Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse, Fenwick English, Editör, Macmillan/Palgrave Press, London , London, ss.1-17, 2022
Since the urbanization of many nations’ populations,
schools have become increasingly bureaucratized, often becoming the basic
building blocks of larger school systems. Despite this, schools have retained some
of their unique properties because of varying student needs and expectations of
the immediate cultural and economic environments. Since the late twentieth
century, the market ideology within neoliberalism has become a dominant feature
of them, often advanced in the guise of education reforms. In this regard,
strict standardization and accountability policies have been introduced to push
schools to produce uniform student outcomes, often embedded in the agenda of
reducing or eliminating achievement gaps between identifiable student groups by
race or class. Within the scope of these policies, competition between schools
has been encouraged through school choice reforms and ranking of schools.
Professional associations and educational agencies at different governmental
levels have supplemented these policies through identifying the so-called
result-oriented leadership practices for school principals. Despite much
legislation and financial investment, schools have produced overall
disappointing results, especially in the academic subjects. Competition between
schools has worsened the situation of low performing and culturally different
students. Teachers have not always supported the applications and goals
prescribed by these policies, and their unions have sometimes adopted a hostile
reaction to them. Howbeit, school principals have struggled to be effective leaders,
even as their increased workload has resulted pushing it to the classroom teacher
level. Accordingly, rigid policies have failed to address the highly variable human
aspects of education, and the one-size-fits-all approach centered on eliminating
achievement gaps has not been able to transform school contexts to conform to
policy requirements. One paradox of this dilemma is that as instruction becomes
more effective it increases rather than decreases the achievement differences
between students. The aim of decreasing achievement gaps through standardization
is therefore somewhat of “a fool’s errand.”