There is currently a proliferation of weighty and often expensive handbooks and readers on the market. All of them purport to present the quintessential collection of commentary on the topic in question. This is not quite the case with the tome under review. As the Editor Fenwick English suggests in his introduction, The Sage Handbook of Educational Leadership sets out to think creatively about educational leadership and to go further than a simple reiteration of the “state of the art” in the field. Indeed, in the very first paragraph of his introduction (and in a rather careless piece of editorial oversight), the editor names the volume “New dimensions and realities” rather than Advances in Theory, Research and Practice. Fortunately the next 600 or so pages are much more carefully proofed and some of the contributions do indeed make the kind of moves suggested in the rejected title.
The handbook is divided into five sections:
- 1.
“Multiple lenses of democratic leadership”;
- 2.
“Management, organisation and law”;
- 3.
“Educational politics and policy: creating effective, equitable and democratic schools”;
- 4.
“Theories of leadership: research problems and practices”; and
- 5.
“The micropolitics of school leadership”.
The authors are all North American with one chapter from Canada sitting alongside 22 from the USA. The third section, edited by Gary Anderson, long‐time proponent of practitioner research (e.g. Anderson and Herr, 1999; Anderson et al., 1994; Anderson and Jones, 2000), has one contribution by professionals in the field of community development, and another jointly written by academics and professionals involved in a progressive independent school.
However what binds the contributors together is not simply their nationality. This group of writers mostly, as at least some of the section headings suggest, work from and with critical, feminist, and/or progressive standpoints. Editor English is one of a group of educational administration scholars who have engaged critically with US moves to develop “standards” for school principals (see Donmoyer, 1999; Donmoyer et al., 1995; English, 2000). He has also written a text on postmodern challenges to educational administration (English, 2003). And, as he notes in his introduction, several of the writers in this volume “took up the challenge of disagreeing with current directions and trends in education, pointing out the shortcomings and politicisation of the field as it is bent by legislative mandates to forms of increasingly monolithic accountability, even as the content of those laws may be contradictory to the professional aims that formed them” (p. xi). This does not mean that all of the authors and editors are of one mind, nor that the text is uniformly critical in its epistemological leanings. Nevertheless, there is a greater concentration of such writing than is usually the case in these kinds of handbooks, where concerns about democracy, community, poverty and public education tend to be marginalised.
A good illustration of these concerns, and of the editors' promise to promote debate, can be found in two chapters which look at school‐community relations.
The first, by Frances Kochan and Cynthia Reed (Ch. 4, pp. 68‐84), is entitled “Collaborative leadership, community building and democracy in public education”. Beginning with the premise that public education has an historical mandate to “foster and maintain the common structures and civilities needed to sustain our (sic.) American democracy” (p. 69), they argue that twentieth century concerns with efficiency and effectiveness created hierarchical and managerial structures: these caused schools to focus inward and thus they were disconnected from the communities they served. Lack of public trust in education, heightened by conservative panics about allegedly declining standards, was shored up by harsh accountability regimes, blunt restructuring and reform efforts, combined with “dumbed down” curriculum. The “solution”, Kochan and Reid suggest, is to attend to collaborative leadership and community building via the establishment of partnerships and networks. They cite the West Alabama Learning Coalition as one example of community development in action, but note the difficulties in such ventures caused by differences in values, issues of power and varying and conflicting organisational imperatives. They propose transcendent leadership, the practice of visionary idealism and transformative learning and note the implications for educational preparation programmes.
The second contribution on the topic is by Eva Gold, Elaine Simon and Chris Brown (Ch. 11, pp. 237‐68). This chapter is called “A new conception of parent engagement. Community organising for school reform”. The authors begin with an example from Chicago's Logan Square neighbourhood which in the 1990s saw dramatic increases in student achievement, the building of eight new schools, the development of a substantive parent training programme and neighbourhood wide literacy initiative and the growth of school‐based community centres. This chapter is both an argument for, and a theorization of how this change was effected. The writers advocate community organising, and draw on the work of seminal 1930s community worker, Saul Alinsky, who took the methods that trade unions used and applied them to problems in high poverty neighbourhoods. The Alinsky tradition of community development works from the basis that those in poverty are best placed to diagnose their problems and to create viable solutions. It also proposes that the poor often need to take political action in order to achieve their collectively decided goals. Gold, Simon and Brown, researching case studies of such political community organising in education, have developed an indicators framework which measures the development of trust across asymmetrical lines of power. They call this a shift from parent involvement to parent engagement. Their eight indicator areas are leadership development (of parents and community), community power, social capital, public accountability, equity, school‐community connection, positive school climate and high‐quality instruction and curriculum.
Issues of schools and communities are also taken up in relation to student misbehaviour (Ch. 19) where George Petersen argues strongly for the notion of bonding social capital – a remedy for the deficit views of parents and students that arise when the activities of students and schools collide.
Despite the assurance by school effectiveness researchers that school‐community relations are very important, it is still unusual to see such discussions about parents and communities in the educational administration literatures. The National College for School Leadership has had school‐community relations as a priority for some time, yet the edited volume by Gelsthorpe and West‐Burnham (2003) is one of the few in the UK leadership field. So to find not one but three chapters on the topic in an educational administration handbook is indeed rare. That one of them brings into the field theories about social movements and the necessity for political action to bring about reform in inner urban localities (see Anyon, 2005) makes this volume unique in the field in both North America and the UK.
There is a similar prominence given to curriculum and pedagogy with two chapters devoted to discussion of their critical importance (Ch. 17 and Ch. 20), a chapter on teacher unions (Ch. 22), and a very welcome contribution on school design and architecture (Ch. 21). The section on inquiry in educational administration has one chapter that addresses both critical race theory and queer theory (Ch. 14), and another more general questions of diversity and equity (Ch. 16) which connects with an earlier contribution on theories of social justice (Ch. 3).
This then is a text which does provide material unlike that which is most usually found in a leadership handbook. English and his co‐editors set out to bring some different ideas into the educational administration field, and in my view they have succeeded. Some will find these ideas highly provocative. Others, and I am one of them, will find the coverage of diverse topics in keeping not only with the everyday challenges faced by practising school administrators but also in line with the wider debates occurring in the social sciences about scholarship, social change and public policy. I believe that this could be a highly useful text particularly at doctoral level, when candidates must understand the dimensions of the field, its debates and also its connections with other fields of inquiry.
