Session Information
26 SES 03 A, Policy, Politics and Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
2016 was a year characterized by political drama and turbulence in terms of ostensibly remarkable political events both in England and in Turkey. Witnessing Brexit in the UK and the alleged coup attempt in Turkey for a Turkish academic on sabbatical leave in England during these events, the need to explore how school leaders make sense of the political phenomena during such times of crisis in two dramatically different cultural contexts was inevitable. Despite the totally contrasting forms of political administration styles, the main similarity lies in the fact that both systems are market-driven and as Apple (2006) stated, they are under the influence of conservative modernism in terms of their attempt to shape the new generations. The prominent feature of the two systems is the global trend of neoliberalism, which promote the privatisation of education and educational services. This is reflected with the proliferation of private schools at all levels in Turkey in the last 30 years. The UK phenomena in this respect is the trend of academisation, which weakens the Local Education Authorities and encourages various Trusts to take over the education service. At this point, the ways in which educational policy is enacted at school level are widely discussed in literature (Ball, 2015; Bell&Stevenson, 2006). Given the impact of politics on education, the schools and school leaders are in a more critical state. As stated by Catano&Stronge (2007), school principals find themselves juggling competing tasks on a day-to-day basis, which is the result of the efforts to satisfy demands from both internal and external stakeholders. One component of this study had explored how school leaders in England mediated educational policy at school level and the results were presented in ECER 2016 proposing a classification model for leader behavior. There are nationally and internationally accounatbility measures, standards, national and supra-national criteria, policies, challenges and dilemmas shaping the profession. Yet, the relationship between the government and the school leaders at micro level is somewhat an unexplored domain. The question of what is going on down at the bottom through the decisions at the top has always been a matter of debate. Despite the availability of research on how school leaders view their professions, how they think the governments view school leaders and the profession remained vague. In this respect, the perceptions of school leaders about how the governments perceive school leadership and school leaders in these times of global uncertainty are worth investigation. Inevitably, there are reasons for mutual understanding and misunderstanding between the system actors regarding education and educational leadership. The perception of governments’ policies by the school principals in any context is a significant factor in attaining educational goals.
This study, as part of the larger research on school-level policy mediation in England and Turkey, seeks to explore and compare how the governments in each country see school leaders and school leadership as perceived and described by school leaders themselves. Given the recent political changes and system-level expectations in both, the results will be discussed and compared accordingly. The findings are likely to lead to open up new perspectives of research in enacting educational policy and implementing reform initatives at school level especially in policy intensive contexts. Research questions serving the above mentioned purpose are
- How do policy developments have impact on the role of school principals in England and Turkey?
- How do the governments see schools and school leadership according to the school principals in each country?
- What do the school leaders of each country think their role is from the government’s point of view ?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Apple, M. W. (2006). Educating the" right" way: Markets, standards, God, and inequality. Taylor & Francis. Ball, S. J. (2015) What is policy? 21 years later: reflections on the possibilities of policy research, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(3), 306-313. Bell, L., & Stevenson, H. (2006). Education policy: Process, themes and impact. Routledge. Catano, N. & Stronge, J.H (2007) What do we expect of school principals? Congruence between principal evaluation and performance standards, International Journal of Leadership in Education, 10(4), 379-399.
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