Leadership preparation: engine of transformation or social reproduction?

Abstract

William Taylor's 1969 chapter provides a springboard to reflect on how what he termed administrator training has developed since it was published. Responding to Baron's insistence in the same volume that education be viewed as a political, the article adopts a critical perspective, focusing on leader preparation programmes and exploring how they contribute to the reproduction or the transformation of education. The aim is to make readers more aware of the significance of such programmes in terms of sustaining or challenging inequality in schools. The literature was scrutinised for evidence of the aims and the beneficiaries of programmes. Little evidence is identified to suggest that learners ultimately benefit from leader preparation programmes and the article concludes that a process of misrecognition is at play. Administrator training appears to be part of sustaining rather than transforming education, yet is not generally recognised as such. The article challenges mainstream, normative assumptions about preparation programmes, that they aim at and achieve primarily benefit to learners. The article suggests the need to adopt Baron and Taylor's stance that a more sophisticated understanding of the structural and political context is axiomatic for the further development of preparation programmes.

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