| Popis: |
Since the urbanization of many nations’ populations,schools have become increasingly bureaucratized, often becoming the basicbuilding blocks of larger school systems. Despite this, schools have retained someof their unique properties because of varying student needs and expectations ofthe immediate cultural and economic environments. Since the late twentiethcentury, the market ideology within neoliberalism has become a dominant featureof them, often advanced in the guise of education reforms. In this regard,strict standardization and accountability policies have been introduced to pushschools to produce uniform student outcomes, often embedded in the agenda ofreducing or eliminating achievement gaps between identifiable student groups byrace or class. Within the scope of these policies, competition between schoolshas been encouraged through school choice reforms and ranking of schools.Professional associations and educational agencies at different governmentallevels have supplemented these policies through identifying the so-calledresult-oriented leadership practices for school principals. Despite muchlegislation and financial investment, schools have produced overalldisappointing results, especially in the academic subjects. Competition betweenschools has worsened the situation of low performing and culturally differentstudents. Teachers have not always supported the applications and goalsprescribed by these policies, and their unions have sometimes adopted a hostilereaction to them. Howbeit, school principals have struggled to be effective leaders,even as their increased workload has resulted pushing it to the classroom teacherlevel. Accordingly, rigid policies have failed to address the highly variable humanaspects of education, and the one-size-fits-all approach centered on eliminatingachievement gaps has not been able to transform school contexts to conform topolicy requirements. One paradox of this dilemma is that as instruction becomesmore effective it increases rather than decreases the achievement differencesbetween students. The aim of decreasing achievement gaps through standardizationis therefore somewhat of “a fool’s errand.” |
