Maladministration in Education

Abstract

Educational administration is a rich domain of scholarship and practice, but one subject rarely discussed is its dark side. This study explored the question: What types of maladministration occur in schooling systems? The goal was to develop findings to inform existing prevention strategies. Focused on the Canadian context, data sources included 64 reports from disciplinary hearings of administrators in the Provinces of Ontario and British Columbia, complemented with other publicly available sources such as news stories. Findings indicated only a small minority of populations of administrators were subjected to disciplinary investigations and sanctions, but the targeted misconduct was often severe. Analysis revealed eight dimensions of maladministration, with sexual misconduct against students and financial transgressions being the most frequent. Academic dishonesty in the context of standardized testing and gendered patterns of maladministration also stood out. A typology emerged that highlighted the main forms of misconduct and negative leader behaviours against which schooling communities should bolster defences. When populated with data on the frequencies of acts of maladministration, the typology can help schooling communities to establish prevention priorities. The data in this study supports making the issues of sexual misconduct and the duty to report sexual abuse central to any planned interventions in the leadership system.

Keywords

educational administration Canada leadership maladministration schools sexual misconduct

Introduction

Educational administration is a rich, varied domain of scholarship and practice; but one subject rarely discussed is its ‘dark side’ (Blase and Blase, 2002: 671). Little has been studied about acts of mismanagement, misappropriation, mistreatment or ‘administrative evil’ (Samier, 2008: 3) committed by leaders in schooling systems. Although such conduct does occur and has been shown to have harmful effects on people and institutions (Blase and Blase, 2010; Milloy, 1999; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), its prevalence is not known. From both moral and risk management perspectives, a focus on maladministration should thus be of interest to those responsible for governing and running schooling systems, and for members of schooling communities. It speaks directly to contemporary concerns about sustaining safe and healthy schools (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015a) and public confidence in education (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015b).

This article addresses the relative silence on the dark side of educational administration, reporting on research that pursued the fundamental question: What types of maladministration occur in schools and schooling systems in Canadian contexts? The main objective was to harvest and analyse an inventory of empirical cases with a view to constructing a typology that could raise awareness of the ways in which educational administrators go off the rails. The hope was this could help inform existing prevention strategies.

Background

Education and its administration are considered to be moral undertakings (Hodgkinson, 1991; Sergiovanni, 2007), vocations in which people are held to high ethical standards through statutory (Berryman, 1998) and other means, such as preparation programmes and codes of practice (Maxcy, 2008). As a result, educational administrators are perceived to be a well-behaved group (Pardini, 2004). This is likely one of the reasons maladministration in and around schools is rarely talked about or studied. Another reason is that talking about dubious administrative behaviours can get people in trouble, especially if those being talked about hold more power or authority than the ones doing the talking. The potential for administrative retribution has long been known to condition cultures of fear that render people silent in the face bad leadership (Samier, 2008). For example, Blase and Blase (2002, 2003, 2004) observed these dynamics of fear and silence among North American teachers working under abusive administrators; and, more recently, a forensic audit identified financial mismanagement in a large Canadian school board sustained by a ‘culture of fear’ promulgated by the alleged threatening behaviour of trustees (Brown, 2014; Ernst and Young, LLP, 2013: 4; Newcomb, 2014).

The silence on maladministration in educational research can also be explained in part by fear. There is an understandable reticence on the part of educational leaders to open their organizations up to avenues of inquiry that could be disquieting, even more so when those making approval decisions about such studies are the ones who may be subject to the lines of inquiry (Alcadipani and Hodgson, 2009). Organizational members may be fearful of talking to researchers asking critical questions about how the organization is run (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000). There is an elevated risk of social, emotional or economic harm to potential participants in such studies, making the ethics of conducting them challenging to navigate (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2014). Moreover, conducting studies on maladministration may represent a career limiting move for researchers who may find their future access to organizations barred because they are perceived to be too critical.

Despite the relative lack of literature on maladministration in education (for example, in 2010, Blase and Blase reported only two empirical studies of principal mistreatment of teachers had been published), information that occasionally comes to light makes it impossible to deny that some of those in leadership roles do troubling things. Take for example the case of a superintendent in an urban school board in Canada ‘found guilty of redirecting $194,357.21 in … funds for her personal use by using phony invoices and cash transfers’ (Mitchell, 2007), one of numerous corruption cases regularly reported in Canada and elsewhere (Transparency International, 2013). Also disturbing are the results of investigations into sexual misconduct, such as the case of a well-regarded principal in the Canadian Province of Alberta (Edmonton Journal, 2010) who had his professional association membership revoked for reportedly ‘having an affair with one of his grade 11 students … who later became pregnant with their child’ (CBC News, 2010).

