Gender, Diversity and Secondary School Principals:

1. Gender, Diversity and Secondary School Principals: How do Patterns of Succession/Rotation Impact on Sustaining School Effectiveness in a Diverse World?

2. Three Year Study (2003-2006) Funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Purposes: • Identify patterns and consequences of secondary principal succession to determine areas of concern and best practice • Examine district and provincial leaders’ perspectives • Focus on gender and diversity

3. Pan-Canadian Research Team • Cecilia Reynolds, University of Saskatchewan • Robert White, St Francis Xavier University • Carol Brayman, OISE/University of Toronto • Shawn Moore, OISE/University of Toronto

4. Concepts Succession refers to the departure of one leader and the arrival of another. It includes: • Identification • Selection • Induction • Placement • Ongoing training • Rotation • Recruitment • Exiting Rotationis an organizational mechanism for transfer of leaders within a system.

6. Relevant Literature • Conger, J.A. & Fulmer, R.M. (2003). Developing Your Leadership Pipeline. Harvard Business Review, December, 2003, 76-84. • Fink, D. (2005). Leadership for Mortals: developing and sustaining leaders in learning. London: Paul Chapman Publishing/SAGE. • Fink, D. & Brayman, C. (2004) Principals’ succession and educational change Journal of Educational Administration. 42 (4), .431-449. • Fink, D. & Brayman C. (2005). Leadership Succession and the challenges of change. Educational Change Special Issue .Educational Administration Quarterly. 41(4) SAGE • Fullan, M. (2000). ‘Leadership for the Twenty-first Century: Breaking the Bonds of Dependency’. The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership. San Francisco: Wiley Co. 156-162.

7. Hargreaves, A. & Fink, D. (2002). Sustaining Leadership. In Davies, B. & West-Burnham, J. (Eds.) Handbook of Leadership and Management. London: Pearson Education. • Hargreaves, A. & Fink, D. (2004). The seven principles of sustainable leadership. Educational Leadership, 61(7), 8-13. • Hargreaves, A., Moore, S. & Fink, D. (2002). An investigation of secondary school principal rotation and succession in times of standards-based reform and rapiddemographic change. Ontario Principals Council Report. Toronto: OISE/UT. • Hargreaves, A., Moore, S., Fink, D., Brayman, C., & White, R. (2003). Succeeding Leaders? A study of principal succession and sustainability. Toronto: Ontario Principals Council. • Hargreaves, A., Shaw, P., Fink, D., Giles, C., & Moore, S. (2002) Secondary School Reform: The Experiences and Interpretations of Teachers and Administrators in Six Ontario Secondary Schools. Toronto: The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/ University of Toronto.

8. Hart, A.W. (1993) Principal Succession: Establishing Leadership in Schools. Albany: State University of New York Press. • Liebman, M., Bruer, R. & Maki, B. (1996) Succession Management: The Next Generation of Succession Planning. Human Resource Planning, 19, 3, 16- 29. • Leithwood, K. (2001). School leadership in the context of accountability policies. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 4(3), 217-236. • Macmillan, R. (2001). Leadership Succession, Cultures of Teaching and Education Change in The Sharp Edge of Educational Change. London: Palmer Press. • Moore, S. (2002). Talisman Park Collegiate: Discourse of Nostalgia. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/ University of Toronto. Unpublished case study for Spencer Project, “Change Over Time”.

9. National Academy of Public Administration. (1992) Paths to Leadership:Executive Succession Planning in the Federal Government. Washington, DC: NAPA. • National Academy of Public Administration (1997). Managing Succession and Developing Leadership: Growing the Next Generation of Public Service Leaders. Washington, DC: NAPA. • Reynolds, C., White, R., Moore, S. & Brayman, C. (2005). The Implications and Challenges of Leadership Succession/Rotation for the Sustainability of School Reform. Paper presented at the International Congress on School Effectiveness and Improvement. Barcelona.

