Abstract
Education policymakers and system leaders worldwide have embraced school-level leadership as a lever for school improvement. Readers of Management in Education don’t need to be persuaded that such a focus on school-level leadership makes sense, since the evidence of leadership’s impact on school outcomes is undeniable. However, ideas from a small core of scholars, primarily from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia, have dominated global initiatives, meaning scholarly attention to the context-specific ways that school leadership is supported and enacted in much of the world has been limited at best. This book is a groundbreaking intervention in the field of comparative educational administration and, with its close examination of school leadership policy and practice in nine countries in Africa, serves as a corrective to educational leadership and management scholarship which, to date, has mostly neglected examination of the experiences in vast parts of the globe including, notably, most of Africa.
Pontso Moorosi and Tony Bush have framed their 11-chapter edited volume with introductory (Moorosi) and concluding (Bush) chapters that put the nine country-specific studies (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria) into greater regional and scholarly context. The book represents ‘a starting point to taking stock of work done in the field in this continent’ (p. vii). Each chapter, whether it presents ‘research findings, reviews, [or] conceptual analyses’ (p. vii), is well anchored in relevant scholarship and concludes with a comprehensive bibliography that will be of interest to readers seeking specific policy and research works for follow-up. There is also a helpful 10-page subject index for the whole volume.
Although Moorosi notes in her introduction that ‘in many African countries, formal preparation training for school leadership is not a priority’ (p. 2), she persuasively argues that the scholarly obligation is therefore to study what is present, not only what’s absent, in terms of preparation for school leaders. ‘In such contexts, research ought to be asking different questions that aim to unearth, understand, and develop the actual practices that school leaders go through to develop skills, knowledge and dispositions that give them the confidence to lead and manage schools’ (p. 2). An absence of formal rules and policy supports for school leaders does not mean that there are no shared, formative experiences for school leaders. In fact, the development of wise policies to support school leaders in Africa will be better informed by knowing what those influential experiences – from initial teacher preparation to ongoing networking within community – currently are. As Carolyn (Callie) Grant notes in her chapter on Namibia, in a context where formalised training for school leaders is minimal, leaders’ life experiences – as members of families, faith communities – are important forms of de facto leadership development. Likewise, Frederick Ebot-Ashu, when examining school leadership in Cameroon, reports that ‘diverse contexts such as community, tribal group meetings, church groups and parent-teacher association forums’ (p. 147) are locations for developing leadership skills.
Throughout this edited volume, the case-study authors examine the ways informal modes of selection and ongoing support are far more common than formalised or regulated pre-service preparation for school administration. Michael Amakyi and Alfred Ampah-Mensah, in their chapter on Ghana, note that this on-the-job training comes with trade-offs. It can ‘equip the school head with the competencies to cope with the job as it exists’, they note, ‘but not how to transform it’ (p. 158). There is always this tension in the school leadership development sector, namely how to balance nuts-and-bolts preparation for the schools that we have with more aspirational or critical approaches of envisioning the schools that we want. ‘The lingering question’, Amakyi and Ampah-Mensah say, ‘is “how does one acquire mastery of the essentials of a profession?”‘ (p. 152). My friendly amendment to that question would be to add: ‘and what are the essentials of this profession?’ Part of developing a contextually informed framework for leadership development will be clarifying what principals can/should know and be able to do and defining what’s special or distinct about being a school principal, rather than a teacher or a ministry official.
In his concluding chapter, Bush is not naive about the challenges inherent in building leadership capacity in Africa: ‘given the limited resources available for education in most of the continent, effective leadership preparation opportunities are likely to depend on donor funding, although the evidence is that such initiatives are rarely sustained when the funding stream is withdrawn’ (p. 194). The obligation of both funders and local policymakers is to figure out how leadership development can be systematically supported in ways that enhance, rather than detract from, school quality. This book documents some of the starting points.
I intend to use the book in my own graduate teaching in Canada because of the valuable way that the authors here have held several concepts in tension: how the need for local, decolonised leadership frameworks meets the realities of centralised policymaking; how policymakers can both overpromise the power of and underinvest in the practice of school-level leadership; how imported assumptions about leadership for school improvement meet the local realities of school capacity; and how expertise and experience in teaching is absolutely vital but is not, on its own, the same thing as preparation for the distinct complexities of school leadership and management. This book is not a technocratic, context-free list of recommendations of best practices borrowed from elsewhere. It is a set of fine-grained, scholarly descriptions and analyses that establish essential baseline knowledge necessary for greater context-informed investments in school-level leadership in Africa.