Leading Schools in the 21st Century: Careful Driving in the Fast Lane1

Tony Townsend

As many of the chapters in this book suggest, being a leader in a school today, almost anywhere in

the world, can be roughly equated to being a careful driver finding oneself in the fast lane. What do

careful drivers do? They look forward, look behind and look to both sides. They try to make sure

they don’t get in other drivers’ way, as being in the fast lane requires a form of teamwork for it to be

able to exist in the first place. They consistently check the speedometer to make sure they are

maintaining a similar speed to other drivers and they keep an eye out for any other vehicle

encroaching on their space. They have to be more vigilant in the fast lane than they might be in the

slow lane because things happen much quicker here. They don’t want an accident to happen,

because the consequences of accidents in the fast lane are disastrous.

But as careful drivers they realise that what is happening is not necessarily the best for themselves

or the car. They may wish that they were not in the fast lane at all and may seek ways of moving out

of it, all the time recognising that to do this may involve some risky behaviour and recognising that

even if they are successful, they will quickly fall behind the other drivers in the fast lane. They

entered this lane because they were good at what they did, and were prepared to push the limits of

their abilities, but they are now finding that they are somewhat out of their depth. They wonder why

the concept of a fast lane even exists when there seems to be a correlation between speed, car

crashes and personal injury, and the real point of having a car in the first place is to make sure all of

the passengers (not just some of them) get to their destinations successfully. They look across to the

slow lane and see many drivers in the slow lane, taking the slower but more measured choice, not

willing to take the risk of moving into the fast lane. They decide that the fast lane is where they want

to be, but in order to be good there they will have to improve their driving skills.

There are so many ways in which we might characterise schools using a fast lane analogy, but

perhaps three are more pressing in today’s educational environment - being in the fast lane of

change, the fast lane of expectations and the fast lane of accountability. I would like to look at these

three issues, referring back to what my colleagues have said in earlier chapters and then to make

1 Tony Townsend (2016). ‘Leading Schools in the 21st Century: Careful Driving in the Fast Lane’ in

Johnson, G. & Dempster, N. (Eds.) Leadership in Diverse Learning Contexts. AG, Switzerland, Springer, pp. 411-

430

some comments on what style of leadership might be appropriate to drive carefully and

competently, when one has to live in the fast lane.

Fast Lane of Change

When considering the fast lane of change, one way to reflect on how much change has happened in

a very short time is to ask the question: ‘What can a 15-year-old do or experience today that you

could not do when you were 15?’ Given a few minutes to think about this, we might come up with a

series of responses such as ‘iPhones’, ‘Facebook’, ‘IPads’, ‘twitter’ and so on. It is clear that most

people recognise that there has been substantial change in the types of technology available to

young people today, most of which we, as adults feel less comfortable about than they do. However,

if we think further, we might come to recognise that it is not just technology that has changed, but

pretty much everything else too, some of it on the back of technology, but other things not so.

Consider changes in the past 20 years for the environment, employment, relationships, health and

wealth, in society, safety, culture, communication, and even the values demonstrated by society’s

leaders. We could argue that virtually everything has changed and that children today think, act and

understand things differently from how their parents did. Toffler (1971, 12) coined the term ‘future

shock’ to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting

them to too much change in too short a time. He called it that feeling of ‘vague, continuous anxiety’.

The interesting thing about the Toffler statement is that nearly 45 years later, the world is changing

even more rapidly than in Toffler’s time. The movement from email to Facebook to YouTube to text

messaging to Twitter can be measured in months, not years. Facebook, now with over a billion

subscribers, was only conceived in 2003. Children in preparatory grade in 2003 still have not had the

time to complete a full school education.

So how does this fast lane of change impact on education and specifically school leaders? At a

conference in Dubai, Baroness Susan Greenfield made the point that by the end of their primary

school years, students have spent substantially less time in school than they have in their local

communities and, to an even greater extent, online or in front of their computers (Greenfield 2010).

What this suggests is that there are now many avenues for children to learn- or be entertained.

Teachers who do not learn to use the power of the technological resources available to them AND

are also unable to present their lessons in ways that are stimulating might soon find students

becoming what Barber (1996) called the “disappointed”, the “disaffected” and the “disappeared”.

Many schools in the west have now instigated a “tablet” education, where every student has access

to the internet on a hand held device 24 hours a day. They are expected to use it in every class that

they attend. Yet there is an old technological adage that for every dollar that is spent on hardware,

two dollars needs to be spent on training. As Beavis and O’Mara argue in chapter 12:

Curriculum and pedagogical change to incorporate games into the classroom requires ongoing resources and support. There is a need for face-to-face and/or online professional learning support, and for relevant and updated resources to be available in a variety of modes, including online.

