advocates using the model of the scientific method to develop the social sciences to their full capacity but, this time around, the call is to not only accumulate knowledge, but to develop wisdom, as well, in order to attend to the very things that are currently plaguing society to its very core and that are showing the effects of this in climate patterns and geological anomalies.

At the very heart of this volume is the oft-times tacit acknowledgment that humanity has become its own worst enemy, developing plans and policies that benefit the few and leave the many to suffer in silenced silos of need. This must change if humanity, itself, is to be spared from its own destructiveness. We need a revolution, now, as we have passed the point of evolutionary change. Drastic measures are needed. We must dismantle hierarchies of greed and selfishness in order to welcome a new dawn of equity, diversity, and inclusivity. There is a real need to lead education through these difficult times, to face the pressure to conform to systems that were built to fail and to vanquish harmful policies that marginalize people and result in a world that has become unsustainable, ecologically compromised, and spiritually vacuous. This volume merely scratches the surface of these and other important issues that face humanity, generally, and education specifically, in today's world.

Stephanie Chitpin

Robert E. White