Abstract
While there has been considerable scholarship on the role of school and district leadership within instructional change, there has been little analysis of the values and orientations that undergird current policy debates about instructional leadership. In this chapter, the author argues the importance of examining instructional leadership in the context of broader political and cultural debates about government and about how society should be organized. She identifies two distinct models of instructional leadership emerging as part of these dynamics: the market model and the polis model.
Drawing on interviews and observations with 185 school staff across three cities and with 82 district administrators, she examines the tensions that these competing models create for school administrators working in improving schools within high-poverty communities. In each district, system-wide press to improve instruction activated district management practices that contradicted reform goals of building a professional community of educators and administrators focused on teaching and learning. Further, how district staff viewed and approach their work departed in significant ways from the management practices of school administrators in improving schools. Based on this research, she identifies the importance of administrators’ professional contexts in studies of instructional leadership.
1This chapter also appears in article form in Journal of Education Policy (2007), 22(2), 195–214.
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Notes
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To make this argument, I draw on institutional measures of professionalization. In studying processes of institutionalization within US art museums, DiMaggio (1991) identifies four main indices of professionalization. This includes (a) the production of university-trained experts and funding to support this training, (b) the creation of a body of a knowledge about the field, (c) the organization of professional associations, and (d) increases in the flow of information about the profession, e.g., through the publication of books, periodicals, and directories.
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The orientations summarized emerged through school and district administrators interview responses. Administrators expressed these views in statements about their reform activities, beliefs about instructional reform, and effective leadership strategies. In each instance, I triangulated the data, checking administrators’ self-reports with evidence from repeated interviews, observation field notes, and artifacts, as well as interviews with other individuals working in the same school or department.
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Burch, P. (2010). The Professionalization of Instructional Leadership in the United States: Competing Values and Current Tensions1 . In: Huber, S. (eds) School Leadership - International Perspectives. Studies in Educational Leadership, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3501-1_7
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