Yet many public schools are poorly resourced and this is getting worse in many western countries as

time goes by. At a recent event in Victoria, Australia, where a local principal talked about her

secondary school in the modern world, she made the comment that government funding now only

covered the cost of staff salaries and building maintenance. All the activities that happened within

the school had to be funded from elsewhere, parents, entrepreneurial activity, grant applications,

community support, and so on. And this is a public school, supposedly fully supported by public

funds. One might suggest that governments have a legal and moral responsibility to provide

sufficient resources to ensure that every child is able to access a quality education, but in many

places now, much of the expense seems to be passed on to parents, or to the school itself.

Yet, even if western public schools see themselves as being poorly resourced, they are palaces

compared to schools in some parts of the world. What we in the west need to remember is that the

changes and reforms that are occurring in western schools as we speak, can be equated to the last

10 metres of a hundred metre race. More than 15 years ago I made the comment (Townsend, 1998:

248):

We have conquered the challenge of moving from a quality education system for a few people to having a quality education system for most people. Our challenge now is to move from having a quality education system for most people to having a quality education system for all people.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for all education systems worldwide, with some countries

trying to catch up to the west in a very short time. For instance, in Oman, in 1975, there were only

three primary schools (for boys) in the country. There were no universities and very few medical

services available. Now with universal education and a burgeoning higher education system, Oman

has moved close to a western education system in around 40 years, when most western countries

had a hundred year start.

However, there are around 20 million young people (the majority of them girls) who will never set

foot in a school of any kind. Perhaps part of the task of the modern school leader is to start thinking

and acting globally as well as locally (Townsend, 2009) and to consider ways in which those of us in

well-resourced countries might support young people in other parts of the world to achieve a quality

education. This may be one reason why the Australian Council for Educational Leaders in its

leadership capability framework (ACEL, n.d., online) identified four levels of activity for effective

Principals:

Influencing within and beyond classroom

Influencing within and beyond team

Influencing within and beyond school

Influencing within and globally beyond school

So how does rapid change impact on school leaders? Almost 30 years ago, Hallinger and Murphy

(1985) promoted the term instructional leadership with three dimensions and 11 specific leadership

tasks being proposed: Defining the School’s Mission (which included framing and communicating

school goals), Managing the Instructional Program (which included supervising and evaluating

instruction, coordinating curriculum, and monitoring student progress), and Promoting a Positive

School Learning Climate (which included protecting instructional time, promoting professional

development, maintaining high visibility, providing incentives for teachers, enforcing academic

standards, and providing incentives for students. Notice that the issue of seeking resources for the

school is not in sight.

In more recent times both Hallinger and Murphy have used the term Leadership for Learning in their

writings and Murphy et al. (2007) identified a new list of roles for school leaders:

The knowledge base of leadership for learning is captured under eight major dimensions: vision for learning, instructional program, curricular program, assessment program, communities of learning, resource acquisition and use, organizational culture, and advocacy. (Murphy et al., 2007, p. 179)

It is noticeable that this long list of roles seems much more top-down than the five principles in the

Leadership for Learning literature that emanates from the UK, discussed by Swaffield in Chapter 5,

and the “disciplined dialogue”, discussed by both Dempster in chapter 4 and Webster in chapter

6.The Leadership for Learning principles identified by Swaffield in Chapter 5: “focus on learning,

conditions for learning, dialogue, shared leadership and a shared sense of accountability” and the

suggestion by Dempster in chapter 4, that disciplined dialogue would lead to “conversations

between leaders and staff, which provide a concentration on data and evidence of student learning

by asking the questions: What do we see here? Why are we seeing what we are? and What should

we doing about this,” seem to suggest a completely different school culture to the one suggested by

the principles above.

Townsend et al. (2013, 82) suggested that this list was hardly different from the one developed in

1985 and consequently had not really captured the extent of the changes that school leaders had

made in their practice during this time. They argued:

Vision for learning might be considered as the school’s mission; the instructional program, curricular program, and assessment program are subsumed under managing the instructional program; communities of learning, organizational culture, and advocacy together might be considered as promoting a positive school learning climate; so perhaps the only thing that is different is resource acquisition and use.

The principal’s comment above confirms that entrepreneurial behaviour is now one of the key

talents a principal must have, but one might also suggest that other roles of the principal have

changed, or where they haven’t changed, they need to change, if one is to be a careful driver in the

fast lane of change. It could be argued that the American model continues to see school leadership

as a top-down, “telling” activity, but the British and Australian models seem to propose a much more

dialogic approach to leadership.

Using these two examples as a starting point, one might imagine that distributed leadership, a key

theme of this book, would be applied differently in these settings, a discussion that will emerge

later.

Fast Lane of Expectations

The first section above identified some of the issues associated with change. But with that change

has also come diversity. Classrooms and schools are now very diverse places. This diversity comes in

many forms, some of which, like gender, socio-economic, student motivation and academic ability,

have always been with us in public schools, but others, like language, religion, culture, sexual

preference and disability have come much more strongly into focus in recent years. The majority of

schools and almost every classroom now have to consider how best to support not just the majority

of students, but all students, and this leads to the need for diversity in terms of resourcing, and in

terms of teaching styles. The community is now expecting new processes for encouraging learning

that a few decades ago were not even considered important.

