Title: ?Get off my bus!? School leaders and the elimination of dissent.
Abstract: In this paper, we argue that school leaders are removing those who embody or vocalise alternative conceptualisations of educator. It seems as if Jim Collins? (2001) call to ?get the right people on the bus? is being taken very seriously in shifting schools from Good to Great. This is achieved by invoking two distinct yet operationally conflated objectives, both privileged in policy. First, eradicating inadequate teaching, which we suggest is operationalised as dismissing ?inadequate? teachers, and second, implementing the leader?s ?vision?, which we argue consists of silencing and potentially removing dissenters. The strategies employed include cultural changes, and speaking and performing approved-of professional identities into existence. Additionally, formal methods are used as ?show trials?: conduct/capability procedures, quasi-constructive dismissal and school re-structuring. The paper draws on a number of projects: first, an investigation of the leadership of new and established school types in neoliberal/conservative times and second, a study into the construction and popularisation of the preferred model of organisational leadership. These studies generated narrative data through semi-structured interviews with 40 headteachers/principals in total. Our thematic analysis of the data is supported by an analytical framework drawing of the work of Hannah Arendt, who enables us to think about how people can be rendered disposable and are disposed of. Arendt?s political thinking tools help us to consider how, through routine practices, current models of school leadership enable totalitarian practices to become ordinary. Our results have significance for three principal areas. First, for practice: school leaders, primed by New Labour and subsequent governments not only to implement reform, but to proselytise the reform agenda, are exploiting the space opened up by policy and discourse to exercise a new, ruthless form of leadership, sanctioned or promoted as ?relentless?. We suggest that this ?attack from within? by leaders in schools throughout England is changing the educational landscape by removing from the collective memory of the profession ways of being and doing antithetical to those promoted by governing party ideologies. Second, for policy: school leaders are being required to exercise their agency as a means of re-structuring the composition, activity and identity of the workforce. Third, for theory: using Arendt?s political thinking tools permits their deployment into contemporary settings as a means of showing what is distinctive about the current situation, and should warn us that totalitarianism is an ever-present, rather than historical danger.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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