NETWORKING AS ADMINISTRATOR

Networking as an Administrator

Networking as an Administrator

While the reformist agenda of the recent past has been a welcome addition to our discourse on the nature of education, it has failed in many respects to address some essential aspects of educational reform. The rhetoric is in many instances laudatory; the California Commission on Public School Administration and Leadership, for example, found that "there are times when evolutionary change is appropriate, but these are not those times. If our society is to succeed, nothing short of a revolution is needed in our schools" (p. 51).

Such sentiments are indeed accurate and they are appropriate for an levels of education; they display a concern with the way educational systems generally have responded to the needs of their clientele and they issue strong statements about the need for educational reform. But the need is not fully met by those reforms which fail to address the underlying assumptions and worldviews held by American educators and which govern the direction in which education proceeds. (East, 2005) This is to say that competing moral philosophies undergird our approaches to practice, and each philosophy is a struggle for mind: a struggle to control the shape and structure of those social agendas we engage in. From Aristotle to Kant, from Sidgwick to Dewey, there is a contested analysis of the right way for resolving dilemmas, making decisions, and governing ourselves. These moral philosophies from pragmatism to behaviourism are the keystone of the relationships that bind individuals together in organization. (Chapman, Sachney, Aspin, 1999)

I will attempt this by first suggesting that the administrative expert, whether in education or in business, largely functions as a myth in American society, a myth which perpetuates current relations of power. In place of such expertise, I recommend that administration, whether of elementary schools or universities, be reconceived as a practice, meaning a calling engaged in for its own internal rewards. More than this, though, administration needs to be thought of as a critical practice and as a moral practice, reflecting on the social conditions of institutions in this society. Such critique and reflection, occurring within a framework which allows for the concept of transformation of social structure, suggests that administration be conceived of as educative leadership, a leadership which needs to develop a moral vocabulary sufficient for addressing the real needs of education systems. As one reads the articles included in this issue, the idea of leadership as transformation, as concern for social justice, will jump out. This will be a very different formulation of leadership than what is ordinarily encountered: Rather than seeing leadership as "running a tight ship," or as "achieving organizational goals," this approach to leadership addresses change, transformation, and liberation--human issues and qualities which have been better addressed by literature than by the social sciences. I hope to start this introduction into a different conception of educational leadership by suggesting the following: first, that the managerial techniques learned as leadership are simply myths; second, by suggesting that our conception ...