Preventative and recourse mechanisms have been put in place in most jurisdictions to make educational workplaces safe and free from corruption (for example, laws, professional standards, regulatory agencies, complaint and adjudication processes, performance management systems); yet, they can still be dishonest, threatening and toxic (Blase and Blase, 2010; de Wet, 2010, 2014; Transparency International, 2013). The mistreatment of employees, for example, is associated with decreased initiative and commitment (Balthazard et al., 2006), increased absenteeism and error rates at work and the ‘deterioration of relationships with spouses, children, and friends’ (Blase and Blase, 2010: 793). It can also have knock-on effects into classrooms, with mistreated educators experiencing a reduced sense of ‘caring/patience/tolerance [for] students’ attended by an increased reliance on ‘rigid, authoritarian, ineffective teaching methods’ (Blase and Blase, 2010: 793).

Maladministration threatens the security and integrity of members of educational communities, all of whom have rights to environments that are safe, lawful and where people and resources are treated with care and respect – values that are at the heart of standards of practice in Canada’s schooling systems (BCPVPA, 2015; Ontario College of Teachers, 2015a).

Theoretical Perspective

The term maladministration is used here as an umbrella concept. It includes managing or leading inefficiently, incompetently, carelessly, badly or improperly (Sykes, 1982) and covers a range of acts from making mistakes to transgressing policies and laws (Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada, 2005). The term also encompasses administrative evil (Samier, 2008) – that is, what administrators do with their control over resources and authorities to overtly, covertly and even unconsciously cause harm to people and organizations.

The perspective offered here on maladministration is social-psychological and humanistic, not legalistic. It is common to think that only disturbed or deviant people commit morally distressing acts in organizations, but that is only part of the story (Samier, 2008). Some psychologists observe every individual has the potential to exhibit troubling behaviour (Furnham, 2010); all it takes is an unfortunate confluence of one’s personality, values, mental state and skills with the peers, pressures and conditions for bad behaviour to emerge and flourish (Furnham, 2010; Mumford et al., 2007; Padilla et al., 2007).

Drawing on these ideas, maladministration is framed in this article as a dysfunctional phenomenon stemming from the actions of ‘sad, mad or bad’ (Furnham, 2010: 6) leaders whose behaviour may be influenced, in part, by organizational and broader contextual factors, such as a conducive social and organizational climate and an increasingly competitive, pressurized environment. Components of this perspective are described below.

Sad, Mad and Bad Leadership

Educational leadership scholars such as Greenfield and Ribbins (1993), Hodgkinson (1991) and Sergiovanni (2007) have convincingly argued that schools are (or ought to be) moral enterprises and that these characteristics is what differentiates them (and the leadership in them) from other organizations. However, with the rise to prominence of new public management (NPM) practices and neoliberal ideologies in public policies and organizations since the 1980s, schooling has become more competitive, business-like and integrated into economic and market processes (Giroux, 1999; Gunter and Fitzgerald, 2013). These changes may have created institutional contexts in which maladministration emerges more like it does in business settings (Samier, 2008), suggesting the research on bad executive leadership offer insights to those working in and studying the education sector. In a book-length review of this literature, Furnham (2010: 6) observes the behaviour of business leaders who do disturbing things can be classified as ‘sad, mad or bad’.

Sad Behaviour

According to Furnham (2010), sad leadership is characterized by incompetence, inattentiveness, negligence, poor judgment and a lack of passion or commitment. An example appears in a study by de Wet (2010: 1453–1454) that revealed school administrators resorting to bullying because they were unable or unwilling to use more appropriate behaviours to influence teachers’ practices.

Mad Behaviour

Mad leadership consists of aberrant, anti-social or derailing behaviours on the part of administrators (Furnham, 2010). From a psychological perspective, such behaviours may be understood as manifestations of sub-clinical personality disorders. Furnham (2010) argues that, although only a small percentage of the population might be formally diagnosable with fully-fledged disorders, every individual has a unique profile. There are a range of possible disorders (for example, narcissistic, histrionic, borderline/mercurial, dependent, aggressive/sadistic, paranoid, obsessive-compulsive and so on) and individual traits are seen to exist along spectrums. From this point of view, no one is necessarily immune from potentially behaving madly (Furnham, 2010). Under certain conditions (for example, exposure to certain kinds of people, stressors or pressures), an individual’s unique traits may come to the fore and result in anomalous or deviant behaviours.