Within the community, we have competing understandings of not only what is expected from

schools but also how they should go about it. Diversity exists in our understandings of what the

underlying purpose of education might be. Townsend (1994) in his study of what communities in

Melbourne, Australia, perceived to be an effective school found that, whereas in some communities

the effective school was expected to prepare students for further education, other communities felt

that an effective school should prepare students for the work place.

Diversity also exists in the community as to whether or not school should be providing equal

opportunities or equal outcomes. The former of these might lead to the argument that all students

should be funded at a similar level within a system, despite the fact that this might lead to

substantial differences in the achievement of students, and the latter would argue that resource

distribution should be based on the needs of the individual student, providing some students with

more resources than others, in order to provide the opportunity for everyone to complete their

education to an appropriate level. A further diversity of opinion within the community relates to the

curriculum considered to be basic, with some arguing that reading, writing and mathematics should

be given strong priority over all other subjects, and others arguing that such a focus deprives

students of the many other skills necessary to become a positive and productive citizen.

Such diversity of opinion can sometimes lead to a substantial difference between what is said at the

policy level and what happens in practice, especially where national priorities have to be

implemented by local education authorities. But there may even be a gap between the national

policies identified and the practical implementation of these policies. Moyle, in chapter 3 argues:

…that although the peak, Australian school education policy, the Melbourne Declaration states that “as a nation Australia values the central role of education in building a democratic, equitable and just society” (MCEETYA, 2008, p. 4), this value has not been carried forward with any vigour into subsequent official national curriculum or personnel performance policies. Instead, this analysis shows that “the central role of education in building a democratic, equitable and just society”, has either been diluted or conflated in the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2011f) and the Australian Professional Standards (MCEECDYA 2011a; 2011b).

It is clear that we are expecting much more of our schools, our principals and our teachers than we

ever have before. First, we are expecting schools to educate more students for longer than ever

before. A quick search of Commonwealth yearbooks in Australia indicates that in the secondary

schools of fifty years ago, only about 1/3 of students that entered year 7 actually completed their

high school education. That has now more than doubled to nearly 80% in most schools and pressure

continues to be brought to bear on schools for maintaining programs that will encourage the other

20% to stay at school as well. It is expected that schools will develop in all students a range of skills

not even talked about twenty years ago; technology skills, critical thinking skills, leadership skills, and

so on. Is it any wonder that American educationalist Judy Codding (1997) suggested that as more

and more students stayed at school longer and longer, the status of teachers seemed to drop in a

proportionate way? At the same time as we expected schools, school leaders and teachers to do

more and more, we took away the level of resourcing that they previously had and our level of trust

in them diminished.

The resource issue is a critical one, because it is one thing totally out of the school’s control. Today

there is a tendency to blame anyone who is part of the system, teachers, principals, teacher

educators, for not ensuring that every single student performs at high levels on specific knowledge

areas. Yet, many of the changes that have happened in schools have been completely out of the

control of either teachers or school leaders. In a newspaper article, headed ‘Teachers: Blame only

where blame is due’ (Hurst 2011), it was argued that of the 16 factors that can affect student

achievement (see below) referred to in Parsing the achievement gap II (ETS 2009), a report by the

Education Testing Service in the US, only six were within the control of the teacher.

curriculum rigour

teacher preparation

teacher experience

teacher absence and turnover

class size

availability of instructional technology

fear and safety at school

parent participation

frequent changing of schools

low birth weight

environmental damage (i.e. lead, mercury)

hunger and nutrition

talking and reading to babies and young children

excessive television watching

parent–pupil ratio (no. of parents)

summer achievement gain/loss.

This balance between what teachers can affect and what they have no control over is mirrored by

what happens to school leaders as well, which is succinctly summed up by Imig, Wiseman, and Imig

(2011, 402), who report: ‘Classrooms experienced sharply increased class sizes and reductions in

supporting staff and aides. School calendars were shortened and more than 100,000 teachers were

“pink slipped” or told their contracts would not be renewed for the 2011/12 school year’. Clearly, all

of these changes would impact poorly on student learning, but none is in the control of the school

leader. These are resource issues decided at the system level and while there is a diversity of opinion

about what the purpose of education is, and how it should be resourced, governments of different

persuasions seem to cater to the opinions they like the best.

The other issue that impacts on the resources that a school currently receives, or is likely to receive

in the future, is the changing demographics of most western societies. In almost every western

society, the population is aging. The percentage of the population reaching what used to be called

the retirement age is now outstripping the percentage of young people at school age. There are a

number of factors involved in this and they are too complex to discuss fully here, so I will just outline

some of them. The most obvious factor is that as the population ages, the percentage of the

community that receives health care is likely to rise too. This means that the health budget, which is

typically one of the two major government expenditures at the state level (with education), is likely

to rise over the immediate future. Public security is also becoming another large drain on resources

at national, state and local levels as these levels now require additional funds for security purposes,

but that is another story.

