Beyond convention, beyond critique: toward a third way of preparing  (Page 9/13)

Inadequate preparation in their leadership preparation program means that many principals are unable or unwilling to challenge the status quo in their schools:

• A plethora of data suggest that some educational administrators accept, without question, disparate achievement for students from different class backgrounds, inequitable achievement in math and science for women and minorities, unequal access to competitive sports for women, burgeoning dropout and graduation rates for non-whites, and dramatically different postsecondary routes for some minority populations (Rusch, 2004, p.19).

Bureaucratization and avoidance contribute to the broader problem of “technical and traditional leadership that has helped build and maintain an inequitable status quo” (Theoharis, 2010, p. 334).

The critical approach

“Their critical pens never cease flowing because they have lost control of them, and instead of guiding them are guided by them” (Nietzsche, 1990, p.112)

Angus (1996) presents the critical approach as a preferable alternative to the conventional approach.

• The socially critical orientation is towards the implicit social, educational, and political causes and effects of educational management, educational policy, and educational practice. This means that management is never seen as neutral and educational participants are seen as social and political actors rather than as occupants of organizational roles. (p. 990)

Referring to Angus’s essay and the wider debate among competing camps, Waite (2002) analyzes the “paradigm wars in educational administration.” Let us now examine an opponent of the conventional view in these paradigm wars.

Critical theory is rooted in Marxism and, in particular, the Institute for Social Research, established in Frankfurt Germany in 1923. The original purpose of the Institute was to explore why the revolution predicted by Marx had not occurred and to develop a more viable form of Marxism for the twentieth century. From its birth, critical theory sought to oppose capitalism, the domination of workers (through both external exploitation and internalized oppression), and positivism as a tool of capitalism (Agger, 1991).

The history of critical theory includes common threads and differing perspectives as well as conceptual development enabling critical theory to adapt to changing conditions. Horkheimer published the essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” in 1937, in which he explained that critical theory wished to change rather than merely explain the situation (Crotty, 1998). Habermas (1984, 1987) proposed in his “theory of communicative action” that authentic knowledge and change come from a combination of self-reflection and interaction. Agger (1991) argued that critical communication theory has enabled “workable strategies of ideology-critique, community building, and social movement formation to be developed” (p. 110). Agger also concluded that the related “new social movements” theory of Habermas (1981) has connected critical theory to “movements deemed irrelevant by traditional Marxists, especially movements of people of color, women, anticolonialists, antinuclearists, environmentalists, etc.” (Agger, 1991, p. 125).