Bad Behaviour

Following Furnham (2010), bad leadership – also known as dark side, toxic or destructive leadership (Blase and Blase, 2002; Einarsen et al., 2007; Kets de Vries, 2006; Padilla et al., 2007) – exhibits most or all of a triad of negative traits including psychopathology (for example, anti-sociality, emotional superficiality, thrill-seeking), narcissism (for example, egocentricity, arrogance, domineering manner) and Machiavellianism (for example, charm, ruthlessness, cynical manipulation) (Paulhus and Williams, 2002). Examples in schooling contexts can be observed in de Wet’s (2010) research that revealed some administrators displaying authoritarian leadership, destructive narcissism, and a penchant for manipulation and playing the ‘power game’ (de Wet, 2010: 1454).

Distinguishing Sad, Mad and Bad Leadership

Sad leadership is more readily identifiable in practice than mad or bad leadership (Furnham, 2010) because the behaviours (for example, disengagement, inattentiveness, poor decisions) are more commonplace and the administrators involved tend not to cover their tracks very well or at all. Sad leadership typically has less severe impacts than mad or bad leadership and can be dealt with through standard organizational measures. Problems with competence can be addressed through training and performance management. Issues with commitment can be approached through coaching and career counselling. Negligence can be addressed through disciplinary procedures.

Mad and bad leaders often rely on coercive and manipulative strategies to get their way (Padilla et al., 2007). They may demonstrate recklessness, endless ambition and self-interestedness, egotism, arrogance, entitlement, bias and distrust (Lipman-Blumen, 2005; Mumford et al., 2007). They may also break rules, be deceitful, impulsive or hedonic, lack normal inhibitions, devalue people and experience little sense of guilt (Lubit, 2004). Furnham (2010) and Greig (2002) point out the distinctions between mad and bad behaviour vary across academic and professional fields. Such differences of opinion are longstanding and cannot be resolved in this paper. For analytical purposes here the distinction between mad and bad leadership (beyond those summarized above) hinges largely on issues of intent and agency, such that those who commit bad acts with seemingly conscious intent and full individual agency could be considered bad, while those whose bad behaviour is marked by an absence (or significant impairment) of these features could be considered mad.

Conducive Contexts for Maladministration

It has been observed that some personality disorders or (bad) character traits may prove useful in leadership positions. According to Furnham (2010: 78), ‘the charm of the psychopath, the self-confidence of the narcissist, the clever deceptiveness of the Machiavellian … [may] … be useful business traits’ in certain circumstances. It has also been pointed out the ‘neediness’ (Lipman-Blumen, 2005: 89) of organizations who ask too much of leaders, have unrealistic expectations of them and invest too heavily in their powers, can help push leaders over the line into bad behaviours. This can be seen in cases of administrators who appear to develop a sense of entitlement because of the personal sacrifices they have made or as a result of the reputations and power they have garnered and who reportedly start helping themselves to financial ‘perks’ through unauthorized, illegitimate or fraudulent means (for example, Jaffe, 2006; Vitello, 2006).

Even people of seemingly good character can find themselves doing bad things if the organizational climate or system in which they work encourages them (Langlois, 2011; Zimbardo, 2007). Bureaucracies, for example, can subvert individual morality. Their ‘instrumental ethos and mentality leads [administrators] to conceive of others in objectified terms, compromising a capacity for ethics and the ability to exercise conscience’ (Samier, 2008: 12). They can also promote a profound obedience to authority, endowing senior officials with too much power and prompting members to follow orders unquestioningly (Arendt, 1964). Bureaucratic prescriptions (policies, rules, procedures) can erode ethical sensitivity (Langlois, 2011) and the impetus for moral action (Begley, 2004; Samier, 2008). Other bureau-pathologies include careerism, nest feathering and abuse of power (Perrow, 1986).

Some organizational environments are more conducive to the emergence of maladministration than others. Workplaces characterized by instability, ambiguity and uncertainty provide breeding grounds for bad leaders (Lipman-Blumen, 2005). So, too, are those organizations that centralize discretionary power and put few constraints on its use (Furnham, 2010). Insularity in leadership teams can institutionalize bad behaviour (Mumford et al., 2007; Van Fleet and Griffin, 2006). Policy orientation can also be a factor. For example, the rise of discourses and practices that over-emphasize performance measurement and competition in education feed a ‘ruthless’ (Field, 2015: 185), results-oriented management style that can be experienced as mistreatment in school cultures that had previously been collaborative and caring (Samier, 2008).

Methods and Data Sources

The research process involved a systematic search for publicly available sources of case material related to maladministration in schooling systems in Canadian jurisdictions. Targeted sources included reports from disciplinary hearings conducted by the regulatory bodies responsible for governing the professional and ethical conduct of school administrators, reports and stories published in newspapers, court records and cases communicated in previous empirical studies. In the end, a decision was made to base the study on data from the two most robust, reliable and comprehensive sources of data, which were the websites of the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT) (http://www.oct.ca) and the British Columbia Ministry of Education (BC Ministry) (http://bcteacherregulation.ca) where it was possible to access reports from disciplinary hearings for certified teachers and administrators in those jurisdictions (see British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2015a; Ontario College of Teachers, 2015b).

To identify cases of maladministration in the OCT inventory, every report in the database was read and those involving administrators were included in the study while those pertaining to teachers were excluded. In contrast, the BC Ministry database was searchable electronically so key words were used to distinguish relevant material involving administrators. These searches yielded 41 reports from Ontario (ON) spanning the years 1999–2014 and 23 from British Columbia (BC) covering 1993–2015 (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Databases for this study – reports on disciplinary hearings from regulators in ON (from 1999 to 2014) and British Columbia (from 1993 to 2015).

Administrative role	ON	BC
Vice principal	8	6
Principal	31	15
Superintendent/assistant superintendent	2	2
Total	41	23

Each case report was read closely and pertinent details (that is, name, position, date of the hearing, description of act(s) of maladministration, whether the act(s) were criminal, outcome(s) of the hearing, penalties/sanctions imposed) were logged in a summary table. A targeted search was conducted for additional sources of data related to the cases (for example, newspapers, court records). Throughout, research memos (Corbin and Strauss, 2015) were used to record details of each case that were responsive to the study’s research question and theoretical framework (Merriam, 2009).

A hybrid approach (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006) was used with the data. Inductive coding and analysis (Thomas, 2006) led to the identification of themes that were eventually specified to be dimensions of maladministration because a continuum of dubious acts (from minor to severe) could be discerned within each thematic area. Deductive coding and analysis (Crabtree and Miller, 1999) based on the theoretical framework allowed for cases to be interpreted as manifestations of sad, mad or bad leadership. The coding and interpretation process using this framework was treated as a heuristic endeavour used to gain exploratory insights (Kleining and Witt, 2000).

Findings and Discussion

The databases supplied information on acts of maladministration committed by superintendents, assistant superintendents, principals and vice principals arising from complaints filed with regulators and for which disciplinary sanctions were invoked following due processes. Analysis of these data allowed for the identification of a typology of maladministration within which individual acts and the types of leadership (that is, sad, mad, bad) associated with them could be categorized and their relative frequencies clarified. The presentation of this typology and related findings is at the heart of what follows; however, the study also yielded tentative insights about the prevalence of maladministration and we begin with a brief excursion into this topic.

The Prevalence of Maladministration: Tentative Insights

The number of cases obtained from the databases suggests that on average fewer than three administrators per year in ON and around one per year in BC were found by regulators to have committed acts of maladministration (see Table 2). These figures imply that in both jurisdictions only 4/100ths of 1% of administrators were subjected to disciplinary sanctions, based on an estimation process that uses as a point of reference the total number of fulltime equivalent (FTE) administrators employed in 2013–14 (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2015b; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015c). This tiny number supports the impression that educational administrators are a competent, well-adjusted group of professionals and that the leadership recruitment and development systems in these jurisdictions has functioned well, at least in terms of managing the risk of bad behaviour.

Table 2.

Estimated prevalence of maladministration based on reports from disciplinary hearings available on websites of regulators in ON (1999–2014) and BC (1993–2015) and using baseline data on FTE counts of administrators from 2013–14.