A further factor associated with this is the seemingly complete rejection by governments of all

persuasions to ever go to an election on a policy of raising taxes (they do so by various forms of

stealth, usually after they win the election). So if the tax base remains largely static and the

proportion of elderly people (who vote) need further funds, then one way of getting them is to

siphon money away from schools full of children (who don’t vote). This might be a cynical way of

putting it, but a review of budget papers over the last 20 or 30 years in most western societies will

show a proportional decline in funding for all forms of education as well as increases in the health

budget. Just ask university Chancellors, Presidents or Principals how supported they feel their

university is. Because the amount of money that governments spend each year increases, if not

through taxes, then through borrowing, a school system can actually be getting more funding year

on year (which is advertised by government) but a smaller percentage of the total pie (which is not

mentioned by government) at the same time.

One response to this is that governments in Western countries are all moving to increase the age at

which one might be expected to retire (which increases the tax base). Another way is to change

retirement benefits for public servants (except politicians), which means that people have to work

longer because their pension may not be enough to keep them out of poverty. A third way is to

make health benefits so expensive that only businesses and organisations can afford them. The

United States is a prime example of this, where people will keep working into their 70’s or 80’s

because it is the only way they can get affordable health coverage. As the world has seen, President

Obama’s attempts to provide universal health coverage in the way that many other western

societies do, has been met with all sorts of opposition, partially because of the belief that this will

increase taxes with a side issue being that government should keep out of people’s personal lives.

When systems find themselves short of the funds they need to provide a world class education for

the whole community, they try to take short cuts. Generally these are identified as being ‘reform

measures that will increase the quality of education’, but most people in education know that

whenever the word ‘reform’ is said, there will likely be less money next year than there was this

year. What we saw in the past, and continue to see today, are all sorts of “reforms” designed to

improve student achievement. They seem to last for a few years and then are replaced by the next

reform measure. Almost two decades ago, Codding (1997: 15) argued:

...almost none of the widely advocated reforms - modular scheduling, open space,

individualized instruction, different school governance experiments, vouchers, charter

schools, the various curriculum reform initiatives - have survived or changed student

performance.

It could be suggested that the last two decades have seen similar results. When reform seems to fail,

or when politicians report that schools are failing, often for their own political motives, people,

especially people who don’t have children in schools, start to lose trust in the system. A perfect

example of this is the US Gallup poll which has measured opinions about public schools in the United

States every five years for the last three decades. The results have been consistent. Parents rate

their own child’s school quite well (in 2010, 77% gave their own public school a grade of ‘A’ or ‘B’),

they are moderately positive about their local schools (in 2010, 49% gave local public schools a grade

of ‘A’ or ‘B’), but thought that overall the US school system was pretty bad (in 2010, 18% gave the

nation’s public schools a grade of ‘A’ or ‘B’). (Gallop Poll, 2014, online)

The impact of this lack of trust impacts substantially on school leaders. The perception that the

system doesn’t trust them creates an environment where they find it difficult to establish a culture

within their school that promotes trust. Gronn’s (2011) comments about education in Britain are

relevant:

With the ever-present looming threat of public humiliation (and even dismissal) for school leaders, due to their schools’ inability to attain performance targets, trust and the ability of school leaders to be able to build and sustain relationships of trust, assume an increasingly high priority (p. 89).

Such a negative environment makes it difficult to build trusting relationships at all levels of the

system when “external circumstances are ill-conducive to the genesis and maintenance of trust”

(Gronn, 2011, p. 100). It could be argued that by managing education through reward and

punishment, and mostly the latter, through the use of standardised testing and then reporting

publically how well schools are doing, that the learning of individual students will be limited and it

may help to explain why there has only been marginal improvement in student achievement in

recent times.

There is evidence to suggest that this lack of trust in schools and the people who work in them may

be misplaced. An interesting study by Alexander, Entwisle and Olson (2001) subsequently updated in

2007, suggests that the blame that is placed on schools for student achievement might not be as fair

as we would hope. Their study, tracking students of 20 elementary schools in the Baltimore area, led

them to conclude:

…cumulative achievement gains over the first nine years of children’s schooling mainly reflect school-year learning, whereas the high SES–low SES achievement gap at 9th grade mainly traces to differential summer learning over the elementary years.

Alexander, Entwisle and Olson (2007, p. 1)

Poorer students, and especially those from the middle class, do better than their higher socio-

economic counterparts during the school year, but the overall performance of schools is mitigated

by the months that students spend away from school. This suggests that perhaps schools may have

been more effective than politicians have given them credit for, but their ability to outweigh the

social disadvantages of poor students is not as high as governments would have us think, because

they are only in school for around 15% of any particular year (and only about 2% of their whole

lifetimes) and the rest the time the community influence overwhelms what schools and teachers

have done. In fact Greenfield, (2010) mentioned earlier, suggests that by the time that students

reach the end of primary school, the amount of time spent in school is about the equivalent of the

time they spend in their community, but is in many cases now considerably less than the amount of

time spent in front of a computer.

