Educational Leadership and the Crisis of Democratic Government

Abstract

This article is organized around three major assumptions. First, it argues that the current crisis of American schooling is symptomatic of a broader crisis in the meaning and practice of American democracy. Second, it contends that the dominant approaches to educational reform, particularly America 2000, appear to be at odds with educating students to be informed, critical citizens capable of actively participating in shaping and governing a democratic society. Third, it calls for educators to refashion educational leadership through a language of critique and possibility that expands and deepens the possibility for cultural and political democracy. In short, the article suggests that educational reformers need to expand the purpose and promise of schooling beyond the narrow interests of the marketplace, view multicultural education as central to living in a democratic society, refuse to equate nationalism with monoculturalism, and substitute the language of community, solidarity, and public responsibility for the current emphasis on choice and individual competitiveness.

The Scholar–Practitioner Ideal

“…The aim of the current theoretical study of scholarly practice is to construct a framework around that same body of academic literature concerning a postmodern, democratic, and socially just educational administration. The literature includes chapters and articles relating to scholar-practitioner theory (Capper, 1998;Jenlink, 2001Jenlink, , 2006Mullen, 2003), democratic leadership (Giroux, 1994;Quantz, Rogers, & Dantley 1991;Starratt, 2001), cultural theory (Anderson, 1996;Bates, 1984;Foster, 1984;Greenfield, 1984), postmodern theory (Fazzaro, Walter, & McKerrow, 1994;Johnson, 1994;McKinney & Garrison, 1994;Ryan, 1998;Scheurich, 1994), critical pragmatic theory (Foster, 1994;Maxcy, 1991), authentic leadership (Anderson, 1998;Beatty, 2000;Duignan & Bhindi, 1995), and social justice leadership (Furman & Gruenewald, 2004;Larson & Murtadha, 2003;Shields 2004).…”

Professional Identity and Struggles of Basic Level English Teacher: A Critical Narrative Inquiry

“…There should be 'dialogical action' (cited in Kohli, 2015) which encourages to participate in teaching learning activities. Henry Giroux (1992) claims the role of teachers as transformative intellectual who aims to change the learning scenario of classroom. Such kind of transformative attitude is lacking in Changba, classroom.…”

Teacher accountability, datafication and evaluation: A case for reimagining schooling

“…Issues like climate change, the rise of populism, far-right extremism, white supremacy, and so on, require collective efforts that are thoroughly incompatible with values like individualism, competition, standardization, and rapid, endless growth, which currently characterize education. Schools might seem like an unlikely site to address these problems, but, historically, schools are where values-based debates have been fought (see, for example, Au, 2008;Carlson & Apple, 1999;Giroux, 1992). Relevant here are modes of datafication that threaten to not only dismantle education as a public good, but exacerbate the crises that democracies face on a global scale (see Zuboff, 2018 on the effects of datafication on the global economy).…”