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Managerial, professional and collective school autonomies: using material semiotics to examine the multiple realities of school autonomy
Abstract
In response to the diverse deployments of ‘school autonomy’ in interviews with education stakeholders, we use material semiotics and the concept of ontological politics to theorize school autonomy as ontologically multiple. We analyze interviews conducted in Australia with forty-two school education stakeholders drawn from principal, parent and teacher associations as well as policymakers at federal and state government levels, to better understand the diverse deployments of public school autonomy and their political implications. We theorize managerial autonomy, professional autonomy and collective autonomy as three coexisting realities of school autonomy spoken about in the interviews. We examine their differences, the tensions in navigating these realities, and what is at stake in how school autonomy is known and enacted. The analysis suggests a concern among many stakeholders for school autonomy to be known and done differently from the dominant managerial autonomy, which we understand as a call to practise alternatives into existence.
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Purpose: This study builds on research scrutinizing school autonomy in policy and school governance by shifting the focus from a formal structural view of autonomy to examining how principals negotiate autonomy in their daily work. Drawing on multiple dimensions of autonomy and street-level bureaucracy, this study examined how principals, as both professionals and bureaucrats, work to expand and strategize their autonomy in practice. Research Methods/Approach: We used portraiture to document and interpret the experience and perspectives of three principals at urban, suburban, and rural PK-12 traditional public schools in the Midwest of US during the 2018–2019 school year. Findings: Principals faced a “bounded” or “partial” autonomy in which they had to constantly negotiate their individual autonomy (e.g., how they spent their time on any given day) with institutional autonomy (e.g., the demands of the role via external expectations). The findings show the ways participants utilized institutional autonomy to support individual autonomy and dealt with the boundaries of their autonomy. While these strategies gave them a bit more “control” over decision-making, they also often resulted in overwork and/or conflict with district priorities. Implications for Research and Practice: Detailed portraits offer key insights for rethinking school autonomy with multiple dimensions intersected in leadership practice. Findings yield knowledge regarding how to best support districts and school leaders in creating greater alignment between institutional and individual demands, thus increasing the likelihood that autonomy, as an improvement strategy, can be effective.
This paper examines principals’ perceptions of school autonomy and leadership as part of a 3-year research project looking at the implications of school autonomy on social justice across four states of Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland). Drawing on interviews with principals and representatives from principal stakeholder organisations in these four state jurisdictions, the paper identifies a number of key issues for school principals and the implications for understandings and practices of educational leadership. These include varied understandings of autonomy, practices of leadership and implications for health, workload and well-being. The paper argues that while principals have mixed perceptions of school autonomy policies, there has been a narrowing of leadership experiences by principals in the form of managerialism and compliance. Furthermore, principals continue to experience high levels of workload, and some principals, depending on career stage and experience level, feel better able to work within and sometimes against these policies in their schools and communities. These practices are sometimes felt to be despite the system and not due to school autonomy policies themselves. The implication of these findings is that principals are inequitably able to respond to and implement school autonomy policies, an issue often glossed over in educational leadership research.
This paper reports on the findings from a multi-site case study conducted in Australia, Finland and Jamaica which explored the conditions that enabled and constrained the autonomy of school principals. Systematic data collection was carried out in the form of interviews of school principals and the data was analysed using a qualitative approach. The analysis indicates that: (1) school principals’ practices are prefigured by the peculiarities of historical trajectories and ideological traditions enmeshed in schooling sites; (2) these prefiguring arrangements in turn influence varying realisations of autonomous decision making practices across national sites; and (3) even in the expression of high/low levels of autonomy, there are contradictory and contested practices. Through the analysis, three different orientations to autonomy were found: a neoliberal market orientation, a professional practice orientation and an educational praxis orientation.
Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Whilst pervasive in policy documents, however, discourses surrounding ‘parent engagement’ are often elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that shape policy enactments in schools. In this paper, we argue that contemporary schooling reforms are constructing a new ‘governing parent-citizen’ through which the parental labour of social reproduction is being extended, valorised and rearticulated. We examine how one major reform movement in Australia is articulating new roles for parents and community members in schools: the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative in Western Australia. Our analysis demonstrates the intensive policy intervention required to produce this new form of parental labour and the subsequent divisions of labour it is producing.
