Leadership for Democratic Community in Schools

Abstract

In his recent monograph on the quest for a new "center" for educational leadership, Joseph Murphy (1999) identifies "three powerful synthesizing paradigms" (p. 54) embedded in the "shifting landscape" of the field-democratic community, social justice, and school improvement. While suggesting that each offers the potential "to re-culture the profession of school administration" (p. 54), Murphy chooses school improvement as the center, arguing that "it will be the most effective of the three . . . in rebalancing the relationship between the academic and practice wings of the profession" (p. 55). In this chapter we consider a different choice: What would it mean for democratic community to be the center for educational leadership in schools, and how would this choice re-culture the profession? 1 We are interested in this undertaking not only as a natural extension of our respective writings on the relationships among community, democracy, ethics, and leadership in schools, but also as a response to the growing concern that current directions in public school policy, including initiatives associated with "school improvement," actually threaten democracy in schools and society (Berliner, 2001;Elshtain, 1995). We will say more about this concern in a later section of this chapter.Murphy's (1999) selection of democratic community as one of the "synthesizing paradigms" of the field reflects the increasing use of this term in educational writing in recent years. However, the concept is not new, with much of the current work finding its grounding in Dewey's ideas promulgated more than 80 years ago. Kahne's (1996) rendition of democratic community is a good example, as he uses concepts derived directly from Dewey when he contrasts "traditional communitarians," who value traditional roles, responsibilities and norms, with "democratic communitarians," who follow Dewey and consider 105

Examining the Foundations of Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining School Leadership: Towards a Democratic Project of Schooling in Dual Language Bilingual Education

“…Here, leadership data challenged traditional forms of shared and distributed leadership models in which the directionality of power often remains unquestioned, resulting in a “culture of performative governance” by which a hierarchical leader predetermines a scope and goal for multiple actors to implement (Woods & Woods, 2013, p. 5). Examples from these two cases also built on the sparse studies to examine how critical consciousness might leverage democratic (or more frequently referred to as shared and distributed) leadership practices to preserve multilingualism and multiculturalism in schools (Brooks et al, 2007; Furman & Starratt, 2002).…”