Total number of cases of maladministration		Average number of cases of maladministration per year*		Percentage of administrators sanctioned per year**
ON	BC	ON	BC	ON	BC
41	23	2.75	1	0.04%	0.04%

Notes: *Calculated as follows: 41 cases/15 years=2.75 cases/year in ON; 23 cases/22 years=1 case/year in BC. **Calculated as follows: 2.75 cases/7230 FTE x 100=0.04% in ON; 1 case/2594 FTE x 100=0.04% in BC.

There are, however, a few caveats to this conclusion. First, not all (alleged) acts of maladministration are reported to regulators and not all cases investigated and adjudicated are reported to the public (Bennett and Mitchell, 2014; Donovan, 2011). Second, there is a distinct lack of cases in the regulators’ databases addressing the mistreatment (for example, intimidation, harassment, bullying) of teachers and students, which was surprising given these behaviours were unearthed by previous researchers (for example, Blase and Blase, 2010). Third, and most importantly, although the number of cases may be small, the maladministration in them was frequently severe and occurred over long periods of time, magnifying its negative impacts. For example, an assistant superintendent was sanctioned for having sexually harassed female teachers and district office employees for more than a decade (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2015c).

Dimensions of Maladministration and Types of Leadership Behaviours

The cases revealed educational leaders being disciplined for a variety of acts that ranged from minor to severe in their impacts and their breach of ethics, moral decency and professional standards. Through inductive analysis eight dimensions of maladministration emerged from the data, including: Incompetence/negligence (for example, failing to report incidents or to adequately supervise); academic/professional dishonesty (for example, breaching testing protocols, falsifying records); financial transgressions (for example, mismanaging or misappropriating funds, committing fraud); sexual misconduct towards students (for example, using sexualized language, committing sexual assault); sexual misconduct towards staff (for example, sexually harassing staff, abusing authority to sexually exploit staff); mistreatment of students (for example, using racialized or belittling language); mistreatment of staff (for example, berating, harassing, intimidating, or marginalizing staff); off-duty misconduct (for example, misbehaving in ways that denigrated the profession, being charged or convicted of an offense).

At first glance, it might seem redundant to have separate categories for sexual misconduct and mistreatment, as the former would seem to be a particularly pernicious form of the latter. However, because sexualized forms of misconduct were the most prominent type of maladministration in the data they merited a distinction. In addition, distinctions were warranted between misconduct directed towards students from that targeting staff because the former were in more vulnerable positions vis-a-vis administrative power. This dynamic was borne out in the data, which revealed students being targeted in significantly higher proportions than staff (see Tables 3 and 4).

Table 3.

Types of maladministration and sad, mad or bad leadership in cases of administrators disciplined by the Ontario college of teachers (1999–2014).

Type of maladministration	Leadership type			Total (% of total) (n = 41)
Type of maladministration	Sad	Mad	Bad	Total (% of total) (n = 41)
Incompetence/negligence	5		1	6 (15%)
Academic/professional dishonesty	1		4	5 (12%)
Financial transgressions	3	1	7	11 (27%)
Sexual misconduct towards students	2	1	8	11 (27%)
Sexual misconduct towards staff	1	1		2 (5%)
Mistreatment of students	1	1		2 (5%)
Mistreatment of staff	1	1		2 (5%)
Off-duty misconduct	2			2 (5%)

Table 4.

Types of maladministration and sad, mad or bad leadership in cases of administrators disciplined by BC regulators (1993–2015).

Type of maladministration	Leadership type			Total(% of total) (n = 23)
Type of maladministration	Sad	Mad	Bad	Total(% of total) (n = 23)
Incompetence/negligence	2			2 (9%)
Academic/professional dishonesty	1			1 (4%)
Financial transgressions	3	1	3	7 (30%)
Sexual misconduct towards students			6	6 (26%)
Sexual misconduct towards staff			3	3 (13%)
Mistreatment of students		1		1 (4%)
Mistreatment of staff				0 (0%)
Off-duty misconduct	2	1		3 (13%)

Tables 3 and 4 present a typology of dimensions of maladministration mapped to sad, mad and bad leadership behaviour. These tables also display the frequencies of forms of maladministration and types of leadership associated with them, as derived and interpreted from the case material. Comparative analysis of the data in these tables yielded five significant patterns, which are the focus of the discussion here.

