More About the Book
In the volume's second part, the angle of vision is decidedly different--reversed in fact. Here the school leadership activities of men and women outside the "inner circle" of government are investigated--trustees, locally-appointed superintendents, principals, teachers, and public representatives who often saw the needs of children and communities from a vantage point far different than that of the educational civil service, and who, in more than a few instances, withheld assent to the dictates of the Education Office. These narratives take a "bottom-up" rather than a "top-down" view of leadership, illustrating civic battles for educational independence, the vagaries of city and small-town politics, local indifference to the plight of rural teachers, and women's century-long struggle to gain access and recognition in school leadership's highest ranks.
In sharp contrast to the traditional literature in the field, this volume of historical essays attempts to "describe" rather than "prescribe" the real world of leadership practice. Rather than define or label leadership behavior, these essays try to illuminate the complexities and conflicts of educational leadership as practiced "on the ground." This emphasis provides a fuller treatment of how school leadership was conceived and practiced at various times and illustrates how the efforts of individuals intersected with the social, economic, and political forces swirling around schools. It also shows how different actors in different parts of the provincial system held different priorities and agendas for schools at different times. By including the contributions of trustees, community leaders, politicians, teachers, parents and other ordinary people within the framework of school leadership, we begin to appreciate what school leadership means in all its myriad forms.
Publication Details
Title: School Leadership: Essays on the British Coumbia Experience, 1872-1995
Editor: Thomas Fleming, Professor of Educational History, University of Victoria
Publisher: Bendall Books, P.O. Box 115, Mill Bay, BC Canada. Tel: 250-743-2946 / Fax 250-743-2910
Email: admin@bendallbooks.com
ISBN: 0-9696985-7-7
Size: 6 x 9 inches
Extent: 428 pages
Index: Index of Names
Illlustrations: 37 historical photographs and other illustrations
Table of Contents
Part One: Views from Headquarters
1. Letters from Headquarters: Alexander Robinson and the British Columbia Education Office, 1899-1919
Thomas Fleming
2. Our Boys in the Field: School Inspectors, Superintendents and the Changing Character of School Leadership in British Columbia
Thomas Fleming
3. Alex Lord: The School Inspector's World, 1915-1936
John Calam
4. Beyond Hope and Past Redemption: Lottie Bowron and the Rural School Teachers of British Columbia, 1928-1934
Thomas Fleming, Carolyn Smyly & Julie White
5. Setting Standards in the West: C. B. Conway, Science and School Reform in British Columbia, 1938-1974
Thomas Fleming & David Conway
6. In the Imperial Age and After: Patterns of British Columbia School Leadership and the Institution of the Superintendency, 1849-1988
Thomas Fleming
*Images of the British Columbia Experience (Photographs)
Part Two: Perspectives from the Field
7. Financing Nanaimo Schools in the 1890s: Local Resistance to Provincial Control
Helen Brown
8. Lay Control in Public Education: The British Columbia School Trustees Association, 1905-1946
James London
9. British Columbia Principals: Scholar-Teachers and Administrative Amateurs in Victorian and Edwardian Eras, 1872-1918
Thomas Fleming
10. The Principalship: Reflections on the Past
John Calam
11. The Anatomy of a Resignation: Margaret Strong and the New Westminster School Board, 1911-1915
Thomas Fleming & Madge Craig
12. Uncertain Days: British Columbia's School Superintendents and Local Employment
Vernon J. Storey
13. The Diary of Mary Williams: A Cameo of Rural Schooling in British Columbia, 1922-1924
Thomas Fleming & Carolyn Smyly
14. From Consent to Dissent: Changing Public Attitudes to Government Initiatives in British Columbia Schools, 1865-1995
Alastair Glegg
Introduction
As the twenty-first century begins, school administration throughout Canada and the United States is in a state of disarray. Public school leadership like public schooling itself, has become a "troubled crusade," to borrow historian Diane Ravitch's telling phrase. Once-popular portraits of school leaders as "can-do" community spark-plugs, educational advocates, and figures of social prominence appear tattered and out of place. In their stead we now find the all-too-familiar image of hurried and often harried school executives, under seemingly constant siege from an array of dissatisfied special interest, business, and parent groups who demand higher educational performance, increased school services, and the promotion of only those values in schooling that reflect their own beliefs or politics.
This change in image contrasts sharply with the rich professional mythology which held in song and story that school leaders occupied the vanguard of a great educational movement to bring universal schooling and, through it, social progress to all reaches of society. As one early professor of school administration claimed, school leaders were obliged to "see more clearly" than those around them "the great spiritual importance" of the crusade to bring learning to all.
