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DeAbreu, Robert J.

The “crisis” in education has made the “fixing” of “failing” schools an explicit national focus in the United States (U.S.), with calls for radical change in many facets of the profession. In December 2009, Laura Pappano of the New York Times wrote of new educational leadership programs being started at Harvard and Stanford the following autumn. According to the author, the key characteristic of these programs is their emphasis on business. Harvard and Stanford’s programs bring together professors from schools of education, business, and public policy to offer candidates skills in being able to oversee large-scale change, to handle the politics of these changes, and to manage finances through budgets, grant writing, fund-raising and strategic partnering. Representatives of these programs who were interviewed stated a need for educational leaders to be able to use “corporate skills” and “speak in business terms or at least be familiar with that way of thinking” in order to have influence. One could argue that the leadership style being promoted by this rationale is aligned with Foster and Smyth’s bureaucratic-managerial model, where “leadership is a function of organizational position” and “is goal-centered” with the purpose of “producing” (Foster & Smyth, 1989, 30) . It is paramount that one considers the possible consequences of embedding such a model of leadership in educational training programs. The purpose of this paper is to respond to the article by examining these possible consequences.

Report

eng

2013-03-05

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44005

UBCV

Graduate

DSpace