The author begins this article with a brief review of the reasons educational leaders and schools need to promote equity and social justice. The article then critiques two approaches to educational leadership as inadequate for preparing educational leaders to foster equity and social justice. The conventional approach to both educational leadership and the preparation of educational leaders is characterized by external control, technical rationality, and maintenance of the status quo, characteristics that are incompatible with the preparation of transformational leaders. The critical approach, although contributing to awareness of inequity and its negative effects as well as the power of assets-based education and empowerment, also possesses a number of characteristics that make it inappropriate as the primary focus of leadership preparation. Negative characteristics of the critical approach cited by Gergen (1994a) include the containment of conversation, rhetorical incitement, atomization of community, the totalizing impulse, and self-immolation. Critical theory leads to deficit thinking, self-certainty, and the forced acceptance of untested assumptions. This article proposes an alternative to both the conventional and critical approaches, a model for preparing leaders for equity and social justice that borrows from several perspectives and attempts to keep those perspectives in balance. This alternative model includes seven components: awareness, care, critique, expertise, relationship, community, and accountability.
Ncpea publications
This two-part manuscript has been peer-reviewed, accepted, and is endorsed by the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) as a significant contribution to the scholarship and practice of education administration. In addition to publication in the
International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation, Volume 7, Number 2 (Summer 2012), ISSN 2155-9635, this manuscript exists in the Connexions Content Commons as an Open Education Resource (OER). Formatted and edited by Theodore Creighton, Virginia Tech; Brad Bizzell, Radford University; and Janet Tareilo, Stephen F. Austin State University. The assignment of topic editor and double-blind reviews are managed by Editor, Linda Lemasters, George Washington University. The IJELP is indexed in the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), sponsored by the United States Department of Education.
Introduction
“Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There was shouting, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials….Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” (Orwell, 1996, p. 141)
I begin this article with a brief overview of the need for preparation programs to address equity and social justice. Next, I discuss the conventional approach to leadership preparation, three historical characteristics of that approach, and why each of these characteristics works against addressing equity and social justice. I then describe the critical approach, acknowledge the contributions that critical theory and related research have made to the knowledge of inequity in our schools, but also critique critical theory regarding its deficit thinking, self-certainty, an antagonism toward other belief systems, and argue that critical theory by itself is not an appropriate approach to leadership preparation. Herein I propose a
third way for addressing equity and social justice in principal preparation—a model including seven components. Finally, I discuss implications of the third-way model for practice and research.