10. Rothwell, W.J. (1994). Effective Succession Planning – Ensuring Leadership Continuity and Building Talent from Within. New York: Amacom. • Ruderman, M., Ohlott, P., & Kram, K. (2001). Managerial Promotion: The Dynamics of Men and Women. Greensboro, MC: Center for Creative Leadership. • Souque, J. P. (1997). Recruiting and Retaining High Technology Talent inCanada. Ottawa, ON: Conference Board of Canada. • Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. • Williams, T. (2001). Unrecognized exodus, unaccepted accountability: The looming shortage of principals and vice principals in Ontario public school boards. Toronto: Ontario Principals Council.

11. Methodology

12. Data Collection Interviews:To date: 29 semi-structured, telephone interviews of approximately one hour with the following respondents: • Directors of Education • Superintendents • School Board Chairs • Executives of Principal Associations • Leaders in Higher Education Artifacts: District rotation and succession policy documents were also collected, in cases where they were available

13. SAMPLE • 4 provinces across Canada • 2 districts within each province (representing a rural, urban, large and small demographic)

14. Provinces Included in Study

15. Findings

16. Research suggests that principal rotation every 5-7 years is essential to professional growth and development.

17. In urban districts, principal rotation tends to occur with regularity every 3 to 5 years • While systematic principal rotation is not the norm in the rural districts we studied

18. Administrators in rural districts must contend with the isolation factor: dispersal of communities across wide geographic areas

19. Amalgamation has been a fact of life for small school districts in all four provinces in our study

20. District amalgamation, while organizationally destabilizing, provides administrators with the opportunity to review long-standing rotation and succession policies

21. In 8 districts we studied since 2003: • Five have male Directors of Education • In one rural district, a women succeeded a male Director

22. One female administrator articulated the invisible role of gender relations within school systems, “Gender's always a factor. Are we allowed to weight it? No…Hiring policies…are masculinist in orientation that favor men…We always make sure there's a woman on the interview committee…to avoid grievance…”

23. Recruitment of leaders from First Nations, African-Canadian, and other under-represented groups, is a growing concern of administrators.

24. “The challenge ... (is) ensuring that our leadership group is representative of our teacher group and of our wider community. The community is changing, there's a huge demographic shift…in relation to the numbers of Aboriginal people…We need to make sure that we're encouraging, training and promoting people of Aboriginal background”

25. Conclusions

26. While some school districts have made progress in developing integrated programs of rotation and leadership succession, others have virtually no formal succession plan ─ other than leadership development

27. Administrators operate in crisis management mode because of: • Decline in professional interest in formal leadership roles • Shrinking numbers of qualified leaders • Accelerating pace of educational change • System restructuring

28. Misconceptions about female capacity to manage leadership roles traditionally held by males have their roots in deeper political and social structures in society.

29. The following factors influence the number of women principals placed in secondary schools: • Policies of inclusion • Male enlightenment • Female educators’ higher academic qualifications and professional leadership ambitions

30. Rotation policy is more effective when integrated within a coherent, system-wide leadership succession plan

31. Principal succession planning should involve key stakeholders, including principals, teachers, parents and community members in more than perfunctory roles

32. Implications

33. An unplanned “carousel” of principal rotation jeopardizes school improvement efforts by creating cultures of professional distrust and organizational uncertainty

34. School communities can stagnate when leaders stay too long and become too comfortable in one setting

35. “Masculinist” attitudes, policies and practices: • Exclude qualified women from leadership positions • Waste valuable, needed leadership talent • Reduce school capacity • Generate cynicism in the succession process

36. Under-representation of certain groups in leadership positions (e.g., African and Native Canadians), deprives schools of leaders who can bring unique cultural and political sensitivities to their work inside and outside their schools

37. When key stakeholders ─ principals, teachers, parents ─ are marginalized from principal succession decision-making, it makes it that much more difficult to build a school climate of shared vision and commitment

38. Future Plans In year three, we are interviewing district and provincial leaders in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, along with key informants in higher education. These new data will be analyzed in relation to the following emerging themes: • Attracting secondary principals who represent diverse communities • SES and its influence on district policies of rotation and succession • Silence on deeper issues of gender, women and leadership

39. Carol_Brayman@hotmail.com smoore@oise.utoronto.ca