There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform
within Australian public education despite evidence linking this
reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper
presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered
from a broader study that is investigating the social justice
implications of school autonomy reform across three Australian
states. We focus on the concerns these stakeholders raise about
the plight of principals and particular schools when policies of
school autonomy converge with market imperatives of economic
efficiency, competition and public accountability. Such concerns
reflect the significance of education systems providing greater
and more nuanced support for principals and schools to manage
the extra responsibilities of greater school autonomy and
accountability. While these aspects of support are central, we
argue that systemic reform that is driven by educative, rather than
market, imperatives is necessary for creating a context where
school autonomy can be mobilised for social justice.
Autonomy, Accountability and Social Justice provides an account of recent developments in English state education, with a particular focus on the 'academisation' of schooling. It examines how head teachers, teachers and others working in diverse education settings navigate the current policy environment. The authors provide readers with insight into the complex decision-making processes that shape school responses to current educational agendas and examine the social justice implications of these responses. The book draws on Nancy Fraser's social justice framework and her theorising of neoliberalism to explore current tensions associated with moves towards both greater autonomy for and accountability of state schooling. These tensions are presented through four case studies that centre upon 1) a group of local authority primary schools, 2) an academy 'chain', 3) a co-operative secondary school and 4) an alternative education setting. The book identifies the 'emancipatory' possibilities of these approaches amid the complex demands of autonomy and accountability seizing English schools. Informed by a consideration of market parameters and social protectionist ideals, this examination provides rich insights into how English schools have emancipatory capacity. Autonomy, Accountability and Social Justice makes a major theoretical contribution to understandings of how the market is working alongside the regulation of schooling and the implications of this for social justice. By drawing on the experiences of those working in schools, it demonstrates that the tensions associated with autonomy and accountability within the current education policy environment can be both productive and unproductive for social justice.
The influence of New Public Management (NPM) on public sector organisation is nowhere more evident or pervasive than in the field of school governance where political actors, school leaders and governors are called upon to make the internal operation of the school more transparent and accountable to others through the explicitness of performance indicators and output measurements. Yet despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of NPM that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule in the context of changing political-administrative structures. Adopting a 'decentred approach' to governance (Bevir 2010), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices. The result is a nuanced account of the complex terrain on which NPM is grafted onto and translated to reflect inherited institutional landscapes and political settlements and dilemmas.
The public education systems of many countries have undergone governance reforms involving administrative decentralisation, corporatisation and community ‘empowerment’. In this paper, we examine the significance of local participation and partnerships in the context of public school autonomy and their corporatisation. Focusing specifically on the use of school boards in the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative in Western Australia, we analyse the interview responses of five IPS principals using Foucauldian notions of governmentality, governance and community. The analysis shows that school boards are conceptualised and mobilised through the narrow technical–rationalist discourses of governance associated with corporatised school autonomy. School boards function as a new form of governmentality that constrains recruitment and participation in school decision-making in ways that depoliticise education. In response to the rise of school autonomy and corporatisation in Australia and elsewhere, we argue for wider local participation on school boards and local engagement with, rather than eschewal of, the politics surrounding education and the public good.
This report analyses how schools in England have interpreted and begun to respond to the government’s ‘self-improving school-led system’ (SISS) policy agenda, an overarching narrative for schools policy since 2010 that encompasses an ensemble of reforms including academies, multi-academy trusts (MATs) and Teaching School Alliances (TSAs). Based on a large-scale, four-year, mixed-methods study, the report asks whether or not the models of co-ordination and school support emerging locally since 2010 represent a genuine basis for an equitable and inclusive ‘school-led’ system. It explores the factors that support and hinder such developments as well as the implications for schools and school leadership. The analysis draws on governance theory to evaluate the reforms, which are conceived as an attempt to mix and re-balance three overlapping approaches to co-ordinating the school system: hierarchy, markets and networks. This shows that while one popular interpretation of the SISS agenda is that it requires inter-school partnerships to ‘self-organize’ their own ‘school-led’ improvement, this is in fact a partial account that underplays the dominant influences of hierarchical and market mechanisms on the thinking and actions of schools and school leaders and the networks they are developing. The report includes important new empirical findings, for example on the impact of MATs of different sizes and on the relationship between Ofsted inspection outcomes and levels of socio-economic stratification between schools. It also combines the perspectives of multiple case study schools across four different localities to provide rich insights into leadership decision-making and agency in the context of local status hierarchies and rapid policy-driven change. As a result, while focusing on changes in England, it provides a unique set of insights into how different governance regimes interact across different local contexts to influence patterns of schooling and school-to-school collaboration – insights that will have relevance for research and practice on school system governance more widely.