The expectation, still held by many, that by the time a child finishes school they are fully able to

become a productive citizen for the rest of their lives is unattainable. It could be argued that one of

the skills now required to be promoted in schools is an attitude towards life-long learning and in

many cases this is happening. But this has little impact on Barber’s disappointed, disaffected and

disappeared. For them, (that is, if they get to go to school in the first place) by the time they reach

the end of primary school, school no longer has any meaning and the last thing they want to do is

learn. But this is also not possible. It is claimed that Gandhi once said:

No child fails to learn from school. Those who never get in learn that the good things in life are not for them. Those who drop out early learn that they do not deserve the good things in life. The later dropouts learn that the system can be beaten, but not by them.

So we could argue that schools are in the very fast lane of expectations. The evidence suggests

that we are expecting principals to lead teachers that have to do more and more with less and

less. One impact has been that the community now expects our teachers to give much more to

the school than the community of our parents did. There is no more rush for the car park when

the school bell goes. Teachers now typically spend three to four hours daily beyond the school

day, some before school, some after school, some in the evening at home, and sometimes all

three, just to be able to manage the expectations of the communities they serve. They have

become leaders of their own classrooms and sometimes leaders of others as well. How the

leader manages this scenario is part of the story of distributed leadership discussed in this book.

It might be argued that distributed leadership is one outcome of the fast lane of expectations,

where the task of leading a school has become too large for any individual and the position of a

single “heroic” leader becomes virtually untenable. How a school leader manages this fact will

provide an insight into how leadership might be distributed.

Fast Lane of Accountability

When we consider the fast lane of accountability we might be able to establish how disappointed,

disaffected or disappeared students now bring pressures on school leadership that did not occur

even twenty to thirty years ago.

As Reynolds et al. (in press) argue, what used to be known as school effectiveness, and is now mostly

called educational effectiveness, focuses on two foundational questions:

What makes a school good?

How do we make more schools good?

The history of the effectiveness research has gone through a number of phases (they argue five)

from the initial reaction to the studies of Coleman et al. (1966) and Jencks et al. (1972) where there

were attempts to try and disprove the argument the previous research had made, that schools did

not make much difference to how well students performed, in comparison to their initial ability and

social backgrounds. Following were phases where more sophisticated methodologies were used to

measure the effects a school might have on student achievement, where there were questions

about why some schools were more effective than others, and where the research became

international in its approach, to the current phase where educational effectiveness is seen as a

dynamic set of relationships(Creemers & Kyriakides, 2008) involving connections between not only

the student and the teacher in the classroom and the school, but also the system (the context in

which the school exists) as well.

The issue of context is worth looking at in more detail since some of the earlier chapters of this book

consider context as critical to the debate. Bogotch, et al. in chapter 2 describe the Principal Rapid

Orientation and Preparation in Educational Leadership (PROPEL) activity as being:

…viewed as a deliberate beginning, again with the understanding that the local context, its rules and regulations, the local culture, the district-way, and the need to develop skills and dispositions for individual and systems had to be rethought.

In chapter 4, Dempster uses the NCSL point that “Differences in context affect the nature, pace and

direction of leadership actions” as a rationale for developing leadership activities that were

contextually based within their PALL (Principals as Literacy Leaders) program and in chapter 5

Swaffield argues that “the efficacy of learning is highly sensitive to context and to the differing ways

people learn.” This point is well supported by the story told by Cirone (2011) about the differences

between business and schools (and why the business approach, where a standardised approach is

applied to ingredients to create standardised products, may just not be right for schools). Businesses

have the luxury of sending back any ingredients that are not high quality in their efforts to turn out

superior products. Since students are the basic ingredients for learning in school, some schools don’t

always have the ideal ingredients to work with, but they can’t send them back to the producer. “We

take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude,

and brilliant. We take them with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, junior rheumatoid arthritis,

and English as their second language. We take them all. Everyone. And that is why it’s not a

business. It’s a school.” (Cirone, 2011, online) This shows on the one hand the limitations, and on

the other, the potential dangers, of treating all people in the same way, having everyone take the

same tests, yet expecting all to be successful. It could be argued that equality of educational

opportunity may not lead to preferred educational outcomes.

But context also emerges in much more obvious ways if we consider Webster’s argument in chapter

6.When students with specific disabilities are included within regular classrooms, they become the

context in which other students will learn. This will have special meaning for some school leaders

where the need to address the context of specific students, or specific classrooms, is required.

Jorgenson in chapter 14, Flückiger and Klieve in chapter 17 and Johnson and McKenzie in chapter 18

develop the understanding of context within indigenous communities and Singh and Glasswell in

chapter 13 consider issues of leadership within a low socio-economic context. In the case of the

indigienous communityall principals will need to share an understanding of a particular context and

a similar response is found in chapter 13, despite the underlying context being quite different. This

school level context is taken one step further by Clarke and O’Donoghue in chapter 7, where a whole

system might have to adapt to the specific context of students learning in post-conflict schools.

What these chapters provide is a better understanding of how context may need to be considered at

the individual student level, for specific classrooms, for whole schools and even for some systems.

