ABSTRACT
Educational leadership literatures offer diminishing returns for understanding of the organising of schooling because so few new insights can be added to the initial conclusions of discrete entities and their attributes. This chapter highlights the orthodoxy of substantialism through systems thinking and how this relates to the dismantling of public education. It discusses the competing normative ends of schooling and how they remain problematic in educational leadership research. As a by-product of the idiosyncratic nature of Australian federalism, even so-called ‘private’ schools receive public funds. Any movement in the engagement pattern of public and private education is reflective of a shift in ways of relating with the social world. Arguments concerning public and private education struggle to get beyond an attempt to anchor the social world in a single, or small set of, principles. The variation within non-public is arguably as great, if not greater, than between public and non-public schools.
