Purpose of Research: This paper examines school leadership behaviors and understandings of Somaliland school principals.  It explores the unique ways that people in Northern Somalia ( i.e., Somaliland) lead schools, and interact with the students, families, and communities they serve.  It expounds on some of the contextual complexities of school leadership as it relates to their past (i.e. postcolonial) and current/future (neoliberal) reforms.

 Theoretical Framework:  Indeed, broader educational contexts are often forgotten as we professors provide educational leadership preparation and training in developing world contexts.   Yet, it is clear that colonial and post-colonial educational contexts (Fanon, 1952, 1961; Memmi, 1991; Said, 1978) are intended to secure the physical and psychological spaces of the conquering powers, and are explicitly meant to control and to be neither liberatory nor emancipatory for the local indigenous peoples.  While nearly all Somali schools were built on post-colonial models, politicians and school leaders have been ostensibly pushing for reforms.  These reforms, however, have been deeply entrenched in Westernized educational reform discourses.  Thus, as the reform foci have shifted to standardized testing results, schools as/for business models, and education as competition, it has become clear that Somalilanders have come to assume neoliberal discourses (Lipman, 2004; Burch, 2009).   Thus, we use post-colonial theory (Fanon, 1952, 1961; Memmi, 1965; Said, 1978) because it offers a critical framework through which African educational policy and practice can be understood and critiqued (Shahjahan, 2011; Deleon, 2012). 

Neoliberal approaches to education have a strong overlap with postcolonial models of schooling.  Education in neoliberal and postcolonial contexts both have empirically-oriented, depoliticized goals that ignore histories of oppression and privilege.  In these models of education, competition—and not mutual support and community building—is what defines success; moreover, educational discourses decenter individuals and communities, and focus on the standards of education, which are almost always defined by White Western men.  And spiritual, culturally responsive, and community based ways of knowing and learning are put off as folklore, religion, or depraved, premodern understandings.   In other words, “standardized testing represents technologies of power that are not questioned or challenged and considered “objective” evaluative tool for student performance. Testing is considered by many the imposition of uncontrolled “scientifism” and corporate capitalism upon children and schools” (Viruru, 2009, p. 100).”  Yet, this knowledge production is hegemonic and powerful, and has ways of delegitimizing the indigenous and culturally responsive ways of leading schools that scholars describe (Ahnee-Benham & Napier, 2002; Ahnee-Benham, 2005; Lopez, et. al, 2001; Khalifa, 2012; Gooden, 2005, Johnson, 2006; Siddle Walker, 1993).  And finally, Viruru (2009) suggests that standardized testing—the chief component and tool of neoliberal educational leaders—should be examined with an imperial gaze:  “the construction of standardized testing as both cultural and imperialistic products” (p. 101). In our examination of Somaliland schools, there was always a “high-stakes” element to colonial and post-colonial educational apparatus. 

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