This seems to suggest that international comparative tests, such as TIMSS and PISA, might be less

than helpful to individual teachers, school leaders, schools and school systems when such broad

brushed understanding of student achievement is used as a means for developing policy.

The nuances of context hardly ever appear in political statements, and a Minister of Education in

Australia was once heard to say “we are 5th in the world and that’s not good enough”. As Cumming,

Maxwell and Wyatt-Smith point out in chapter 11, “Accountability assessments are political and

managerial mechanisms to identify publicly the relative quality of schools through their students’

performance on standardised tests” where the “potentially negative effects on teaching quality that

have been shown to result from external accountability tests and examinations can have disastrous

consequences for both teacher and student morale and wellbeing.”

However, the response to such attitudes has been felt in many countries as national governments

take steps to override state or local government responsibility for the delivery of education. In

chapter 2, Bogotch, et al. report:

…federal mandates such as Goals 2000: Educate America Act (1994), the passage of the 2001 “No Child Left Behind” Act (NCLB), and the subsequent 2009 “Race to the Top” competitive grant program (RTTT), have exceeded federal constitutional authority in mandating the content and direction of public education (Reyes-Guerra, 2012).

It could be argued that the fast lane of accountability has impacted on school leaders and teachers in

both positive and negative ways. On the positive side of things, the impact of NCLB in the US, for

instance, might be seen as positive in “changing mindsets of what leaders expected in the classroom

and altering how teachers taught students with varying needs” (Murakami-Ramalho & Rodríquez,

2012, p. 57) and it “brought more focus to curriculum and instruction and held principals and

teachers more accountable” (Alsbury & Whitaker, 2012, p. 173). However, when it comes to the

measure of success that is used in the US, namely student achievement, it might be argued that

NCLB has been found wanting. Kerachsky (2009) reported minimal progress in student achievement

in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) since 2004. Over a longer period, from

1971 to 2008, there has been a 6% improvement in scores for reading for 9 year-olds, a 2%

improvement in 13 year-olds, but no improvement in 17 year-olds. Again, for mathematics, the

actual numbers are different, but exactly the same trend occurs overall.

It is arguable whether this top down approach to accountability can be seen to be successful. Acker-

Hocevar et al. (2012) and Townsend et al. (2013) considered the impact of the No Child Left Behind

(NCLB) Act using the voices of superintendents and principals across the United States. They found

that under NCLB policies, both superintendents and principals reported that the narrowness of the

curriculum objectives, the top-down hierarchical nature of decision making in the system, and the

pervasively negative and punitive environment, impacted negatively on the work of instructional

leaders.

It seemed that the use of the NCLB framework led to a particular view of what principals saw

instructional leadership to be. Townsend, et al. (2013, 72) use the statement from one of the

principals in their study to demonstrate this:

“I’m going to be the leader of the vision and I’m the instructional leader and I know that those are two of my primary goals” (Principal 4, elementary school, Midwest, 2005)

Not only was instructional leadership under NCLB hierarchical in the sense that the school leader

was the one in charge, it was also narrowly focused and seems only to “support growth with a focus

on results” (Pedwell et al., 2011, p. 613). It could be argued that “much of the instructional

leadership literature reduces learning to ‘outcomes’” (MacBeath & Townsend, 2011, p. 1250) rather

than to focus on assessment for learning, assessment as learning or assessment in learning as

discussed by Cumming, Maxwell and Wyatt-Smith in chapter 11. Instructional leadership ignores the

fact that education and learning, at their roots, are about people. Elmore (2003) argues that this

leads to problems of both implementation and resourcing.

[In] . . . state accountability systems in the U.S. and the U.S. national policy (No Child Left Behind), accountability for performance is considered to be the leading instrument of policy and human investment is considered to be a collateral responsibility of states and localities, which can be exercised according to their preference. In the U.S. this situation has resulted in a disastrous gap between capacity and performance—the states and the federal government exert increasing pressure on schools to perform, but have essentially defaulted on their responsibility for human investment, leading to an increasingly large number of low-performing schools that continue to operate at low capacity. (p. 2)

Yet if accountability forces us to focus on a narrow range of possible outcomes and to adopt a

hierarchical approach to educational leadership, then perhaps we need to reassess what we mean

by accountability and how we might use it to support student learning. Townsend (2009: 364)

argued that we have to do things in a different way.

…we have to move beyond accountability, which is simply a counting and sorting process, and seems to mostly have been designed to enable politicians to report things to communities in slick sound bites and with little or no analysis, and towards responsibility, where we need to respond to the needs and circumstances of the young people we serve and have an internal motivation to improve schools, not because it makes us look better, but because it is the right thing to do for the young people we interact with. Under these circumstances communities, and governments, accept that it is both their legal and moral responsibility to ensure that all people within their communities are given the educational provision required to enable them to achieve their full potential as global citizens.

If we are to have leaders capable of living in the fast lane, where there are greater risks, but also

greater rewards, what might we need to think about? In the final section of the chapter, I want to

consider some of the issues that might lead us forward.

