Insights on the Profession of Educational Administration

• In Event: 46.021 - Theory, History, Debates, and Paradigm Wars: Whence the Field of Educational Administration?

Abstract

When we look across the academic arm of the profession of school leadership, I believe that we are entitled to a fair measure of satisfaction. There are, however, significant challenges that remain to be addressed in the academic domain of school administration, some left over from our foundation and a few that we have created anew as we progressed. My objective here is to discuss three of the most important of these challenges: (1) the ahistorical nature of scholarship in and an inadequate understanding of the development of our field of study (a new challenge); (2) a misspecification of the core model of who we are (a new challenge); and (3) an inappropriate grasp of the academic disciplines in the academic arm of the profession (a recurring challenge).
Ahistorical Perspectives: The Missing Lens
We pay little attention to the historical roots and the growth of the profession. We are without an historical ethnography, "a memory of the community" (Hager, 2002, p. 17). As a consequence, we often have impoverished understandings of the issues we address and the challenges we confront. Three indicators of this reality can be teased out from the macro narrative. First, there is a near absence of historical analyses in educational administration in general. The grandfathers of the profession [there were no grandmothers] and their offspring did leave a small historical body of analysis, almost a bit of a legacy. However, none of these scholars were historians and few used the methodological tools of historians. Most of their writings are first-hand accounts of the world as it rushed past them, or had recently rushed past them. Even this work, however, is rarely referenced today. New scholarly efforts to expand these early pieces of scholarship and to fill in the spaces from their times to now are in very thin supply.
Misspecification of the Core Model of the Profession: The Cracked Lens
For reasons that remain hazy, we continue to portray the full profession as a triangle, the famous portrait of "research, policy, and practice." The problem is that this is a quite inadequate picture of the landscape, akin to seeing the world as flat. A fourth component is required to make a whole. Specifically, we need to add the core element of "development."
Inappropriate Commitments to the Disciplines: The Clouded Lens
This is not the venue to replay the battles of the 1950s and 1960s that placed the social science disciplines on the throne of the academic domain of school administration. That is the reality of school administration, at least since the 1960s. Calls for displacement of the status quo routinely have been met with discussion, skepticism, or tokenism. So I will refrain from an assault on the Emerald City here. However, employing a more conservative approach, i.e., keeping disciplines front and center, some serious challenges can still be successfully addressed.

Author

• Joseph F. Murphy, Vanderbilt University