In many countries, education systems are moving towards a combination of increased school autonomy and intensified accountability. In the wake of that shift, decision-making at the school level has become paramount, and the role of the school leader has gained in importance. Despite these trends, surprisingly little is known about how schools and school leaders use school autonomy in practice. To study the use of school autonomy in practice internationally, and, subsequently, its impact on outcomes, a classification is needed to capture the full range of school interventions. An extensive literature review revealed that existing classifications are inadequate for these purposes. This article presents the mixed-methods construction and validation of an empirically based classification of school interventions that allows for the identification, analysis, and comparison of the actual use of school autonomy. To capture the range of school autonomy in practice, a school intervention was broadly defined as a planned action intended to cause change in the school. That definition was not confined to innovative interventions and did not rule out any school decision-making areas. An open-response questionnaire was employed for the same purpose. Because of the high level of school autonomy in the Dutch education system, the study was carried out among secondary-education school leaders in the Netherlands. School leaders with the ultimate process responsibility for their school were regarded as decision-making executives at the school level. To ensure the face and content validation of the classification, school-level decision-making representatives were actively involved at all stages of the process.
This article takes a critical comparative approach to examining autonomous schooling in the United States and Australia. Amid the market imperatives currently driving education priorities, its focus is on how autonomy can be mobilized in ways that preserve the integrity of public education. Through reference to key debates and research about school autonomy in the United States and Australia, integrity is defined with reference to three values: (1) public ownership (i.e., governance that is responsive to the people it serves), (2) equity and access (i.e., adequate funding and inclusive student admission practices), and (3) public purpose (i.e., prioritizing the moral and social purposes of education; Darling-Hammond and Montgomery 2008). The analysis is mindful of the resonances and differences between the education systems in the United States and Australia and the fluidity and complexity of the notion of autonomous schooling. Against this backdrop, the article illustrates the significance of embedding these values within school autonomy policy in order to preserve the integrity of public education. © 2016 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All Rights Reserved.
Over the last 20 years, international attempts to raise educational standards and improve opportunities for all children have accelerated and proliferated. This has generated a state of constant change and an unrelenting flood of initiatives, changes and reforms that need to be ‘implemented’ by schools. In response to this, a great deal of attention has been given to evaluating ‘how well’ policies are realised in practice – implemented! Less attention has been paid to understanding how schools actually deal with these multiple, and sometimes contradictory, policy demands; creatively working to interpret policy texts and translate these into practices, in real material conditions and varying resources – how they are enacted! Based on a long-term qualitative study of four ‘ordinary’ secondary schools, and working on the interface of theory with data, this book explores how schools enact, rather than implement, policy. It focuses on
The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault and Foucauldian scholarship, this article examines how the IPS programme functions as a regime of government and self-government. Data collected from two IPS principals is used to examine the subjective effects of power as it is exercised in the IPS regime. The article finds that the IPS initiative introduces new possibilities for principals to actively participate in practices of self-formation, through which these principals self-steer, exercise their freedom and govern themselves and their schools. It illustrates how governmental mechanisms depend on, harness and shape the autonomy of these principals, and how their individual practices of self-government align with neoliberal governmentalities.
