The “School Leader” as an Emerging Identity: Performativity and the Enactment of Education Policy

New Public Management discourses in educational policymaking and administration are evidenced in the emphasis on marketization, choice, managerialism, measurement of performance and accountability. These policy discourses recast public institutions as troubled spaces in need of urgent reform (Shove, 2010). The prescribed treatment for the constructed malaise in public education has been the introduction of new forms of managerialism under the guise of “school leadership”. This paper is based on a study conducted by the author that examined the adoption of leadership standards in schools in the province of Ontario, Canada. The central claim is that this leadership turn in education reform has instantiated new organizational technologies that aim to enforce prescribed identities and practices in the administration of education. Positioning leadership as a driving force behind reform initiatives has the effect of casting certain social actors, those deemed the leaders, as ultimately responsible for the success of reform initiatives. One salient example of this trend is the ubiquitous assumption that there is a “direct and powerful link between effective leadership and improved student achievement” (The Institute for Educational Leadership, 2013, p. 3). This discursive connection between leadership practices and student achievement has the effect of assigning school administrators a direct responsibility over a goal that could be equally conceived as a goal of the entire educational system, not only a responsibility of principals / head teachers. The paper builds upon the notion of education policy enactment, namely, the embodied and situated processes by which education policy is interpreted and recontextualized into practices in schools. In contrast with the more traditional notion of top-down policy implementation, Ball et al. (2012), argued that the notion of policy enactment conveys the “creative processes of interpretation, that is, the recontextualization –through reading, writing and talking – of the abstractions of policy ideas into contextualizing practices” (p. 23). The notion of policy enactment constitutes a rejection of the instrumentalist assumptions of most policy analysis and provides a situated account of policy processes that highlights the role of school actors, their practices and actions in the adoption of policies in education. The paper concludes by noting that leadership standards are regulatory mechanisms that normalize policy discourses on New Public Management, creating disciplined subjects and practices. Furthermore, the standards, once translated into practices, contribute to the constitution of the identity of school administrators. In the same line, Niesche (2013) argued that leaders are “discursively constituted through a number of competencies that were largely instrumentalist, gendered and hierarchical” (p. 226). The common assumption in these discourses is that school contexts are stable, so the same criteria should apply to all schools regardless of their location or particular circumstances. An interrogation of the material effects of these policy discourses over the identities and practices of educators has the potential to inform our understanding of the dynamics of school reform. In particular, it illustrates the ways in which identities and practices are shaped and reconfigured through policy in education.