Dissertation

Power Within Distributive Leadership: A Consideration of Teacher and Administrator Relationships as Constructed and Deconstructed through Discourse

Reform is constant but there is little or no change in the achievement gap. As the nation begins yet another reform effort, the Common Core State Standards, the question proposed in this study is ever more pressing. Are we seeing real reform or is it that underlying these many reform efforts are unchallenged and unchanged epistemological assumptions that nurture existing theories-in-use despite whatever the current flavor of espoused theory. The primary purpose of this study is to identify how leadership practice is distributed at the school site. Current literature on distributed leadership has identified that for distributed leadership theory to be explanatory it will need to account for not only that leadership practice is being distributed but how it is being distributed. Since distributed leadership is the espoused leadership practice in education today a method to uncover the theory-in-practice of leadership is required. The study used discourse analysis and Micropolitical theory to analyze the conversations of teachers and administrators during 18 team meetings at two elementary schools over the course of a year. The research questions of the study focused primarily on how conversations revealed the power and position of specific discourses. This study has observed that standards-based instruction and the high-stakes testing that drives it have changed the paradigm of learning. This paradigm is that learning is quantifiable and represented by the results of high-stakes testing. Raising test scores is not only the indicator of closing the achievement gap but discursively substitutes for closing the achievement gap. The study found that the discourse of high-stakes testing was the most powerful discourse at the two schools and established the context for conversations around learning. This discourse was more powerful at the school where scores were more important and was more influential on the approach teachers at that site had toward instruction. The discourse of high-stakes testing served as a substitute for leadership, which reduced teacher and principal autonomy. The study also found that the discourse of distributed leadership provided spaces where participative discourse occurred. Further, it found that leadership was largely hierarchically distributed at the two sites partly due to macro-discourses from beyond the school site. Distributed leadership did not necessarily reduce and may have increased the hierarchical power of the principal position. These findings lead to a conclusion that the most recent version of standardsbased instruction, the Common Core state standards, will continue to have the discourse of high-stakes testing set the context for conversations around learning since it continues the same discourse. Another implication of the study is that how the Common Core affects authentically engaging instruction will be more around the construction and implementation of the assessment tools than around the accompanying rhetoric. Adding to research on distributed leadership theory the study demonstrated that research on how leadership practice is distributed must incorporate some mechanism to consider how power and position influence the distribution. Studies using discourse analysis participate in the social construction of reality where meaning is never fixed and all analysis is open to alternate interpretations. The findings that seemed emerge from the many conversations considered have other alternative interpretations that are accessible to the reader through the extensive presentation of text in chapter four.

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