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This review has been accessed times since June 25, 2009

Normore, Anthony. (Ed.). (2008). Leadership for Social Justice. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing Pp. v + 308           ISBN 978-1-59311-977-3

Reviewed by Paul A. Crutcher
Michigan State University

June 25, 2009

Brooks, the series editor, suggests that the contributions to Leadership for Social Justice “confront myriad issues in multiple contexts and struggle to position themselves in the fuzzy space between research and activism,” further, that readers should see it “as an edited volume of discrete studies, but also as a collection with many conceptual and empirical connections” (p. viii). Normore, this book’s editor, adds that education leaders are all in that fuzzy space, that many have become, intentionally or by default, “social justice advocates and activists;” similarly, that the book’s “contributors provide a variety of rich perspectives to the social justice phenomenon from the lens of empirical, historical, narrative, and conceptual designs” (p. ix). Current scholars, teachers, activists, and leaders in education may (likely) disagree about these claims that they are driven by social justice rhetoric and practice, but the editors have compiled in Leadership for Social Justice an interesting mix of research methods, foci, and authorial expertise.  

Content is divided into four parts. The first includes four chapters that are critical of various ideology and policy, each stressing certain commitments to social justice, equity, and tolerance. Part 2 promotes social justice pedagogies through three chapters. Community, teacher-student, and other collaborative partnerships are detailed in the three chapters that comprise Part 3. The editors identify Part 4 as Ethical Leadership and Principles of Social Justice, but the first chapter in Part 4 seems to be more fitting for Part 3, and the final three chapters discuss the New DEEL (Democratic Ethical Educational Leadership) movement.

Part 1 begins with a narrative inquiry into the transformative, educative leadership and Black feminism of four prominent Black women at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the southeast. Jean-Marie and Normore discuss how these four women were keen on actively challenging structures of oppression and promoting “racial uplift,” which is perhaps the “rearing of African American students” (p. 19) or perhaps “providing a purpose for the Black community” (p. 20), and they describe significant personal and professional moments in the 60s and 70s, what the authors call “formal and informal mentoring they received as they ascended the career ladder” (p. 25), and how they put social justice theory into practice. The authors also note how these narratives rarely come out; however, if they show the committed, radical work being done by these women in these contexts, the message seems diminished by giving them pseudonyms, by muddying their individual struggles.  

Like many of the contributions to Leadership for Social Justice, Chapter 2 is framed around an analysis of Brown v. Board of Education, and 50 years of possible change. Lightfoot’s central question: If inequities and disparities continue, how can we achieve more equitable education—education that doesn’t support or perpetuate racism? The key criticism Lightfoot levels is at the assumption that separate is inherently unequal, arguing that combating racism can be disastrously neglected if advocacy focuses on flawed assumptions about segregation. In all, Chapter 2 includes succinct history, an intuitive prose, and compelling, simple arguments; the conclusions might be somewhat pessimistic in this ideological company.

Tooms and Alston employ the 20 questions comprising the Attitudes Towards Lesbians and Gay Men Scale (ATLG) to determine the same of 174 graduate students in a school leadership prep program. Their findings include significant neutrality, but they argue that “neutrality concerning issues of equity and marginalized groups is in direct conflict with the concept of leading in a democratic society” (p. 69). Using a privileges list McIntosh (1988) devised to provoke individuals to see White privilege, these authors do something similar for privileges based on sexual orientation, building a two-page, 28-statement list. Unfortunately, the authors seem to use the quantitative research that allowed for this chapter to forward an agenda not altogether derived from or connected to the research. Notably, for instance, they include their privilege list, one that swallows roughly 20% of the chapter, but do not include the 20-question ATLG, which would have allowed the findings more explicit relevance to the reader.   

Finally in Part 1, López and Vàsquez reasonably posit that “Latinos are often viewed as a cultural ‘other,’ even among other marginalized groups” (p. 77). The primary othering explored in their Chapter 4 is linguistic—they write, “The Senate’s move to ‘link’ language issues with immigration…wrongly conflated issues of national security with modern day nativism” (p. 76). The chapter “seeks to interrogate the multiple, yet subtle, ways in which teacher and administrator perceptions of their Spanish speaking Latino students were informed by nativist and assimilationist ideologies” and therefore “function as racialized constructs that reify and reproduce inequities” (p. 78). López and Vàsquez discuss from their case study the one-way and artificial language “barriers,” the problematic notion of language “experts,” and the flawed judgments levied by teachers and administrators at Latino parents. 

The social justice pedagogies of Part 2 begin with Brooks’ and Miles’ efforts “to examine pedagogical trends in educational leadership toward the goal of identifying patterns that have historically shaped the field” (p. 100). They highlight the possible repetition seen in US history, and what might be learned from these intersections and precedents. The chapter also posits “issues and contingencies that confront a field of practice and scholarship standing collectively at a crossroads” (p. 100), a crossroads detailed thoroughly in Part 4 and elsewhere. Pragmatism comes through a list of possible actions school leaders might employ toward social justice, such as applying for various grants and funding possibilities.

Whole school reforms (WSRs) are central to Sernak’s Chapter 6, and an initial premise suggests that WSRs promote academic quality and thus economic relevance, but not or not often social justice. Two such WSRs in one elementary school in New Jersey, Success For All and Professional Development Schools, are examined through Freire’s conscientization, or “critical consciousness” (p. 120). The development arc of conscientization: to promote leader’s interest in power dynamics, critical and analytical thinking, challenging norms (desocialization), and, finally, taking actions to change practices and policies.

While race, gender, and class tend to dominate conversations about social justice, O’Hair and Reitzug argue that these conversations should also include location. Despite the fact that rural areas are poorer than urban areas, O’Hair and Reitzug describe how rural education systems are underrepresented in studies, even though they include “one-third of all U.S. schoolchildren” (p. 152). Using the efforts of the Oklahoma Science Project (OSP) and the Oklahoma Science Initiative for Rural Schools (K20), O’Hair and Reitzug write, “This chapter provides a professional development model…that is evidence-based and which combines the strengths of OSP and K20” toward improving science education in these rural settings (p. 153). O’Hair and Reitzug find that authentic tasks with interactive instruction is key to improvement, and offers three major goals and strategies to implement them in schools. While explicitly about rural Oklahoma, O’Hair and Reitzug make it clear and it’s intuitive that their ideas speak to much broader populations. 

Part 3 opens with the institutionalized racism Black communities face, specifically through the social unrest and riots in 1967 and 2001 Cincinnati. Brown, Larsen, Britt, Ruiz, and Star call to educators and educational leaders to find and incorporate Black perspectives in education, and they note positive changes since 2001 and since partnerships. The chapter examples that the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Arts Consortium of Cincinnati have created spaces for just such a dialogue over Black perspectives through the university-museum collaboration in the exhibit Civil Unrest in Cincinnati: Voices of Our Community.

In the next chapter, Mitra dissects the workings of 13 youth-adult partnership programs, all San Francisco-area grant recipients. In straightforward organization, Mitra describes her qualitative study through interviews and observations, and highlight the connections between and interrelation among the primary categories system, organization, and individual. Distributive leadership is a running theme in Leadership for Social Justice, and it’s found in this chapter through the argument that student contributions are essential to social justice partnerships. Notably, Mitra suggests students tend to bring different and important perspectives and a “passion and attention to the process that adults alone rarely do” (p. 211). 

Part 3 follows university-museum and youth-adult partnerships with those between school and community. Nevertheless, Chapter 10 offers a brief, slanted history that includes Brown v. Board of Education, and claims also familiar to other chapters about the disadvantaged, poor, urban, Black individual. Normore and Blanco link social justice and leadership through moral obligations, and argue that schools making collaborations and avoiding bureaucratic nonsense is key to true educational successes. The chapter’s extensive conclusion requires school leaders to be active in reconnecting with the community through partnerships with community leaders and parents, and make ethical and moral decisions and mandates throughout the process.

Leonard starts Part 4 with a unique chapter in this company. Often personal, and intensely self-aware, as if narrative, qualitative, first-person work must be done this way (the chapter comes across to this reader as a small apologetic for the method), it details collaborative university faculty grappling with change, accountability mandates, and the like. The author struggles with “authenticity,” while not providing a workable definition of the term that is not highly-subjective; nevertheless, Leonard offers “teacher leader” (p. 253), “researcher leader,” and “servant leader” (p. 254) as ways readers might position themselves to work toward authenticity and social justice. 

