Reimagining School Leaders as Stealth Democratic Actors: A Deweyan Analysis of the School Leader Paradigm

• In Event: Deweyan Perspectives on Standardization, Accountability, and Assessment in Contemporary Education

Abstract

Contemporary high stakes educational mandates, otherwise known as the accountability movement, have overrun and re-directed teacher preparation toward neoliberal, market-driven, overly private-good aims. A similar trend holds true for the education and professional development of public school leaders (e.g., principals and superintendents). The classroom, as well as the management of the school building and district office, have been nurtured by decades of neoliberal logic—a system of deregulated, privatized, economized public institutions—that persists through a dangerous brand of leadership that forecloses the aims and purposes of education away from democratic ends. Notions of school leadership have been guided by forms of benevolently autocratic, top-down, charismatic (dare I say “transformational”) leadership practices—all of which defy theories of democratic leadership, limit teacher agency and collaboration, and threaten the prospects of creating and sustaining a democratic populous through the institution of schooling. Anti-democratic leadership practices shape the management of educational institutions in the likeness of corporate/business, for-profit entities that amplify education as a privatized good rooted in neoliberal rationality. The cornerstone of neoliberal rationality is that all aspects of life should be economized and thought of in terms of amassing value to justify their existence, and competition and inequality are normative (Brown, 2005, 2015).
Following the logic of neoliberal rationality, the perils of anti-democratic (often anti-intellectual) school leadership discourses persist within what Picciano (1994) described as the “educational industrial complex.” The educational industrial complex (EIC) grew up in parallel to neoliberalism in the U.S. at the nexus of ideology, profit, and technology. Desai (2015) defines the EIC as “made up of multiple networks and alliances of agencies, organizations, foundations, media companies, educational technology providers, for profit educational providers, venture philanthropies, and think tanks. These networks and alliances interact with each other to push market-based initiatives” (para.1). As a result, the rationality of the EIC has been the source of an overt and covert creep into the logic of public school leadership which has adopted the language and practices of privatized industries, and mimics what Wendy Brown (2015) has dubbed “neoliberalism’s stealth revolution.” This stealth revolution can be understood similarly as a form of gas-lighting, where the slow creep of change is just below the threshold of perception—so subtle it barely registers in our consciousness. This slow creep of change has significantly influenced the daily working conditions of teachers and administrators. In addition, school leadership, as an industry in and of itself, seems disinterested in pushing back against these logics to reclaim the sovereignty of their profession. Instead, the school leadership industry has absolutely embraced discourses that further the project of neoliberalism to their demise. These discourses will be central to the analysis offered in this chapter.

Author

• Jessica Heybach, Western Michigan University