Resisting and Reclaiming the Global Discourse of Leadership: From Entrepreneurial to Advocacy Leadership

• In Event: 18.018 - Theoretical and Topical Focuses of Educational Leadership From The International Handbook of Educational Leadership

Abstract

This paper draws on secondary sources to describe the shift in school administration from the administration of schools as public bureaucracies to the entrepreneurial leadership of increasingly marketized and privatized schools. We theorize that “leadership” is, in part, a discursive shift that indexes a post-welfare state settlement in which the role of the state has shifted from the provision of services through public schools, to overseeing the privatization of public schooling. “Leaders”, then are no longer charged with administering education as a public good to all citizens, but rather have become “mediators” and legitimators (Meyer & Rowan, 2006) of schooling as a private good. We will explore two cases: New York City under the Bloomberg regime and Chile from 1973 to the present.
In Chile, for example, which was globally perhaps the first neoliberal experiment, privatization has forced a new conception of leadership. In 1981, 80% of the student population of Chile attended a public school. By 1998, only 55.1% of students attended public schools and 34.1% attended private subsidized schools; by 2011, these percentages had nearly reversed, with private subsidized schools enrolling the majority of the students (51.8%), and with enrollment in public schools falling to only 39.3% (Montecinos et al., 2015). Rather than look backwards at older conceptions of leadership, we will explore how we might move from an entrepreneurial approach, to an advocacy approach in which leadership is networked among school professionals, community activists, and students.

Authors

• Gary L. Anderson, New York University

• Andrea Lopez, New York University