Sexual Misconduct

Sexual misconduct directed mainly towards students but also targeting teachers and staff members was the most common type of maladministration, accounting for more than one-third of the cases. A small minority of these acts involved sad leadership stemming from extremely poor judgment, an example being a male vice principal subjecting 16 male students to a demeaning strip search after money reportedly went missing from a locker room (Ontario College of Teachers, 2013). There appeared to be one instance of mad leadership centring on a male administrator who formed an emotional attachment to a female student that represented a serious lapse of professional boundaries for which he reportedly sought psychological therapy (Ontario College of Teachers, 2012a). The remaining cases all featured severe forms of misconduct, such as one involving a vice principal who was subject to disciplinary action after being convicted of 22 criminal acts (sexual assault, sexual intercourse without consent, indecent assault, gross indecency) against 14 complainants over a period of two decades (Ontario College of Teachers, 2005a). Behaviours like this could really only be understood to be bad, even evil.

These findings were made more distressing by the cases of negligence, all but one of which involved a failure to report suspected sexual abuse (when the alleged misconduct occurred between an adult and a student) or failure to adequately supervise (in instances where there was alleged sexual assault between students). The inattentiveness, lack of competence, will or courage in these cases were manifestations of sad leadership, which served to create conducive conditions for harm to occur and to amplify harm. In one instance (that is, Ontario College of Teachers, 2013: 2), a regulatory decision revealed a principal ‘deliberately turned a blind eye … to protect his friendship’ with a school employee who sexually abused a student with learning disabilities over a period of several years. This wilful behaviour was typified here as bad leadership.

Financial Transgressions

Financial transgressions represented the second most frequent type of maladministration. These cases demonstrated how weaknesses in the checks and balances on administrators’ use of organizational authorities can be conducive to maladministration (Office of the New York State Comptroller, 2005). The acts ranged in severity from one principal failing to keep track of expenditures to another who was found guilty in court of defrauding a school board and accepting bribes and eventually returned CDN$127,000 to the board. Some acts seemed to stem from worrisome ethical lapses (for example, repeatedly using a school board credit card to fill up the gas tank of a personal vehicle) and poor judgment (for example, taking expensive resources from one school to another without approval upon a job transfer). These types of cases were classified as stemming from sad leadership because the administrators involved seemed to have fallen into the mismanagement or misuse of resources out of fairly limited failures in judgment, commitment or integrity.

The majority of cases, however, revealed a consistent pattern of unscrupulous behaviour over significant periods of time, with the misappropriation exceeding CDN$100,000 in two instances (Ontario College of Teachers, 2005b, 2005c). Most of these acts seemed to be full-blown examples of bad leadership because they encompassed a dark triad of features (that is, narcissism/entitlement, risk-taking, manipulation), which were captured in a news story on the outcome of a criminal trial related to one of the cases. In passing sentence the judge was reported to have argued:

The fraud engaged a high degree of planning, premeditation and sophistication. The dishonest conduct was years in duration … To outside observers, [the superintendent] appeared to be a successful educator and executive manager … [but] … with power can come temptation to abuse that power [such that the conduct reflected a] high-degree of moral blameworthiness. (Mitchell, 2007)

Two cases were deemed to manifest mad leadership. In one, the principal appeared to exhibit an abnormal level of anti-social, risk-taking behaviour (Ontario College of Teachers, 2000). In the other, the administrator was subject to a court order to undergo psychiatric assessment and treatment (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2015d).

Academic Dishonesty

The third most frequent acts of maladministration involved academic dishonesty. These cases were largely confined to the ON context where they revealed misbehaviours at school levels related to the administration of standardized tests. One clearly manifested sad leadership. It involved a superintendent who lacked the knowledge and judgment to correct erroneous instructions given by a junior colleague to teaching staff, and whose inaction appeared to condone the widespread breaching of protocol that subsequently took place (Ontario College of Teachers, 2006). The other cases all involved wilful transgressions. One featured a principal who, against guidelines, allowed teachers to access and photocopy tests in advance, while reportedly suggesting they should ‘do what they could to ensure good test scores’. These actions were interpreted by some teachers as encouragement to disregard protocols leading up to and during the tests (Ontario College of Teachers, 2009a: 5). The apparent lack of integrity, risk-taking and manipulative behaviours apparent in these types of cases bore the hallmarks of bad leadership and were thus categorized that way. In one case, however, a statement was included about the administrators being ‘highly respected’ and having an ‘unblemished’ track record (Ontario College of Teachers, 2009a: 4) and in another case the administrator was reportedly ‘considered by many … to be a dedicated, capable and caring Vice-Principal’ (Ontario College of Teachers, 2007: 8). Such statements suggested the dishonest behaviour was out of character. This raised questions during the analysis and interpretation of these two cases regarding contextual and motivational factors, such as the degree to which external pressures to raise test scores were a factor or whether the administrators saw their actions as somehow levelling the playing field. Because the pedagogic and social value of standardized testing are hotly contested among educators in Canada and elsewhere (Giese and Alphonso, 2013; Westheimer, 2010), it is conceivable these administrators may have acted, at least in part, from what they believed to be in the students’ or schools’ best interest. This would shift the nature of their leadership into the realm of sad (for example, poor ethical or professional judgment) or mad (for example, abnormal levels of passive-aggressiveness or manipulative behaviour), but there was not sufficient contextual data to confirm or disconfirm these possibilities.