Leading in the Fast Lane

Historically, traditional leadership theory framed the tasks of the leader as the relationship between

leaders, followers, and common goals (Bass, 1990; Blake & Mouton, 1961; Burns, 1978). Townsend,

Pisapia & Razzaq (2013) argue that this theoretical position served us well for leading people in

vertical relationships (e.g., leader – follower – common goals) where command, control and

persuasion tactics are the levers of change to maintain the status quo; when the world and its

systems are seen as comparatively stable over time. Simply put, leaders could solve problems with

established processes in seemingly clear cut and well known ways. This form of leadership, however,

does not serve us well when we view problems in more complex systems that require adaptive

leadership and non-routine solutions (Snyder, Acker-Hocevar, & Snyder, 2008).

Various theorists have talked about the problems that leaders face. Patton (2008) offered a typology

of problems as simple, complicated, and complex. If the ingredients are standardised and the steps

are clear and easy to understand, then baking a cake is a simple problem. A complicated problem

involves organizing many people to work on a task together, such as in sending a rocket to the moon

and a complex problem happens when even if you know what to do and you follow the steps

required, unpredictable results occur. Leithwood & Steinbach (1995) found that leaders generally

categorized situations into those that are either structured or unstructured and that when leaders

run into an unstructured situation, they can be confronted by a disorienting, challenging, situation.

The implication is that they needed others to help define the problem. Grint (2005, p. 13) argued

there are “tame” problems, where solutions are readily found, “critical” problems that threaten

stability and need decisive and disciplined action, and "wicked" problems, that involve complex

challenges that can rarely be solved, or have multiple stakeholders who have multiple perceptions of

the issues.

It could be argued that resolving the issue of improved student achievement is more likely a complex

or wicked problem, not only because student responses to the same presentation will vary widely,

but because there are many variables to take into account to create the right conditions for student

achievement. Some of these would include the various perceptions of how student achievement

might be defined (narrowly, as by some governments, or broadly, as by many parents); how it is to

be taught (by teachers being the directors of knowledge – a form of telling students what to do, or

by teachers being facilitators of learning – by asking students many questions); and what the impact

of positive or negative performance might be (a system of supportive ongoing development as

suggested by Swaffield in chapter 5 when she talks about leadership for learning or a system of

punitive measures as suggested by Bogotch in chapter 2 when he talks about removing school

principals – and sometimes school staff as well – as a possible method of turning schools around).

Is it any wonder that Qian and Walker (2011, 210) described principals’ work lives as ‘uncomfortable,

increasingly uncertain and fraught with tensions’, where those in leadership positions are ‘forced to

engage in both front-stage and back-stage performances when they play-out their role of leaders for

learning’? MacBeath and Townsend (2011, 1243-44) suggested that “front of stage are the demands

and accountability imperatives, back stage is the inescapable commitment to a quality of leadership

which is for learning in all its complex manifestations”.

It could be argued that, in the modern, technologically complex, culturally diverse and rapidly

changing world (the fast lane), leaders face a substantial number of complex, unstructured and often

wicked problems on a daily basis. Given this, there is a need to engage others in defining the

problems they face; changing dramatically our understanding of what is required for leadership in

education systems. It is argued that the command and control method that served well in a vertical

relationship, serves less well for leading people and groups in horizontal relationships where

collaboration, co-creation, coordination, minimum specifications, change management, and

generative processes are the levers of change (Pisapia, 2009).

We might argue that education involves three levels of problem. The simple, structured or tame

problems in education are amenable to solutions with recipes or standard protocols. There are

complicated problems that can be managed with knowledge, skill, and organization, where

communication and conflict skills are essential, and there are complex, unstructured or wicked

problems that cannot be reduced to simple or even complicated ones. These problems require, (in

addition to ingredients and recipes; and in addition to knowledge, skills, and organization) careful

reading of the situation and the landscape, flexibility, adaptability, and building and maintaining

different relationships that help leaders work with the various members within the school and

community to address solutions (Acker-Hocevar, Cruz-Janzen, & Wilson, 2012).

The NCLB prescriptions referred to in this chapter, ones that are mirrored in other systems as well,

have offered much that is promising in the way of recipes, and they have emphasized knowledge,

skills, and organization. In short, they have adopted an approach of command and control. Using

Grint’s terminology, good management is all that is required for those who wish to lead education. I

would argue, however, that these prescriptions have not fostered the competencies needed to deal

with complex, wicked problems, using collaboration and co-operative techniques. To deal with

“wicked” problems, we need to move beyond management and to promote leadership at many

levels and include others in defining the problems and moving toward solutions. This means that

vertical leadership needs to be challenged and horizontal leadership needs to be considered. The

move toward horizontal leadership requires skills to create direction, alignment and commitment; to

work in teams; and to develop community, which is suggested by distributed leadership theory (Cox,

Pearce, & Perry, 2003; Gronn, 2002); complexity science (Snyder, Acker-Hocevar, & Snyder, 2008;

Goldstein, Hazy, & Lichtenstein, 2010; Lichtenshein et al., 2006; Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey,

2007); and relational theories (Drath, 2001, McNamee & Gergen, 1999; Place, 2011, Uhl-Bien, 2006).