This article examines how upper secondary school teachers perceive and respond to the consequences for their professional autonomy of recent school reforms and restructurings. Based on empirical material from interviews of 119 teachers in three studies conducted between 2002 and 2014, the findings indicate that teacher autonomy has been reduced by school reforms and restructurings since the late 1980s. Regardless of their individual aims, these reforms have collectively created a power structure that distributes power to the state, municipalities, principals and the school market, including 'customers', that is, students, at the expense of teacher autonomy. Teacher agency follows certain policies at the discourse level, such as decentralisation and management by objectives and results, but in practice seems to be based on individuals' and groups' capacities to exploit opportunities for agency in combination with more or less facilitative management and organisation cultures. This development is multifaceted and varies locally, but the overall trend can be described as a shift from occupational to organisational professionalism and from 'licensed' to 'regulated' autonomy but emphasising the influence of market logics.
The OECD's international education indicators have become very influential in contemporary education policies. Although these indicators are now routinely, annually published in the form of Education at a Glance, the calculability upon which the indicators depend was an achievement that involved the mobilisation of a huge machinery of expertise, trust, pragmatism and other resources. This paper traces the ways in which varied constraints were addressed, interests translated, categories defined, classifications negotiated, frameworks agreed upon, choices made, methodologies established and protocols developed, as the indicators exercise moved from being nearly impossible to becoming routinely produced. Using resources from Science and Technology Studies (STS), it demonstrates that the work of making such assemblages is both instrumentalist and performative, and argues for an undertaking of critique as a moral enterprise.
Contemporary discourses in educational administration have exponentially grown the number of adjectival leaderships, challenged traditional organisational structures, and offered autonomy as a solution to performance issues. In this theoretical paper, I ask what does the principalship look like after autonomy? Despite the range of objections that could be raised in relation to thinking with and through an organisational role, it is the contention of this paper that it is in the principalship that we find important resources for theorising educational administration, even if, at first sight, these resources appear to bear little connection to, or resonance with, contemporary discourses of ‘leadership’ in education. Working within a relational approach to educational administration that I am advancing, my argument is built around three key markers: the centrality of temporality, the (im)possibility of the local, and the imposition of ‘quality’.
In this article, we explore the potential of actor network theory and feminist material semiotics as a set of tools for critical policy analysis. We describe their focus on material heterogeneity, ontological multiplicity and performativity, and consider how this both generates political and policy possibilities and impossibilities and also creates the potential for change. We explore this by considering the British policy response to the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic, which we treat as a case of ontological multiplicity, and ask what might have happened if policy makers had recognized and responded to this multiplicity.
The Gillard Labor Government seeks to liberate schools through the mechanisms of devolving authority to the school level. Such devolution is often advocated for on the basis that they enable schools to shape their own directions. However, despite the rhetoric of empowerment and participation at the school level, the state, through various apparatus such as systemic authorities and publicly available data continues to set the agenda by defining what is an 'effective school'. This article argues that school-based strategic planning, as a devolutionary practice, is little more than the Trojan horse of the state. That is, school level planning has been used by the state to get beyond the school fence and into the daily practices of school leaders. Drawing on empirical work undertaken in the NSW public school system, primarily through policy analysis and interviews with principals, this article seeks to bring to the level of discussion some of the seemingly invisible actions of the state in the management of education.
In theory, the charter school concept is based on a trade-off or exchange: greater autonomy for increased accountability. Although charter schools have been operating for more than 10 years, little is known about charter school autonomy in practice. This mixed-methods study used survey and case study data to examine the degree of autonomy of charter schools across the country and the factors limiting school autonomy. The findings indicate that many charter schools do not have high levels of autonomy, with schools least likely to have control over budgetary decisions. In addition, school autonomy is influenced by state laws, relationships with authorizers, and partnerships with educational management organizations and community-based organizations. Finally, the levels of autonomy in some schools were dynamic, with schools experiencing less autonomy over time.
Purpose
The paper seeks to apply the theory of the democratic deficit to school‐based management with an emphasis on Australia. This theory was developed to examine managerial restructuring of the Australian Public Service in the 1990s. Given similarities between the use of managerial practices in the public service and government schools, the authors draw on recent literature about school‐based management in Australia and apply the democratic deficit theory to it.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is conceptual in focus. The authors analyse literature in terms of the three components of the democratic deficit – i.e. the weakening of accountability, the denial of the roles and values of public employees, and the emergence of a “hollow state” – and in relation to the application of this theory to the Australian Public Service.