These cases of academic dishonesty revealed how the ethical climate of schools were affected by the symbiotic relationship between organizational members who were susceptible to dubious direction and leaders who were emboldened by the conducive response of members to that direction. The cases also foregrounded the broader contextual pressures associated with accountability and performance measurement reforms layered onto Canadian schools over the last two decades (Pinto, 2012; Taylor, 2001; Wallner, 2012). Similar reforms in other public sector settings have been shown to have unintended ethical and organizational consequences such as gaming, cheating and doing whatever it takes to meet targets (Pollitt, 2013). These reforms have also prompted subversive behaviours aimed at resisting or undoing the perceived harms and injustices brought in their trail (Portelli and Konecny, 2013). Begley (2004) observed resistance to be one of the responses of school administrators when they are confronted with ethical issues in policy implementation, but it needs to be noted that resistance to bad policy does not need to occur through morally dubious means. There are ethical reasoning and advocacy processes, for example, based on the balanced application of the ethics of justice, critique and care (Langlois, 2004), along with politically savvy avenues of action such as ‘policy appropriation’ (Winton and Pollock, 2013: 43) administrators can use when they are troubled or outraged by system-level direction.

Mistreatment: Curiously Absent

Mistreatment (for example, harassment, bullying, emotional abuse) that did not have a sexualized component but that previous researchers (Blase and Blase, 2010; de Wet, 2010, 2014) had unearthed was barely represented in the data here. Although it could be that such acts are infrequent, it is more likely they go unreported due to shame or fear of reprisal (Blase and Blase, 2002, 2003, 2004) or because they manifest as ambiguous behaviours that are not as readily defined as are sexualized forms of mistreatment. Organizational members who are negatively affected might not feel there are clear grounds for making formal complaints to regulators or if complaints are made they may be plausibly denied as a matter of perception or opinion, making non-sexualized mistreatment difficult for regulatory bodies to investigate and decide upon. As a result, this type of maladministration may be quietly dealt with at local levels, if it is dealt with at all, and different data sources and methods than those used here would be needed to confirm or disconfirm the presence and prevalence of mistreatment.

Gendered Patterns of Maladministration

The majority of cases (81%) involved male administrators (see Table 5), a figure that is disproportionate to ratios of male to female administrators in ON where, in 2012–2013, one-third of all principals and vice principals were male (in 1999–2000 two-fifths were male) (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2015d, 2015e) and in BC where the ratio has been roughly 50/50 since 2009–2010 (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2015e). This finding suggests that, from the standpoint of cases heard by regulators in ON and BC, maladministration has been confirmed more frequently among populations of male administrators.

Table 5.

Types of maladministration in cases of female and male administrators disciplined by the Ontario college of teachers (1999–2014) and BC Regulators (1993–2015).

Type of maladministration	Female Administrators		Male administrators		Total (n = 64)
Type of maladministration	ON (n = 11)	BC (n = 1)	ON (n = 30)	BC (n = 22)	Female (n = 12, 19% of total)	Male (n = 52, 81% of total)
Incompetence/negligence	2	0	4	2	2	6
Academic/professional dishonesty	3	0	2	1	4	3
Financial transgressions	4	1	7	7	5	14
Sexual misconduct towards students	1	0	10	5	1	15
Sexual misconduct towards staff	0	0	2	3	0	5
Mistreatment of students	0	0	2	1	0	3
Mistreatment of staff	1	0	1	0	1	1
Off-duty misconduct	0	0	2	3	0	5