The final three chapters, and the collective bulk of Part 4, work with the New DEEL (Democratic Ethical Educational Leadership) movement. Gross provides a tidy introduction to the movement in Chapter 12. In it, Gross describes the New DEEL as a product of University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) members and scholars “to change the direction of our field away from an overly corporate model toward the values of democracy and ethical behavior” (p. 262). Gross argues that education leaders and education leaders in training must answer “Will we prepare a generation of obedient functionaries serving a bureaucratic accountability regime, or will we prepare a new kind of leader who can build a democratic-ethical vision for the school and surrounding community?” (p. 260). In addition to then charting the dichotomy New DEEL frames between transformative, democratic leaders and traditional, transactional, corporate leaders, Gross implies New DEEL adherents’ shared ideology about leadership and progress: “There is no democracy without social justice, no social justice without democracy, and that these mutually inclusive concepts are indispensable ingredients to school improvement worthy of the name” (p. 262). Storey and Beeman’s Chapter 13 adds advocacy of distributive leadership, altering the hyper-individualism that runs contrary to social justice, and building what they consider “democratic-ethical-educational leadership” (p. 281). It couples New Deel rhetoric with a pointed critique of NCLB and other corporate-type educational practices. Finally, in Chapter 14 Shapiro contributes the paradox of control vs. democracy and a critique of accountability-based ideology and policy that adhere to the New DEEL principles expressed in 12 and 13.     

This Part 4, three-chapter cluster provides a clear place to begin holistic comments on Leadership for Social Justice. Most fundamentally, those who are advocates of NCLB, quantitative and standardized test measures, accountability practices, and the like will almost surely find this book hard to stomach, and it does little to attract those who do not already agree with the basic premises expressed within. It provides strong and diverse practices and expertise, but it’s also narrowly focused on the US and on the false Black-White binary that defines “race” in the US. O’Hair and Reitzug challenge the first problem in Chapter 7 and López and Vàsquez challenge the second in Chapter 4, but Leadership for Social Justice remains contextually myopic. Importantly, the reasoned appeal to extend social justice to location, and to underrepresented rural areas throughout the globe, sits at odds with the decisive statements in many of the other chapters, especially Chapter 10, about the primacy of race and the equating of social justice with binary racial tensions in the US. Morality also pervades the book, yet just as the contributors are fragmented on of what social justice is inclusive, morality is largely an undefined concept that nevertheless purports universality. Interestingly, if the moral charge these authors (and editors) discuss requires inclusivity, the book’s lopsided take on social justice becomes problematic.

Readers may also question editorial decisions. Chapters include typographical errors, for instance, but more disconcerting is the redundancy in Chapters 12, 13, and 14, and why Chapter 11 is grouped with them in a Part 4 that might have been Perspectives on the New DEEL rather than the ambiguous Ethical Leadership and Principles of Social Justice. Normore, the book’s editor, manages to contribute the introduction and Chapters 1 and 10. Add to that point the fact that several of the chapters, including Normore’s Chapter 1, are parts of larger studies, and readers might (rightly) question how much the book is contributing to the field relative to how much it is a publishing project from a special interest group at AERA.      

For these reasons, Leadership for Social Justice unwittingly points out the discontinuity within advocacy and some of the recycling in academic research and publishing. Nevertheless, it also largely accomplishes the task Normore claims it does: to “provide a variety of rich perspectives to the social justice phenomenon from the lens of empirical, historical, narrative, and conceptual designs” (p. ix). Leadership for Social Justice, then, while narrow in scope and fractured in ideology, does offer a mix of research methods, foci, and authorial expertise that may appeal to receptive scholars and educators.        

About the Reviewer

Paul A. Crutcher has degrees in philosophy, composition, and women’s and gender studies. Paul has published in a variety of mediums, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy at Michigan State University.

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Editors: Gene V Glass, Gustavo Fischman, Melissa Cast-Brede

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