Principals, markets and ethics

Year: 2013

Author: Semmens, Brendyn

Type of paper: Abstract refereed

Abstract:
How has public education become marketised and what are the manifestations of this? How has this impacted on state secondary schools and what are the consequential influences on the role of the principal? Can the tensions and contradictions between the goal of the public good and the means of the pursuit of individual gain be reconciled through recourse to personal and professional ethics?
Neoliberalism uses a variety of rationalities and technologies tightly connected to that of the market-place and through which we are all rendered as governable subjects. In this sense then we conduct ourselves within a social space created by a set of “regimes of truth” and “systems of control” that are predicated on the construction of social relations that are seen through such prisms as those of transaction, enterprise and competition. While we resort to personal agency to interpret social relations using a rich store of experiences, the seduction of market-place logics is powerful. These logics impact as significantly on families and citizens as they do on schools themselves.
Using an analytical lens based on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, and through a critical ethnographic methodology, my research interviews seven principals from a variety of public secondary schools and gauges their understandings about how a marketised environment impacts on their schools and their leadership. They bring to life a range of relevant experiences, including the increased need for school promotion activities that “sell” a middle class academic curriculum above all else, helped in no small part by the narrow focus on value described through the “My School” website.
My research concludes that public secondary schools are increasingly drawn into a set of market logics that serve to, at the very least, distract principals from their preferred focus on creating successful educational environments for all students. While this situation places their leadership in difficult circumstances, which often clearly takes its toll, my study concludes that it is through a reliance on their personal and professional ethics that principals are able to retain a positive focus on their raison d’etre, and reject the worse inclinations that neoliberalism tends to elicit.

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