When the data was disaggregated by sex (see Table 5) two other patterns emerged. First, in contrast to the prominence of sexual misconduct among the cases involving male leaders, only one case concerning a female leader had a sexualized dimension to it. This finding resonated with previous research showing sexual misconduct to be rare among female educators (Shakeshaft, 2004). In addition, the incident in question was not severe; it involved a female principal who required a female student to bend over to demonstrate how the student’s underwear would be visible because of her short skirt (Ontario College of Teachers, 2009b). The principal’s behaviour appeared to stem from poor judgment and was classified here as an instance of sad leadership. The second pattern showed a higher proportion of female administrators to have been involved in financial transgressions, although there was not an observable difference in the severity of transgressions across male and female leaders and administrators of both sexes appeared to be motivated by their own enrichment and/or that of family members. In two cases involving female administrators, however, there were indications the majority of ill-gotten resources were redistributed to the school community – for example, to purchase gifts and rewards for staff members (Ontario College of Teachers, 2012b) or technology for an underprivileged school (Ontario College of Teachers, 2012c). This raised questions in the analysis and interpretation of the cases as to whether the administrators were motivated (at least in part) by a (misguided) ethic of care. Ultimately, further research is needed to confirm the validity of these gendered patterns and plausible explanations for them.

Conclusion

Based on the public records available in the two Canadian jurisdictions at the heart of this study, maladministration appears to be infrequent among school and district level leaders and even less frequent among populations of female leaders. This finding supports a view of the educational administration community as being comprised of competent, trustworthy professionals who have generated the collective ‘moral intensity’ (Langlois, 2011: 55) needed to ensure widespread principled action.

It is also likely, however, that maladministration is underreported in schooling systems because of fear, uncertainty or negligence on the part of organizational members or as a result of the deceptive or manipulative practices of perpetrators. In addition, evidence exists that some reported cases are hidden from public view. Moreover, although maladministration may be infrequent, it is often severe and can have long-lasting negative impacts on people and institutions. This point was foregrounded by the disturbing fact that sexual misconduct against students was the most frequent type of wrongdoing in the data explored in this study. The harmful effects of such behaviour on victims and their families can last a lifetime and cascade across generations (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). In an era where trust in public institutions is reportedly on the wane, the prevalence of financial transgressions and academic dishonesty in the data also raises red flags because individual cases may be seized upon in the media, legislatures and popular imagination as signs of a lack of accountability and integrity in the system.

An underlying goal of this study was to generate a typology to inform existing strategies for preventing maladministration. The typology that emerged had two parts. The first consisted of eight dimensions derived from empirical data, which can serve to highlight the main forms of maladministration against which schooling communities should continue to bolster defences. The second consisted of the model of sad, mad and bad leadership, which, if used as a sensitizing construct (Patton, 2011), can help people recognize leaders who may be going off the rails (Furnham, 2010) and to discern the kinds of interventions that might be needed for such leaders (for example, incompetence and mental illness each merit a different organizational response). When populated with data that describes the frequencies of certain forms of maladministration and the manifested leadership behaviours (as in Tables 3 and 4), the typology may help to spot patterns and establish prevention priorities. For example, the data here would be supportive of making the issues of sexual misconduct and the duty to report sexual abuse central to any planned interventions in the leadership development system.

There are also some broader preventative mechanisms that have been shown to bolster schooling systems against wrongdoing. Formal standards of professional practice (for example, BCPVPA, 2015) have been reported to improve ethical decision making, although ethical sensitivity can be reduced if too much external control is exercised over individual leaders (Langlois, 2011). Arguments have also been made to focus leadership recruitment, development and monitoring on issues of individual character, integrity and virtue. Systems of admonishment and punishment, such as those from which the data for this study were drawn, have also been shown to reduce the unethical behaviour that can flourish when it is ‘not subject to sanctions or otherwise provokes no response’ (Langlois, 2011: 54). Other guidance includes avoiding the centralization of discretionary power (Kaiser and Hogan, 2007), democratizing governance (Dillard and Ruchala, 2005), ensuring recourse mechanisms are fair and safe, and having impartial third parties who can monitor, intervene and adjudicate (Kellerman, 2004). Finally, maladministration may be warded off by (re)humanizing organizational cultures to help generate the reciprocity, goodwill and moral commitments needed to create a system of mutual care, to keep leaders on the right track, and to have the will to intervene when leaders go off the rails (Samier, 2008; Lipman-Blumen, 2005).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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