The Educational Leader in a rapidly changing world: new contexts, new challenges, new purposes, new

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The Educational Leader in a rapidly changing
world new contexts, new challenges, new
purposes, new qualities?

• Professor Mike Bottery
• University of Hull
• England.

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Conceptualising contextual levels

• The Micro - Personal
• The Meso - Institutional
• The Macro - Cultural/National/Global
• But a complex interaction between them.

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The Micro- Personal context you can say this
better than me

• Ki mai ki a au
• He aha tem ea nui o tea o
• Maku e ki atu
• He Tangata, He Tangata, He Tangata.

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Recognising and appreciating difference

• Much evidence of increased workloads
  internationally
• Some may cope 14 hours a day and loving it
• But some find it more difficult
• Pat We havent even got time to think about the
  fact that we havent got time
• Bill Countless, countless, countless
  initiatives
• Angela Everything comes in great big piles. I
  take home boxes of the stuff
• And the local context matters hugely

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The neglect of the personal

• The effect of a focus on top-down research
• The search for simple solutions
• The effect of the hyper-rationalist

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The paradox of hyper-rationality (After Lipsky,
1989, and Hoyle and Wallace, 2005)

• Much leadership and management is necessarily
  characterised by ambiguity and irony due to the
  incompatibility of demands
• Such ambiguity generates pressure, which is made
  worse by external imposition blind to individual
  contexts.

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Five ironies of hyper-rationalist management

• The more you try to engineer the creation of a
  successful workforce, the more likely you are to
  suppress the creativity upon which success
  depends
• The more you try to encourage quality by
  measuring it, the more you will encourage people
  to concentrate on the measurable, and thus to
  ignore real quality
• The more people are not trusted, they more they
  will become untrustworthy
• The more you try to control and engineer success,
  the more you suppress the local knowledge upon
  which such success depends
• The more you define the bottom line, the more
  that this becomes the only line that people are
  interested in achieving. .

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A micro-meso context? (after Bryk and Schneider,
2002)

• Interactions within institutions are not just
  between people, they are between people in roles
• In schools these can be parents, teachers,
  government officials, principals
• BS found that academic attainment was strongly
  correlated with each playing their role in the
  interests of the students (rather than a personal
  or sub-agenda).

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The Institutional Context

• Morgans Images of Organisations Handys Gods of
  Management Peters and Watermans business
  cultures (In Search of Excellence)-
• All suggest institutions steer individuals to
  behave in particular ways
• Yet each is not totally determined despite
  attempts to totally control culture, each has
  conflicting messages, values and demands.

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The principals reality? (from Bottery, Ngai,
Wong, and Wong, 2008)

• This study of English and Hong Kong Primary
  Principals showed that
• Whilst they have to deal with the impact of
  distant external forces (legislation,
  inspection), personal and local issues are their
  day-to-day concerns
• Their personalities and the local context are
  large determinants of how they approach these
  issues
• The reality for them is a complex,
  multi-dimensional, never totally predictable or
  controllable reality they mediate these issues
  with and through their personalities and the
  contexts they find themselves in.

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Does this suggest a need

• to cultivate a formal acknowledgement and then
  an appreciation of the inevitability of some
  degree of ambiguity ?
• to provide space for sufficient accountable
  autonomous practice by leaders to mediate demands
  into their local context.
• .for a greater appreciation of macro-contexts,
  including the cultural and national

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The assumptions of the UK macro historical
context (after Grace, 1995)

• The 19th century head of hierarchy and control,
  moral and cultural transmission
• 1940s-80s The Social Democratic head of
  patriarchal leadership, public good and
  professional domination
• 1980s-1990s the Market head of service
  competition, entrepreneurialism and
  responsiveness
• 2000 onwards the outcomes head of
  standards, value-added targets, benchmarking
  self-evaluation, and integration with other
  services.

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Compare with the US macro historical context
(after Goodwin et al. 2005)

• 19th and early 20th - producing an American
  citizen out of a melting pot of a culturally
  diverse immigrant population a state rather than
  a national endeavour.
• From the 1950s - the use of education as a
  response to increasing Soviet competition
• From the 1960s - dealing with the implications of
  the civil rights movements
• From the 1970/80s an increasingly
  anti-professional literature and policy approach
• From 2000 dealing with the No Child Left Behind
  Legislation

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And the Chinese macro historical context (after
Ribbins and Zhang, 2005)

• The continued influence of ancient Confucianism
  and patriarchal culture
• The lingering effects of the Cultural Revolution
• The influence of Communist egalitarian Ideology
• The effects of political authoritarianism
• The expanding and conflicting influence of the
  new economic and competitive culture.

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The New Zealand context?

• The deep historical ties with the UK
• The growing away towards nationhood
• Maori rapprochement rather than colonial conquest
• The movement from social democratic welfare
  state, through neo-liberal educational policies,
  to?