Contemporary school leaders have drawn many of their understandings about administrative life from this mythology, and from their own observations of the profession's importance, first as children in school and, later, as teachers. But the educational world they joined as young teachers appears to be vanishing. The stability and order that once characterized administrative service in public education has given way in recent decades to conflict and uncertainty. As a result, administrators at school, district, and provincial levels no longer appear sure about what they do, or convinced, as they once were, of their work's meaning and value. Criticisms of the systems they manage abound. More than a few complain that a leadership vacuum exists in public education, yet feel powerless to do much about it. Others despair of the bureaucratic procedures and complexities they helped create, frustrated by the increasing politicization of schooling and the power of special interest groups.
Dreams of leaving a lasting educational legacy have been replaced for many school leaders by fears about surviving the rough and tumble that now marks administrative life. Their anxiety and sense of loss is typically reflected in high rates of turnover among school managers, unfilled administrative posts, and early retirements. "Being the administrator of a school system these days," one superintendent recently said, "is like making a career out of bungee-jumping." School-level administrators appear no less beleaguered by events, especially the growing influence of teachers' unions. "It's like watching the Mozambique rebels take over the capital," one principal painfully observed. Even senior educational civil servants seem dismayed by the system they are supposed to oversee. Once secure in the appeal and "rightness" of public education, they now muddle through their work bereft of any social or educational orthodoxy to guide them, much less any durable public consensus about schools. In what has become the harsh ecology of public education, administrators all-too-frequently feel like members of an endangered species. Certainly, educational leadership today seems far removed from a time when school superintendents--especially provincial superintendents of education--felt themselves to be masters of the educational universe, or when school inspectors patrolled the province's schools, "ruling the waves," when necessary, and "waving the rules" at discretion's call.
The changing character of school leadership in British Columbia is the subject of the collection of essays found in this volume. More specifically, the 14 essays that comprise this work attempt to provide an historical account of how school leadership changed from the time of the gentlemen scholars who staffed schools and the government's small Education Office in the Victorian Era to the men and women who administer today's complex school system as superintendents, principals, and educational bureaucrats. In the six chapters that constitute Part I of the volume, "Views from Headquarters," school leadership in its oldest, most centralized, and most imperial form is examined. Here we see provincial school superintendents and their inspectorial brigades struggling to bring some measure of order, standardization, and equality to schools scattered across an enormous provincial domain. Here, too, can be found evidence of how the sometimes lofty pedagogical ambitions of headquarters' staff in Victoria were softened by the stark physical and social realities surrounding many rural and remote schools—and how the views of the government's own education officers were conditioned more by the province's own remarkable people and landscapes than by educational objectives learned in textbooks and universities. Altogether, such essays provide entry to a world of school leadership beyond living memory, to a time before administrators were armed with graduate degrees and management theories, before schools and school systems became bureaucratized, and before a provincial community once unified in its regard for schools and educators became divided and fractious.
In the eight chapters that make up Part II of this volume, "Views from the Field," the angle of vision into British Columbia school leadership is decidedly different—reversed in fact. Here the school leadership activities of men and women outside the "inner circle" of government are investigated--trustees, locally-appointed superintendents, principals, teachers, and public representatives who often saw the needs of children and communities from a vantage point far different than that of the educational civil service, and who, in more than a few instances, withheld assent to the dictates of the Education Office. In this part of the volume, the narratives invariably take a "bottom-up" rather than a "top-down" view of leadership, illustrating civic resistance and local battles for educational independence, the vagaries of city and small-town politics, community indifference to the plight of rural teachers, and women's century-long struggle to gain access and recognition in school leadership's highest ranks. We also find here discussions of the recent past, the school wars of the 1980s, and the revolution for public participation in school policy and decision making.
In several respects, this volume of historical papers differs appreciably from conventional treatments of school leadership and administration. First, its historical focus brings a measure of perspective not usually found in much of the literature about school administration. Unlike many writings in this field, this essay collection seeks to "describe" rather than "prescribe" the real world of administrative practice. That is to say, it is more concerned with what school leadership actually "is" than what it "ought to be." It does so by bringing together an emerging body of scholarship that illustrates through the careful analysis of historical contexts and events how school leadership has been undertaken over time by different actors at different levels within one provincial system--British Columbia.
Rather than attempting to define or label administrative behaviour, these essays illuminate the complexities and conflicts of school leadership as practiced "on the ground" inside and outside school systems. Such a focus allows a fuller treatment of how school leadership was conceived and practiced at various times and how administrative policies and decisions--and, indeed, the course of provincial schooling itself—were a result of the ways that individual efforts intersected with a constellation of social, economic, and political factors. Different actors and different parts of the system, the historical record reveals, have long had different priorities and agendas for schools and have sought to bend the schools to their wills in different ways.
In probing the often conflicting views about schooling held by politicians, senior officials in the Department of Education, government inspectors in the field, locally-appointed school superintendents, trustees, principals, teachers, and others interested in education, these essays furnish a more cohesive and comprehensive study of leadership than can be found elsewhere. Moreover, in documenting the spectrum of school leadership from the highest level of government to its expression in local schools and communities, these essays also record the general evolution of school leadership in other Canadian provinces, as well as the United States.