Findings
A trend towards the three components of the democratic deficit is evident in Australia although, to date, its emergence has not been as extensive as in the UK. The authors argue that the democratic principles on which public schooling in Australia was founded are being eroded by managerial and market practices.
Practical implications
These findings provide policy makers and practitioners with another way of examining managerial and market understandings of school‐based management and its impact on teachers and on students. It offers suggestions to reorient practices away from those that are exclusively managerial‐based towards those that are public‐sector based.
Originality/value
The value of this paper is that it applies the theory of the democratic deficit to current understandings of school‐based management.
This paper provides an overview of the policies of school autonomy in Australian public education from the Karmel report in 1973 to the present day. The key focus is on the social justice implications of this reform. It tracks the tensions between policy moves to both grant schools greater autonomy and rein in this autonomy with the increasing instatement of external forms of regulation. Utilising Nancy Fraser’s concepts of dis-embedding and re-embedding markets, we track key policy moments in three Australian states (Victoria, Western Australia and New South Wales) along with federal interventions. We draw attention to the redistributive and representative justice implications arising from these policy moments as occurring within a consistent trajectory towards a market agenda and argue that future policy needs to consider the effect of past policy.
Marketization is the development of quasi-markets on the systemic level, which promote choice, competition, accountability, and devolution in public schooling. Marketing is a strategy that individual school leaders employ to respond to these logics. This paper argues that education marketization has led to an increase in school-based marketing within the Australian public school system. The eight public school principals we report on here, perceived marketing as a key technique in shaping school choice but paradoxically, felt that they shouldn’t have to market to prospective families. In addition, some participants no longer felt like they operated as public schools, but rather, existed somewhere in the “grey zone” between public and private. We use Bateson’s concept of the double bind to argue that marketization is creating a system of performative pressures for public school principals that contradict with their ethical values and beliefs. This double bind is not representative of a simple contradiction of individual conflict, but of school leaders caught up in an ongoing system of marketization that produces conflicting definitions of “publicness” and understanding of what public schools are and ought to be.
The academisation of schooling in Northern England is an example of a new mode of educational governance that promises greater autonomy for schools and school leaders. A common claim regarding the benefits of academisation is that it will improve student outcomes by delivering greater autonomy for Headteachers. In this paper, six Headteachers from Northern England, who had decided to academise their schools for various reasons, reflect on this promised autonomy. In particular, their initial, cautious optimism regarding autonomy has been replaced by frustration as they have been 'outmanoeuvred' by subsequent policy changes. We develop the concept of 'indentured autonomy' (an outcome of negotiating autonomy, continued precariousness and cruel optimism) to explain how these Headteachers' initial optimism for the academies programme has given way to the concern that they are probably less autonomous now than what they were previously. Paradoxically, these HTs still express a desire for autonomy, even as they reflect that the promised autonomy has not delivered what they had hoped.
This paper explores the OECD framing of the role of the school leader in a series of its publications, drawing on role theory, using critical analysis of how school leaders’ roles are represented in a body of OECD texts. The research findings provide insight into the multi-faceted portrayal of the ‘ideal’ role of school leadership as framed by the OECD. The findings also show the dominance of classic scientific management ideas in the framing of the role of school leadership by the OECD. The study demonstrates how adopting role theory can provide a deeper understanding of how OECD discursive actions redraw new roles for those working in education.
Teacher autonomy has been a topic of growing interest over recent decades. However, what teacher autonomy means remains work in progress. Drawing from existing conceptualisations, which consider teacher autonomy as a multidimensional and context-dependent phenomenon this paper presents an analytical device applicable in international comparative studies. The conceptualisation is presented in the form of a matrix, which distinguishes different domains and levels of teacher autonomy. A sample of existing research is then utilised to demonstrate how the matrix can assist in cumulative knowledge building. The article demonstrates how the matrix can be applied, in particular, to empirical comparative research.