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Does such societal change create

• An evolution of the educational leadership role
• or rather a messy accumulation of expectations?
• If the latter, then perhaps part of the
  explanation for the ambiguity and irony of the
  role, and the increased stress and early
  retirements seen throughout the western world
  and beyond.
• The need to appreciate global forces

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Globalization, technology, and thought change

• a social process in which the constraints of
  geography on social and cultural arrangements
  recede and in which people become increasingly
  aware that they are receding.
• (Waters, 1995)

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Leadership and the globalised context a new
ecology, a new set of contextual challenges?

• Technological
• Economic
• Political
• Cultural
• American
• Linguistic
• Energy
• Environmental
• Demographic
• (Bottery, 2006)

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The Demographic context

• An increase in the age of the populations of the
  countries of both the developed and developing
  worlds, producing
• A changing disease morbidity
• A smaller tax base
• The policy implications
• Changing priorities away from education except
  for wealth generation
• more care by government with the money thats
  left
• more control and direction by them of it.

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In the UK?

• For the first time this year, the number of
  pensioners exceeds the number of children
• By 2031 it is projected that there will be at
  least 2 million more pensioners than children
• Office for National Statistics.

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In the US?

• An increase in a young population, but
• the postwar demographic bulge is forcing
  Americans to abandon the idea that they can rely
  on a state pension to see them through old age in
  comfort
• By 2017 social security will be paying out more
  than it takes in from payroll taxes
• No longer a veneration of twilight years -
  effects on educational spending?
• The Guardian 18/10/07

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Chinese National Ageing Working Committee Report
(23rd February, 2006)

• 2004 - China had 10.97 of its population over
  60.
• 2051 China will have more than 30 by 2051.
• The UN forecasts that by then, China will have
  the worlds largest elderly population.
• South China Morning Post 24th February 2006

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And in New Zealand?

• 12 of the population are 65 or more
• By the late 2030s, this figure is expected to
  double.
• Statistics NZ 2006.

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International movements in allegiance to the
Welfare State.

• Universal providing everything from cradle to
  grave
• Affordable providing what the state can
  afford
• Residual providing only a safety net
  for the most serious cases and the incursion of
  neo-liberalism.

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What might this mean for educational leaders?

• In many developed countries
• Less money from taxation means financial and
  resource constraints
• A greater direction of professional work from
  on top to on tap.

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Energy globalisationOil and food

• supporting more than half of the human race in
  urban environments would not be conceivable were
  it not for the increase in agricultural yield and
  productivity made possible by the use of oil to
  power farm machinery, fertilize land, fend off
  agricultural pests, and transport products to
  faraway metropolitan areas.
• Rifkin, 2002, p.163.
• Rising food costs and oil.

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The importance of oil starting your day the
western way....

• Without oil, its difficult to shampoo, shave,
  deodorise, shower, have toast or cereal for
  breakfast, use the t.v., telephone, toaster,
  computer, lighting or heating, drive your car,
  wear shoes, or use the pavements
• Yeomans, 2004.

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Competition for diminishing supplies of oil
(after Klare, 2005.)

• The developed world have economies and ways of
  life fuelled by oil, but are dependent for most
  of their oil on foreign imports
• The developing world is competing with the
  developed world for diminishing reserves.
• The largest reserves by far are in the Middle
  East and the Caucasus both unstable regions.

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A three fold trend in energy globalisation

• An increasing need by developed and developing
  countries for imported oil
• An increase in the need by them for oil from
  unstable regions
• An increased competition for supplies which are
  finding it increasingly hard to meet this demand.

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Energy and climate avoiding a global paradox?

• If oil consumption is reduced, because of our
  dependence on it, global instability and
  fragility is increased
• Yet if oil consumption is maintained, global
  warming is thereby increased, and global
  fragility and instability is increased.

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Key leadership issues

• A continued increase in costs and resource
  constraints
• Attempts to defray costs, and the likely increase
  in privatised education
• A greater need for scientific creativity
• Curricular emphases on energy, climate,
  environment, food, locality, and IT
• Citizenship education in an increasingly
  dangerous world.

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Necessary leadership qualities

• A greater sense of ecological leadership in
  education which better appreciates its micro,
  meso and macro contexts.
• A greater sense of accountable autonomy to
  mediate the macro into the meso and micro
• A greater need for the acceptance of the
  ambiguous, ironic nature of leadership
  practice.
• A greater need to recognise the the public
  dimension of education locally, nationally, and
  globally?
• A critical engagement with these issues.
• The need for leaders as ethical dialecticians.

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The key ideas?

• Ma te whakaarao nui e hanga te whare ma te
  matauranga e whakau.
• Big ideas create the house knowledge maintains
  it.

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Ancient Chinese warning

• They lower their heads to pull the cart, instead
  of raising their heads to look at the road.