Abstract
The quest to find the essential nature of school leadership is an ambitious one. If that quest is undertaken on a global scale, ambition risks becoming hubris. Paul Miller’s The Nature of School Leadership adeptly undertakes this task by providing an empirically grounded account of school leadership from a global perspective. The 200 pages of his book are divided into nine chapters and include data from 16 countries. He establishes clear protocols for each chapter to minimise the possibility of Eurocentric drift. Each chapter must include data from at least three countries; the three countries must be located in a least two continents and using the same data collection instruments throughout; analysis from at least one developing country must be included in each chapter.
There is a strong sense that this book includes ‘other voices’. That is voices from outside the developed English speaking world. It will be of particular relevance to students, scholars and policymakers interested in international or comparative studies in educational leadership and management.
These other voices that the book includes are not only those from the global south: the practitioners’ voices are felt throughout and, in a sense, lead the book. Despite the book spanning five continents and 16 countries, we nonetheless get to grips with the ‘street realities’ of school leadership, as school leaders talk in response to three questions: What is school leadership? How do you do school leadership? What underpins your leadership?
There is an inherent danger with studies which focus on the global: how to reconcile the tension between an account which is grounded in the particulars of a local situation and yet universal enough to have cross-contextual relevance. To what extent is it possible to speak to and from lived experience, while being abstract enough to grasp the global nature of the thing? In these post-human times (Braidotti, 2006), the quest for the universal, the essence of the thing is rightly treated with scepticism. It too often and too easily leads to the disparaging and inferiorisation of difference. Those branded as other are reduced to the status of invisible or non-existent. As Braidotti (2006, p.21) points out, difference as disparagement is the self-constituting power of sameness. What should be analytical description quickly descends into irrational inscription. Whatever activity falls beyond the normative frame of the analyst is disposed of as irrelevant. What emerges is a generic cross-cultural leader who is too often and too easily identifiable as belonging to a particular race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion; they are a property-owning, standard language speaking citizen (Braidotti, 2006, p.37).
These are examples of the tensions that Miller is able to remain within − acknowledging without smothering. In Chapter 2, school leadership is personal and internally motivated; however, it is also inherently social: context dependent in Chapter 7 and change oriented in Chapter 4. Miller’s exploration pins down leadership into seven distinct characteristics premised on practice – change-oriented, entrepreneurial and enterprising (Chapter 6), partnership-dependent (Chapter 8). He acknowledges the existence of drivers / enablers such as teachers (Chapter 5) and policy (Chapter 3). He is able to accept the curved ball that environment throws at leadership, ‘An experienced and successful school leader who has achieved much in one context may achieve only limited success in another’ (Miller, 2018, p.170). In voicing this stance, Miller speaks a truth to power that many policy makers may find it difficult to hear. Acknowledging the social, teacher-dependent, policy-enabled dimensions of leadership implies that there is no single solution to our educational woes. Super heads or academisation are unlikely to be the panacea to our educational woes that our politicians fantasise about finding.
The four dimensions of school leadership that Miller identifies – personal, relational, environmental and social (Miller, 2018, p.167) – mean that class size, location, staffing, availability of materials and resources, the adequacy of funding, improvement trajectory, parental support and involvement of the community all impact on what the leader is able to achieve.
The book explores the nature of school leadership without descending into the indulgence of extolling the virtues of school leaders. There is no indication that leaders are leaders by dint of sheer grit or their good character, charisma and charm. The personal qualities that they possess and its capacity to impact on student learning are all filtered through the context in which they work: the enablers and the drivers of change. There is no insistence that the reader chooses a stance in relation to whether leadership is a process or product. Decades of dispute are swerved with the acceptance that it is simultaneously both: a contradiction held in creative tension.
The book avoids heroic and adjectival leadership models by placing the actual voices of school leaders front and centre of the text. Each chapter opens with a bold assertion about the nature of leadership, which – on the first page of each chapter - is presented alongside substantial quotes from at least two leaders. These quotes from school leaders are listed on the first page of each chapter as italicised footnotes. They are present but visually marginalised. If, like me, you often overlook footnotes (they interrupt the flow of the text), you might not at first appreciate their significance. They represent the texts’ empirical grounding. When answering the question ‘what is the nature of school leadership?’, the words of Miller’s research participants are authoritative. There are seven statements that conclude the sentence: ‘School leadership is…’, each of which is based on what school leaders say. In the pages that follow the chapter header, these assertions are elaborated upon more fully with other extracts from data and then placed in conversation with extant literature.
One feature of the organisation of the chapters that I particularly liked was the evidence summary and bullet-point characteristics that precede each ‘Making sense of it all’ conclusion. The sub-title ‘evidence summary’ might lead the reader to conclude the chapter itself was being summarised. It is not. The evidence being summarised is the empirical data that informs the chapter – some of which might not have featured in the chapters text at all. The evidence summary covers ground not discussed in any detail in the text. In Chapter 2, the evidence summary notes that school leadership is personal and internally motivated, different genders experience school leadership as uniquely personal in nature, but there are differences in the ways in which they are internally motivated: men are motivated by the prospect of winning, while women are motivated by the prospect of serving. Leaders’ responses to resource precarity is also noted and differences between countries are identified. Intriguingly, school leaders in Pakistan, Turkey, South Africa, Mozambique and the Caribbean are more likely to ‘show greater signs of internal motivation’. School-based factors, such as size, school type and location in a country (rural, remote, urban or inner city) made no discernible difference in patterns of motivation (p.34-35). If there are any aspects of the text which jarred uncomfortably, it is these evidence summaries, which raised intriguing quirks in the data but left their insightful potential dangling. It is at this point where compromise – something I have suggested was a strength of the text – leads to a smothering out of differences and is therefore also its weakness. But perhaps this is the unavoidable outcome of a quest for the essential nature of school leadership – it foregrounds commonality (rather than difference) – and as such perhaps it overlooks the most intriguing features of the concepts with which we work. The book succeeds in its own terms. There are few books that inspire an intense cover-to-cover read: the layout, organisation, global focus and generous inclusion of ‘other voices’ make this text one of them. But nonetheless, I can’t help feeling:
‘It is not enough to simply say concepts possess movement; you also have to construct intellectually mobile concepts’. Deleuze, cited in Patton, 2010, p.27