A different approach to leadership is required if improving learning is seen as the problem to be

solved (Townsend & MacBeath, 2011). I have suggested in this chapter that vertical relationships

rather than horizontal relationships are still the dominant way of leading US, and perhaps other,

education systems, and that there is a need to reconsider this strategy if we are to improve

outcomes in an increasingly complex environment. We need to recognise, as do Beavis and O’Mara

in chapter 12, “the messy complexity of schooling and the practicalities of classroom lives” and to

build “bridges between schools and students’ out-of-school leisure lives”. As Dempster (2009) points

out, and as Conway and Andrews in chapter 9 remind us:

Leaders cannot work alone in schools. They can only achieve the school’s moral purpose through human agency and as such move towards leadership as a collective activity (distributed leadership).

Perhaps one way forward might be to assume that for schools to be really effective, globally focused

institutions, then everyone has to become a learner, a teacher and a leader (Townsend & Otero,

1999).As is demonstrated in a number of chapters in this volume, this is something that some

schools have already commenced.

The requirement here, as pointed out by Lovett in chapter 10, is that leadership is seen as an activity

and is not restricted to either a position or a title. Conway and Andrews in chapter 9 describe cases

where teachers have become leaders, “where principals and teacher leaders come together in a

special professional relationship that is bound by trust, respect and allowance for individual

expression.” To do this it is important to establish conditions that will “give teachers opportunities to

experience leadership work regardless of their level of experience and thereby to retain their

preferred closeness to the classroom” as identified by Lovett in chapter 10.

Burton in chapter 16 considers the issue of student leadership by considering how peer teaching,

originally used as a means of dealing with conflict or bullying in schools resulted in much more than

a lowering of inappropriate behaviour. It provided students with the tools they needed to take

control of their own actions. Flückiger and Klieve in chapter 17 have discussed the powerful

outcomes that can happen when more equal partnerships between home and school, between

parents and teachers are “characterised by collaborative relationships built on mutual trust, respect,

and shared responsibility” and open up “the possibility for every person involved, including teachers,

parents and other community members, to act as leaders in one way or another and for leadership

activities to be undertaken collaboratively”.

To undertake this level of learning, related to supporting leadership for everyone in the school, will

involve capacity building (Mitchell & Sackney, 2011; Hopkins & Jackson, 2003; Hargreaves & Fink,

2006; Crowther & Associates, 2011; D. Hargreaves, 2012) for everyone in the school. This may well

mean new strategies for establishing partnerships and encouraging others to adopt leadership roles.

Johnson and McKenzie for instance, in chapter 18, discuss the “persistent difficulties of engaging

disenfranchised parents in children’s learning” using indigenous communities as their example. They

found that there was “an emphasis on in-school reading support in indigenous community schools” a

factor that limited what parents were able to do. With Epstein et al.’s (1997) research suggesting

that there were 6 different ways in which parents might support their children’s learning and that a

number of these can be accomplished without ever having to come to the school, building capacity

for parent leadership in their child’s learning needed to re-conceptualised. A further difficulty faced

in many rural communities is the transience of both teachers and school leaders. Clearly for capacity

in such communities to be improved, the system needs to also play a leadership role, something that

has been suggested by Creemers and Kyriakides (2008). Balfour in chapter 19 discusses a social

leadership program designed for returning war veterans that may, with adaptations, create

opportunities for leaders of schools to develop leadership networks within and beyond their own

schools.

One thing that is clear is that the leader’s task within a school is to establish an environment in

which there is a shared “moral purpose”. This phrase has been repeated time and again within the

chapters of this book. The identification of a moral purpose for the school, whether it is to focus on

the moral purpose of public education (Bogotch et al, chapter 2) to improve students’ literacy

(Dempster, chapter 4) the moral purpose of leadership for learning (Swaffield, chapter 5) or simply

to lead with moral purpose (Conway and Andrews, chapter 9) becomes the framework to establish

what will happen within the school. The moral purpose to focus on learning for everyone may not be

enough in today’s rapidly changing environment. Perhaps a future moral purpose might be to

develop everyone in the school, administrators, teachers, students and parents, as leaders.

Fundamentally, this might be what distributed leadership really means, not distribution of

responsibility, but accepting responsibility, as it might only be when everyone, governments and

communities included, do this, that we might approach our moral purpose of a quality education for

every single student.

So the commitment of careful drivers in the fast lane becomes clear. The purpose of driving in the

fast lane is to get somewhere as quickly and efficiently as possible. Careful drivers however, do what

they can to ensure that everyone travelling with them gets there safely. In Codding’s (1997: 17)

words: ‘The best guide I had as a high school principal was to try to do for the 2,500 students I had

responsibility for in my school, what I would want done for my own three children’.

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