Abstract
Constant changes in a school’s policy environment, underpinned by increased workload and the need to guarantee national economic development, have left principals feeling vulnerable and isolated. (Miller, 2016: 152)
Organized across eight chapters and employing a comparative narrative approach, Miller addresses some of the significant educational concerns framing contemporary school leadership in England and Jamaica (school transformation, social justice, school resourcing, educational policy reform, technological innovation in education and school safety). Chapter 1 articulates the contested, contextualized and complex nature of school leadership. Chapter 2 navigates the ways in which school leadership is deployed to enable improved student learning outcomes. Chapter 3 explores educational inclusion across race, class and gender, and the ways in which these position the realities of the classroom, school transformation and the challenge of teacher workload. Chapter 4 addresses the deployment of technology in education and the ways in which, across jurisdictions, information and communications technology is used as a medium for increasing educational access for students with special educational needs. Chapter 5 speaks to the relationship between educational policy and educational leadership, and the ways in which the school principal, through his or her social practices, challenges and interprets educational policy within the happenings of accountability for national imperatives. Chapter 6 examines leadership for human development in schools. Chapter 7 explores the issue of entrepreneurial and safety leadership, and considers the relationship between school branding and creating safe learning environments. Finally, chapter 8 pulls all the strings together and touches on the notion of autonomy, its relationship to school leadership and the ways in which market imperatives in education serve to construct a system of compliance in education; here, Miller reminds us that the only response is the recognition that the ‘professional development of principals is a most important issue for governments’ (152) if they are to apprehend the vision of economic development through education.
Written in an accessible style, there are two points of interest/concern in the book: first, the methodological design and, second, the positioning of leaders, the leadership and the practice of leading at the centre of the educational market drama. On the point of the methodological design, Miller compares the experiences of leaders in England and Jamaica. In this, the title of the book is misleading. The experiences of the Jamaican principals cannot be taken to be generalizable to the Caribbean; they are specific to Jamaica as one of the many English-speaking nations in the Caribbean region. Given economic and other contextual differences, the experiences of leaders in Trinidad and Tobago or Barbados, for example, may be similar to but still very unique compared with those in Jamaica. In making Jamaica synonymous with the Caribbean, Miller has unfortunately continued a rehearsal of an oversimplification of educational experiences in the larger Caribbean region. Despite this, I applaud his staging of Jamaica as a Caribbean island nation and the ways in which the leadership experiences of principals in Jamaica are privileged in an international arena. In doing so, he contributes to the academic regional agenda of promoting the Caribbean as a citational context.
On the point of positioning leaders, the leadership and the practice of leading at the centre of the educational market drama, Miller has worked to bring together a range of educational concerns that collide and come to bear on the realization of leading and educational quality. Using a comparative approach as the vehicle for this exploration serves, first, to highlight the differences experienced in developed and developing spaces and, second, to indicate similarities of concerns across differences in social, economic and historical contexts. In this, there are two concerns. First, the presence of globalized market imperatives driving educational policy and leading practices is recognized but not comprehensively dealt with in the text. The need to privilege experiences (narratives) over theory is applauded (in this case), but the narratives are sometimes left slightly decontextualized, without strong references and connections to the theoretical field.
Second, in addressing a methodological gap in the leadership field – that of promoting ‘actual accounts of principals in different country contexts concerning the nitty gritty of their jobs’ (3) – Miller finds the solution to the challenges experienced in the disposition of the leader. As he indicates: ‘Principals constantly and actively challenged their attitudes and behaviours towards education, schooling, their leadership and the national policy context – highlighting how these behaviours and attitudes were as problematic in leadership and leading as the volatility of the policy environment’ (155). This individualized awareness of self-in-action is only the first step. What is required to shape praxis-oriented responses to the complexity of school leading must move the field beyond the individualized behaviours and attitudes of the leader. New work in the field of educational leadership (e.g. Bristol, 2015) has shown that sustainable school transformation, educational reform and human development occur in the messiness of the sociality of practices (leading, professional learning, teaching, learning). That Miller selects to end this complex project on a return to individuality is not only underwhelming, but also omits a growing body of work that speaks back to engaging school leadership in challenging times and across contexts (e.g. Bergh, 2015; Bristol et al., 2014; Keddie, 2015; Misfud, 2016); this provides a response to the challenge of context that is critical and draws on more than the individualized responses of the maximum leader. Rather, it promotes responsive leading in challenging times as situated in the power of the social – the collective. Even though this is not recognized by Miller, the strength of the book is in the narratives shared. These are empowering examples of leading as political social movements in the community.