Australian public school teachers work some of the longest weekly hours among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, particularly in the state of New South Wales where average hours are officially in, or near, the statistical category of ‘very long working hours’. These reports of a high workload have occurred alongside recent policy moves that seek to devolve responsibility for schooling, augmenting teacher and school-level accountability. This article explores changes in work demands experienced by New South Wales teachers. As part of a larger project on schools as workplaces, we examine teaching professionals’ views through interviews with teacher union representatives. Consistent with a model of work intensification, workload increases were almost universally reported, primarily in relation to ‘paperwork’ requirements. However, differences in the nature of intensification were evident when data were disaggregated according to socio-educational advantage, level of schooling (primary or secondary) and location. The distinct patterns of work intensification that emerge reflect each school’s relative advantage or disadvantage within the school marketplace, influenced by broader neoliberal reforms occurring within the state and nation. © 2018, Australian Labour and Employment Relations Association (ALERA), SAGE Publications Ltd, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC.
The devolution of public sector schooling systems has been a feature of education reform since the 1980s. In Western Australia, the Independent Public School (IPS) initiative has recently been installed, announced by the state government in 2009. Now over 80% of the state’s public school students attend IP schools. Drawing on interview data from a broader study of devolution and the conditions of teachers’ work, this article explores the cases of two schools – one IPS and one non-IPS. While both schools were ostensibly disadvantaged, they proved to be highly contrasting schooling sites, responding to the school marketplace in markedly different ways. We consider the ways in which the IPS initiative is contributing to the operation of market dynamics within the public school sector in WA, and argue that it has created new mechanisms for the residualisation of particular, and specifically non-IP, schools. Furthermore, while one school was apparently more of a ‘winner’ within the school marketplace, as it was attracting increasing student enrolments, we query what it might actually mean to ‘win’ in such a policy settlement, with staff at both schools reporting significant dissatisfaction in their work.
Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is constrained by technologies of competitive performativity, now the norm across Australian and other school systems. Entrepreneurial policies focused on competition, compliance and improved performance make schools, their leaders and teachers, more responsible to external accountabilities. At the same time, autonomy is creatively exercised by leaders due to public service orientations associated with traditional teacher professionalism. This analysis of two Australian case studies of IPS, a secondary school in Queensland and a primary school in Western Australia, illustrates how school leaders navigate conflicting demands of the audit and performance culture by exercising autonomy according to differing notions of professional responsibility, disrupting and moderating the more inequitable priorities and effects prevalent in many performative systems.
Ontological politics has received increasing attention within education policy studies, particularly as a support for the notion of policy enactment. While policy enactment offers serious challenges to traditional approaches toward policy implementation, this paper takes up ontological politics as a concept that extends beyond implementation and holds consequences for policy formation as well. Analysing the different uses of evidence in recent policy documents from Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper argues that an ontological politics of evidence grounds policies in ways that define what can and cannot be enacted, what this paper terms policy enablement. The analyses illustrate an ontological politics of evidence that excludes non-experts in the first instance, and that sanitises the critical elements of enactment in the second. Both analyses highlight the ways policy enablement emerges from ontological politics and offers a supplement to policy enactment. Following these analyses, the paper offers some provisional thoughts on the relationship between enablement and enactment as an approach that attends to context as a constitutive element of policy-making.
Some schools and their principals are lauded, feted and rewarded, while others are criticized, pressurized, and closed down. This chapter considers the kind of school system that produces extremes. It examines the school systems in two locations, England and Australia, and shows how the same logics and many of the same discursive practices are at work. The chapter draws on the work of Michel Foucault, specifically his notion of discursive practices, in order to make sense of the ways that neoliberal reforms and movements in education have affected not only discourses of school leadership but also educational leaders' day-to-day practices. It suggests that the principal's role has been corporatized and largely stripped of its educational purposes, and that leadership education is now dominated by advocacy of pseudo-democratic practices such as distributed leadership. The chapter explores the discursive practices of school autonomy as practices that exercise certain relations of power and form particular knowledges and subjects.
Purpose
Purpose: In order to fill the gap in theoretical and empirical knowledge about the characteristics of principal workload, the aim of this study was to explore the components of principal workload as well as its determinants and the coping strategies commonly used by principals to face this personal state.