This collection of essays is also unique in the way it locates leadership in the work of those who are not professional school officers at provincial or local levels. By exploring the educational contributions of trustees, community leaders, politicians, teachers, parents and others, these essays expand our understanding into the origins of leadership. In acknowledging the contributions of "ordinary participants," to borrow historian J. Donald Wilson's term, the essays extend the study of leadership beyond the boundaries of formal organizations. So, too, in adopting a less formal idea of what leadership means, these essays allow for greater appreciation of leadership in its myriad forms. As the essays reveal, sometimes leadership is exemplified in no more than simple decisions about selecting school texts, desks, and the colour of linoleum for the floors of the normal schools--or deciding to turn a blind eye to ill-advised or overbearing educational rules, regulations, and standards. At other times, leadership proves no more than lending a willing ear, offering a word of support to a lonely teenage school mistress, or dispatching a diplomatically worded letter nudging an inspector to find a teaching assignment in a more secure place for a young woman in harm's way. At still other times, leadership represents an endeavour of immense proportions involving massive public consultation, large decisions of state, and Herculean efforts to restructure and reform the public schools.
Understanding the nature and quality of school leadership is important because going to school is a social and cultural experience shared by almost everyone. Schools remain the public institutions closest and most accessible to families and communities--and the most instrumental institutions in determining a youngster's life chances. The kind and quality of leadership that schools provide are, thus, matters of public interest and, indeed, public policy, particularly in British Columbia where people have wrestled for more than a century with questions about access, equity, and diversity.
It is hoped that this edited collection is of interest to several audiences--including undergraduate students in educational foundations courses, graduate students and professors of education, administration, and history, as well as administrators, trustees, government officials, teachers, and others interested in British Columbia education and its leadership. The essays may also interest students of public policy and general readers of the province's history. These essays could easily be used as a textbook or as a supplementary resource in various undergraduate and graduate courses in educational and social history, school leadership, educational foundations, school administration, and general administration.
About the Editor
Thomas Fleming is a professor of educational history at the University of Victoria. He was born in Dublin and was educated in private, public, and parochial schools in Ireland and in the provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. He studied history at the University of Victoria, where he completed B.A. and M.A. degrees, before undertaking further graduate study at Stanford University and the University of Oregon, where he earned a Ph.D. in the history of educational administration. No stranger to the real world of administration, he has managed several private-sector companies and served as Assistant to the President at both the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Fleming has written numerous articles on British Columbia school history and policy and was appointed as a research director and Editor-in-Chief of the 1988 British Columbia Royal Commission on Education. He co-authored the volume A History of Thought and Practice in Educational Administration, a study that has become a standard reference work in the history of school management in the United States. He is currently a professor of educational history at the University of Victoria where he recently received the Faculty of Education's inaugural "Excellence in Teaching" award.
Contributors
HELEN BROWN is a member of the Department of History at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia. She recently completed her doctoral dissertation at the University of British Columbia on the spatial relations of city schooling in Nanaimo in the 1890s.
JOHN CALAM is a Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia. Along with his volume on early American education, Parsons and Pedagogues, he has written many journal articles on the history of education. He is currently writing social and occupational histories of work he did as a young man in British Columbia.
DAVID CONWAY teaches music and humanities in an elementary school in Houston, B.C. He leads the Twain Band, a music group of nine to twelve-year olds whose recordings have received radio airplay throughout the province. He lives with his wife and daughter on a small farm in Quick.
MADGE T. CRAIG has recently retired from the University of North Texas where she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Administration. Her research interests include teacher preparation for literacy education and biographical study of educators.
THOMAS FLEMING is a professor of educational history at the University of Victoria and writes on the history of schooling and educational leadership in Canada and the United States. He has co-authored Educational Administration: A History of Thought and Practice and recently co-edited the volume, Educational Reform in Canada and Argentina.
ALASTAIR GLEGG is a lecturer in educational administration and history at the University of Victoria. His analyses of educational issues in British Columbia have been published throughout North America and the Commonwealth, and he has presented numerous papers at international conferences in Canada and Britain.
JAMES LONDON has been a public school educator most of his life, having taught at every level in the system, from Grade 7 to graduate school. His experience includes 13 years as principal of three B.C. schools, a year in Australia on a teaching fellowship, and a decade lecturing at four post-secondary institutions in the province. He also served as the first mayor of Langford and is currently a school trustee in District #62 (Sooke).
CAROLYN SMYLY is a UBC graduate in English and history who writes about various aspects of British Columbia's social, educational, architectural and aboriginal history. She lives on Salt Spring Island with her husband, John, and is currently finishing a mystery novel set in Victoria.
VERN STOREY is a professor of leadership studies at the University of Victoria. He has extensive experience as a teacher, school superintendent and university professor, and a strong interest in school district governance and administration. He is the author of several professional books, including In the Real World: School Leaders and the Political Fact (1997).
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