Abstract
Education reform policies in Australia, the UK, and US have prioritised the role of the school principal and teacher leaders in school organisational change. Particular versions of leadership, namely distributed leadership, have emerged within these policy discourses and are prescribed as the means for effecting school reform. Critical scholars have raised concerns about the models of distributed leadership dominant within recent education policies, describing these as functional or normative and aligned with neoliberal education policy discourses of performativity and accountability. Key instruments or technologies of the neoliberal education reform agenda are high-stakes national testing, public reportage of test results via designated websites, and discourses which hold school leaders, teachers, students, and parents accountable for test performance. This macropolicy context frames our exploration of leadership practices within a case study school involved in a Smart Education Partnership project (SEP) between Griffith University and a cluster of local schools to address problems of low educational achievement. Through an analysis of interview, survey, and focus group data, we explore how leadership practices materialised in the interactions between people (district administrators, school leaders, classroom teachers, university researchers), objects, artefacts, routines, and rituals to generate possibilities for improving students’ literacy learning. In so doing, we contribute to the critical discourse policy literature which has challenged functional perspectives on distributed leadership prevalent within education reform policies and professional development materials. Moreover, we add to the critical scholarship literature by drawing on theories of distributed activity (Spillane JP. Educ Forum 69(2):143–150, 2005) and diffraction patterns (Barad K. Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, Durham, 2007) to explore how leadership practices in one case study school came to materialise an educational difference.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Official website developed by ACARA (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority 2011, 2014) which provides school performance data on NAPLAN and encourages comparison of test results across schools according to a ICSEA scale (The Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage [ICSEA] – a scale developed specifically for the My School website for the purpose of identifying schools serving “students from statistically similar backgrounds” [ACARA 2014, p. 4]). The formula for ICSEA is: socioeconomic advantage + remoteness + percentage of Indigenous students + percentage of disadvantaged students with languages background other than English. Socioeconomic advantage is calculated by drawing data from student enrolment records and Australian Bureau of Statistics on parental occupation, education level, and language background (ACARA 2014, pp. 10–12).
- 2.
Bernstein (2000) argued that critical scholarship in the new sociology of education tended to produce descriptions of the surface manifestations of phenomena, rather than examine the complex power and control relations that generate the possibilities for the realisations of these surface manifestations.
- 3.
National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy – centralised assessment of literacy (reading, writing, spelling, punctuation, and grammar) and numeracy for students in Years 3 (aged 8), 5 (aged 10), 7 (aged 12) and 9 (aged 14) was introduced and mandated in Australia in 2008 by the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA).
- 4.
Hardy’s (2013, p. 7) methodology included 40-min individual interviews with principals and teachers across three schools: two metropolitan (Montesquieu, Elsemier) and one regional primary (Oleander) school in south-east Queensland, Australia. Each of the schools was chosen in consultation with senior Education Queensland personnel as sites with reputations for reform take-up in relation to NAPLAN, the National Partnerships Programme, the Australian Curriculum, and a number of policies specific to each school site.
- 5.
Alpha State Primary School was selected as an illustrative case study because leadership practices and teacher perceptions shifted significantly over the course of their engagement in the SEP project. Rating scales produced by five research assistants working intensively in the cluster of 12 schools over 3 years demonstrate greater shifts at Alpha Primary in the areas of principal engagement, school culture and leadership for learning than most other schools. In addition to these gains, Alpha Primary school saw consistent improvements in student learning in reading comprehension (as measured by ACER’s Test of Reading Comprehension).
- 6.
Data collected from focus group discussions across 10 of the 12 schools participating in the SEP project were compared. These data indicated that the teachers from Alpha Primary conveyed a sense of having collaboratively developed an understanding of the principles underpinning the SEP project in the way that they “riffed off” each other, i.e., one teacher’s statement could be elaborated by another teacher, or could lead off into a slightly different topic, which could in turn be expanded by another. Most of these discussion threads seemed to incorporate the specialist language of the project in unselfconscious ways, as though they had become used to speaking with each other about these issues. They also conveyed a personal ongoing commitment to the ideas of the project.
- 7.
Profile of teachers participating in focus group at Alpha Primary (n = 5): one male, four female; three teachers had 5–10 years’ experience, and one female teacher had more than 10 years’ teaching experience; all the female teachers had been involved in the SEP project for approximately 2 years; the male teacher was involved for 1 year. Three of the teachers taught years 3–5; and four teachers taught years 6–7. Two of the teachers were specialist trained in science and literacy. Abbreviations: MT = Male Teacher; FT1 = Female Teacher 1.
- 8.
C2C = Curriculum into the Classroom strategy designed by Education Queensland, Curriculum Branch for teachers in Queensland schools. C2C is a set of lessons offering one interpretation or translation of the Australian Curriculum.
References
Angus, L. (2012). Teaching within and against the circle of privilege: Reforming teachers, reforming schools. Journal of Education Policy, 27(2), 231–251. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2011.598240.
Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2011). NAPLAN. National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy. Melbourne: Australian Government. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu.au/
Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2014). MySchool. Melbourne: Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority. Retrieved April 28, 2014, from http://www.myschool.edu.au/; http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/About_ICSEA_2014.pdf
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2012). Australian charter for the professional learning of teachers and school leaders: A shared responsibility and commitment. Melbourne: Education Services Australia. Retrieved from http://www.aitsl.edu.au/verve/_resources/Australian_Charter_for_the_Professional_Learning_of_Teachers_and_School_Leaders.pdf
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity (Revth ed.). Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers.
Council of Australian Governments (COAG). (2008). National education agreement. Retrieved from http://www.coag.gov.au/schools_and_education
Council of Australian Governments (COAG). (2010). Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) on federal financial relations. Canberra. Retrieved from http://www.coag.gov.au/schools_and_education
Department of Education, Training and Employment (DETE) (2010). Smarter schools national partnerships. Queensland Annual Report for 2009. Retrieved from http://education.qld.gov.au/nationalpartnerships/three-form-initiatives.html
Eacott, S. (2013). Rethinking ‘leadership’ in education: A research agenda. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45(2), 113–125. doi:10.1080/00220620.2013.768971.
Fitzgerald, T., & Savage, J. (2013). Scripting, ritualising and performing leadership: Interrogating recent policy developments in Australia. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45(2), 126–143. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2013.769432.
Glasswell, K., Singh, P., McNaughton, S., & Davis, K. (2008). Smart educational partnerships: Testing a research collaboration model to build literacy innovations in low socio-economic schools (p. 67). Brisbane: Australian Research Council Linkage Proposal Application.
Gowlett, C. (2013). Queer(y)ing new schooling accountabilities through MySchool: Using Butlerian tools to think differently about policy performativity. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Advance online publication. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.793926
Gunter, H. (2013). Researching and conceptualising the field. Educational Administration and History, 45(2), 201–212. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2013.768967.
Hall, D. J., Gunter, H., & Bragg, J. (2013). The strange case of the emergence of distributed leadership in schools in England. Educational Review, 65(4), 467–487. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2012.718257.
Hardy, I. (2013). A logic of appropriation: Enacting national testing (NAPLAN) in Australia. Journal of Education Policy, 1, 18. doi:10.1080/02680939.2013.782425.
Heimans, S. (2012). Coming to matter in practice: Enacting education policy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(2), 313–326.
Heimans, S. (2013). Education policy enactment research: Disrupting continuities. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education. Advance online publication.
Mayrowetz, D. (2008). Making sense of distributed leadership: Exploring the multiple usages of the concept in the field. Educational Administration Quarterly, 44(3), 424–435. doi:10.1177/0013161X07309480.
Neumerski, C. M. (2012). Rethinking instructional leadership, a review: What do we know about principal, teacher, and coach instructional leadership, and where should we go from here? Educational Administration Quarterly, 49(2), 310–347. doi:10.1177/0013161X12456700.
Niesche, R. (2013). Governmentality and My School: School principals in societies of control. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Advance online publication. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.793925
O’Reilly, D., & Reed, M. (2010). Leaderism: An evolution of managerialism in UK public service reform. Public Administration, 88(4), 960–978.
Sellar, S. (2013). Transparency and opacity: Levinasian reflections on accountability in Australian schooling. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Advance online publication. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.793924
Singh, P., & Glasswell, K. (2013). Chasing social change: Matters of concern and the mattering practice of educational research. International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change, 1(2), 162–183.
Singh, P., Märtsin, M., & Glasswell, K. (2013). Knowledge work at the boundary: Making a difference to educational disadvantage. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2, 102–110. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2013.02.001.
Singh, P., Heimans, S., & Glasswell, K. (2014). Policy enactment, context and performativity: Ontological politics and researching Australian National Partnership policies. Journal of Education Policy, 29(6), 826–844. doi:10.1080/02680939.2014.891763.
Singh, P., Märtsin, M., & Glasswell, K. (2015). Dilemmatic spaces: High-stakes testing and the possibilities of collaborative knowledge work to generate learning innovations. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 21(4), 379–399. doi:10.1080/13540602.2014.976853/.
Spillane, J. P. (2005). Distributed leadership. The Educational Forum, 69(2), 143–150.
Spillane, J. P., & Lee, L. C. (2013). Novice school principals’ sense of ultimate responsibility: Problems of practice in transitioning to the principal’s office. Educational Administration Quarterly. doi:10.1177/0013161X13505290. Advance online publication.
Youngs, H. (2009). (Un)critical times? Situating distributed leadership in the field. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 41(4), 377–389. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620903211588.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the discussions in The Other Lab, Griffith Institute for Educational Research. Thanks to Stephen Heimans, Sue Thomas, and Jill Ryan for insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Funding for this study was provided by the Australian Research Council Linkage scheme (LP0990585). Ethics Approval: GU Ref No: EPS/23/09/HREC.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Singh, P., Glasswell, K. (2016). Distributed Leadership Policies and Practices: Striving for Educational Equity in High Poverty Contexts. In: Johnson, G., Dempster, N. (eds) Leadership in Diverse Learning Contexts. Studies in Educational Leadership, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28302-9_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28302-9_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28300-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28302-9
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)