Design/methodology/approach
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 50 principals, all from the elementary and secondary educational systems of Israel. The analysis followed the principles of qualitative research.
Findings
Findings: Four subjectively-held constructs of principal workload, main sources of this workload, and the key strategies used by principals to face this workload were found in this study.
Practical implications
Implications: It is recommended to strengthen school autonomy, increase the number of positions of middle management, prepare future principals for the heavy workload, and encourage supportive superiors who are sensitive to this issue.
Originality/value
This study fills the gap in theoretical knowledge concerning principal workload, assuming that the particular characteristics of the school organization have some unique impact on this personal state. It also enables us to identify the types of this personal state occurring in educational organizations from the subjective perspectives of school members and stakeholders, thereby broadening our understanding of employee workload in various settings, including educational arenas.
This paper follows recent debates on the ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities to exemplify how this turn creates important openings of methodological and political potential in education. In particular, the paper makes an attempt to show two things: first, the new questions and possibilities that are opened from explicitly acknowledging the methodological and political consequences of the ontological turn in education—e.g. concerning agency, transformation, materiality and relations; and second, the importance of being clear about how educators and educational researchers conceptualize ontology and engage with debates on the ontological turn in related disciplines. The paper sketches some of the methodological and political implications of the ontological turn for education, focusing in particular on the concept of learning.
Over the past 25 years charter school policies have spread through the United States at a rapid pace. However, despite this rapid growth these policies have spread unevenly across the country with important variations in how charter school systems function in each state. Drawing on case studies in Michigan and Oregon, this article argues that mobile education policies are best conceptualized as made up of both mobile and immobile elements that continually shape and reshape those policies.
Modernising School Governance examines the impact of recent market-based reforms on the role of governors in the English state education system. A focus of the book concerns how government and non-government demands for ‘strong governance’ have been translated to mean improved performance management of senior school leaders and greater monitoring and disciplining of governors. This book addresses fundamental questions about the neoliberal logic underpinning these reforms and how governors are being trained and responsibilised in new ways to enhance the integrity of these developments.
Drawing on large-scale research conducted over three years, the book examines the impact of these reforms on the day to day practices of governors and the diminished role of democracy in these contexts. Wilkins also captures the economic and political rationalities shaping the conduct of governors at this time and traces these expressions to wider structural developments linked to depoliticisation, decentralisation and disintermediation.
This book addresses timely and original issues concerning the role of corporate planning and expert handling to state education at a time of increased school autonomy, shrinking local government support/oversight, and tight, centralised accountability. It will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in disciplines of education, sociology, political science, public policy and management. It will also be of interest to researchers and policy makers from countries with similar or emerging quasi-market education systems.
Decentralization of decision-making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed systems but detrimental in low-performing systems. We construct a panel dataset from the four waves of international PISA tests spanning 2000–2009, comprising over one million students in 42 countries. Relying on panel estimation with country fixed effects, we estimate the effect of school autonomy from within-country changes in the average share of schools with autonomy over key elements of school operations. Our results suggest that autonomy affects student achievement negatively in developing and low-performing countries, but positively in developed and high-performing countries. These estimates are unaffected by a wide variety of robustness and specification tests, providing confidence in the need for nuanced application of reform ideas.
While teacher learning has become a locus of school reform across many international settings, there is relatively little examination of the idiosyncratic ways in which policy discourses on teacher learning are enacted in schools. In this paper, we aim to investigate how these policy discourses are translated and configured into practices and thus, enacted into concrete realities. Using the conceptual notion of multiple ontologies, we argue that teacher learning is actualized in a multiplicity of socio-material entanglements, not as a single reality, but as a multiplicity of realities that coexist, simultaneously, in the mesh of assemblages that we call “school.” In this study, we describe and trace how particular socio-material configurations of teacher learning produce concrete realities of practice that mobilize and generate specific networked effects. We conclude that the postulation of multiple ontologies of teacher learning prompts a shift in how policy makers could conceive of and develop strategies aimed at transforming teaching practices.
