Educational Leadership

‘This powerful book provides its readers with a rich and productive range of theoretical lenses drawn from the social, political, and organizational sciences to make sense of educational leadership as a professional practice in these troubling times. One of the most powerful contributions is how it captures the tensions and dilemmas for leadership practitioners as they attempt to straddle the (il)logic of practice that characterizes the contemporary education field. The book stands as a testimony to and repudiation of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM): the book’s site of practice may lie in Anglophone nations, but the dilemmas and contradictions it speaks to reach far beyond their shores. There are lessons to be learned from this book for educational practitioners from a range of nations – it is a compelling book, which should be read by scholars and practitioners in the field.’ - Jane Wilkinson, Associate Professor Educational Leadership and Associate Dean, Graduate Education, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. ‘This excellent book will be of help to anyone researching educational leadership, but also head teachers and other educational leaders who want or need to confront the difficult question of what sort of leader it is possible to be in current arrangements. Educational leadership has always been important, but the last 15 years have seen a profound and far-reaching elevation of it, especially in England. It is now seen as the key to a successful school. At the same time, there are crises in recruiting and retaining head teachers, and evidence of unprecedented stress. This paradox is one of the foundations for this book, and one of the main reasons it is so important. By presenting a diverse yet coherent series of examples of scholarship driven by critical theory, it offers ways to make sense of the interplay of policy, agency, and structure. A particularly welcome feature is the incisive engagement with the concealed theory behind policy: the sort of theorizations that claim they are nothing to do with theory, but rather ‘common sense’, or the realm of the ‘practical’. This endlessly and deliberately refreshed element of neoliberal thinking has to be the starting-point for anyone that really cares about the nature and quality of education and its effects, or who is worried or affected by the pressure to force these things into the simplistic reckoning of examination results. Yet the book goes further than this, offering insight and imagination, pointing the way to more hopeful reconceptualizations of leadership and to opportunities for challenge and change. I wholeheartedly recommend it.’ - David James, Professor, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK