New Issue: Leadership in Public and Higher Education

With deficit-ridden and budget-slashing conditions now impacting the public sector in North America, one challenge for gravely underresourced public schools, colleges, and universities becomes resisting the lure of private funding tied to corporate control. Compounding this challenge are public perceptions of schooling, which have been slowly transformed by the thinking that education is a private right rather than a public good.

(Image courtesy of Truthout.org)

Unfortunately, efforts by educational policymakers to address such conditions are often dictated by political expediency, rather than an overarching concern to safeguard quality education as the very foundation of democracy. The results have been educational ‘reforms’ that focus on standardized testing, performance-based teacher evaluations, and union-busting measures such as the privatization of public schools in the United States and back-to-work legislation in Canada. Across all public sectors, we are seeing political interventions that are stripping away labour rights in the name of fiscal responsibility during a period of economic vulnerability.

How long critical education can remain robust within institutional conditions that appear on the verge of collapsing to financial and ideological pressures is a serious concern. It seems that leadership in education has become a matter of educators not only teaching their students, but educating administrators and policymakers as well.

Educators are taking a more active role as defenders of public values both inside and outside of their own institutions. This is true with respect to communicating the importance of education rooted in democratic principles to the broader public as well as taking up issues of social justice and labour organizing. It is also true with respect to a growing mass of university researchers who prioritize connecting their work to policy circles and embracing collaborative opportunities to engage various sectors in the production and sharing of knowledge and practices related to pressing social issues.

Those working to organize within educational institutions can learn from the philosophies and interventions that have long guided community organizers and activists in the broader community. Educators should create spaces for mutual enrichment, such as a March 22, 2013 workshop facilitated by Chandra Talpade Mohanty on “being a scholar-activist” that brought together non-academic community organizers working in Hamilton with academic community organizers working at McMaster University. Regardless of institutional affiliation, people who believe in working for a more just and equitable world through public education will find there is much more bringing them together than driving them apart.

Forging opportunities for cross-sectoral knowledge exchange, community building, and solidarity on local, national, and transnational levels is one promising approach that appears to be moving forward through the dedicated efforts of engaged scholars, despite slow or no encouragement from educational institutions and their leaders.

Educators should also create spaces for young scholars to be involved in the politics and decision-making structures within their schools as well as in the civic life of their broader communities. Yet equally important will be for students and teachers to join together in supporting those key leaders within public and higher education who are in the right positions to voice a collective vision of education as a site that supports human agency, equity, and dignity, rather than only statistics and ‘measurable impact.’

- Grace Pollock