The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school communities with a range of responsibilities. This paper seeks to better understand the kind of post-welfare form of government IPS enacts. Using concepts from the governmentality literature, this paper analyses documents related to the program, and interview data collected from key government officials responsible for the initiative. It finds that while IPS renders operable a neoliberal critique of the public sector by implementing the processes of contractualization, it also diverges from the ideal schema of neoliberalism. Analysis reveals that a number of strategic, pragmatic and political concerns have resulted in what some may view as a contradictory rationality of “the system” being instituted as a key element in this autonomizing reform. The paper calls for attention to the actual operationalizing of neoliberal reform projects to gain a nuanced understanding of modern regimes of rule.
What do different research methods and approaches do in practice? The article seeks to discuss this point by drawing upon socio-material research approaches and empirical examples taken from the early stages of an extensive case study on an interdisciplinary project between two multidisciplinary fields of study, education and computer sciences. The article examines how divergent disciplinary hinterlands influence the enactments of research methods, and how the choice of research approach affects the types of knowledge and realities produced in the research process.
What is a theory? Or, more broadly, what is a good way of addressing intellectual problems? This paper explores the tension central to the notion of an ‘actor’ - ‘network’ which is an intentionally oxymoronic term that combines—and elides the distinction between—structure and agency. It then notes that this tension has been lost as ‘actor-network’ has been converted into a smooth and consistent ‘theory’ that has been (too) simply and easily displaced, criticised or applied. It recalls another term important to the actor-network approach—that of translation— which is another term in tension, since (the play of words works best in the romance languages) to translate is to also betray ( traductore, tradition). It is suggested that in social theory simplicity should not displace the complexities of tension. The chapter concludes by exploring a series of metaphors for grappling with tensions rather than wishing these away, and in particular considers the importance of topological complexity, and the notion of fractionality.
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.'
(Henry Reed, Lessons of the War: 1)
Accountability, autonomy, and choice play a leading role in recent school reforms in many countries. This report provides new evidence on whether students perform better in school systems that have such institutional measures in place. We implement an internationally comparative approach within a rigorous micro-econometric framework that accounts for the influences of a large set of student, family, school, and country characteristics. The student-level data used in the analysis comes from the PISA 2003 international student achievement test that encompasses up to 265,000 students from 37 countries. Our results reveal that different facets of accountability, autonomy, and choice are strongly associated with the level of student achievement across countries. With respect to accountability, students perform better where policies are in place that aim at students (external exit exams), teachers (monitoring of lessons), and schools (assessment-based comparisons). The combined achievement differences amount to more than one and a half PISA grade-level equivalents. Students in schools with hiring autonomy perform better on average, while they perform worse in schools with autonomy in formulating their budget. School autonomy over the budget, salaries, and course contents appears to be more beneficial when external exit exams hold schools accountable for their decisions. Students perform better in countries with more choice and competition as measured by the share of privately managed schools, the share of total school funding from government sources, and the equality of government funding between public and private schools. Cross-country differences in private school operation account for up to two PISA grade-level equivalents. The performance advantage of privately operated schools within countries is stronger where schools face external accountability measures and are autonomous. In urban areas, indicators of choice among public schools are also associated with superior outcomes. Several aspects of accountability, autonomy, and choice are also associated with superior noncognitive outcomes such as student morale and commitment, non-disruptive behaviour, disciplinary climate, and tardiness. We find no evidence that these policies have led schools to focus on raising student achievement at the expense of non-cognitive skills. (Three appendices include: (1) Database and Descriptive Statistics; (2) Econometric Modeling; and (3) Additional Tables. Contains 32 footnotes, 11 figures and 16 tables.)
Because various aspects of the school organization matter, this study was designed to determine to what degree principals in both charter and traditional public schools experience autonomy. This quantitative study draws on the 1999-2000 School and Staffing Survey, and the analyses suggest that there are variations in the degree and amount of principal autonomy experienced across charter and traditional public schools. Principals, although clearly autonomous, are constrained by state influence but supported by district influence. Charter school principals enjoy greater degrees of autonomy across various internal school activities, and this contributes to the conceptual understanding of organizational autonomy. (Contains 5 tables and 2 notes.)