ABSTRACT
Educational administration . . . involves not simply the formulation and implementation of reliable and neutral techniques of management but rather the active embracing of a political role involving analysis, judgment, and advocacy and the adoption of an active stance toward issues of social justice and democracy. (Bates 1987: 110)
Although today many North American educational administrators, or more inclusively, educational leaders, take Bates’ words of two decades ago seriously (e.g., Educational Administration Quarterly 2004; MacKinnon, in press; Maynes 2001), a large segment of the school system still sees its goal as putting into practice the latest theories to emerge from that dominant duo of government and markets. Marshall, in an introduction to a special edition of Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ), points out the relatively short history of equity concerns within the administrative side of education. Rather than focusing on inclusion (or exclusion) of people by gender, sexual orientation, class and race, she notes that administrators’ concerns, as refl ected in scholarly writing, have tended traditionally to center on such generalisations as ‘bureaucracy, hierarchy, [and] effi ciency’ (2004: 3). Thus, Marshall argues, the fi eld is overdue, especially in light of reactionary reforms in the United States, for a more openly ideological perspective.
