Who Am I? Novice Public School Principals Identity (Re)Creation and Sense-Making Amid Neoliberal Accountability Regimes

• In Event: The Sociopolitical Context of Neoliberal Education Policy and Implications for Black Girls and Novice Principals

Abstract

Purpose and Conceptual Framework
In the post-No Child Left Behind milieu of accountability and standardization within public education, mainstream positivist paradigms of educational leadership focus on the skills and habits that school principals should exhibit in order to foster higher test scores for students. While proponents of these paradigms have claimed measurable improvements of test scores as success (Day, Harris, Hadfield, Tolley & Beresford 2000; Jacobson & Day, 2007; Leithwood & Riehl, 2005), much criticism and concern has been raised by scholars (Apple, 2014; Crow, Day & Möller, 2017; Pinar, 2012; Ylimaki & Henderson, 2017) surrounding this narrowed view of leadership in public schools. For example, Crow, Day and Möller (2017), note that the prevalence of, “technocratic leadership skills and competencies…which define effectiveness as the production of high student test scores [overlays] over values, beliefs, dispositions and practices designed to develop students’ emotional as well as functional literacy and social values” (p. 265).
What effects do these narrowed roles have on principals’ identities, job-satisfaction, and professional longevity? What happens when a principal’s professional role identity (meanings and motivations) contrasts rather than compliments their person identity? Some of these questions have begun to be examined by education scholars (Crow, Day & Möller, 2017; Lumby & English, 2009) utilizing various frameworks of sociological identity theory to understand how leaders’ identities are (re)created and how can that knowledge broaden our understanding of school leadership beyond the current technocratic nature of school leadership.
Sociological identity theory (Burke & Stets, 2009) give scholars a framework in which to understand how identities are created and recreated within the existing social structures. As identities create meaning and motivation to enact roles (Burke & Stets, 2009; Crow et al., 2017), understanding how these processes occur is vital to, “provide valuable information on how preparation programs and support systems need to be developed to enable successful narratives that balance, or even hold in tension these conflicting identities” (Crow et al., 2017, p. 274).
Methods and Data
In this comparative study, I utilize narrative inquiry to analyze interviews, journals, and documents of novice school principals across traditional public and charter schools to situate stories of sense-making and meaning-making of their identities and roles into larger analysis of neoliberal educational accountability regimes. Preliminary data suggest that novice principals feel a disconnect in enacting the role of data leader (technocrat) and their own values that tend towards a more democratic approach leading them to struggle to verify the identity standard and “give in” to the needs of the narrowed focus approach to school leadership.
Significance
The high turnover of public school principals suggest that novice principals are not being well prepared for longevity within the system. This study seeks to add to this emerging corpus of research into how school principals understand and make sense of their identities and roles, specifically the highly volatile experience of novice public-school principals across contexts (charter, public, international) as they create and recreate their identities.

Author

• Kent Thompson, The University of Arizona