Unpacking Leadership Formation Practices and Policies for US Catholic Schools
Abstract
There is an emerging consensus in the field of Catholic education in the US about what constitutes effective Catholic school leadership defined by the National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Schools (NSBECS). The professional/trade organization supporting Catholic schools in the US (NCEA) has endorsed the NSBECS and the Journal of Catholic Education recently published a focus section dedicated to the NSBECS focusing on the increasing use of standards to help (arch)dioceses assess leadership and school quality (Ozar, Weitzel-O’Neill, Barton, Calteaux, & Hunter, 2019). Simultaneously, there have been recent efforts to redesign leadership formation programs specifically for aspiring Catholic school leaders in light of the NSBECS (Boyle, 2016). To this point, though, there has been little effort to unpack the assumptions underlying these new consensus definitions of leadership effectiveness or leadership formation.
The proposed roundtable discussion paper will present part of a larger empirical study of Catholic school leadership formation programs identifying major trends shaping the ways educators are prepared to become leaders in US Catholic schools. The study asks: How is Catholic school leadership formation designed and implemented within and across major sites of practice? How do programs define leadership formation and what are the implications of this definition for how programs intend to prepare leaders?
This study draws upon a new conceptual framework proposed by the authors at the AERA Annual Meeting in 2019 articulating the complex interrelationships among narratives defining the current enrollment-driven ideology of US Catholic education policy, practice, and research (Miller & O’Connor, 2019). This study and its conceptual framework are also informed by the complementary theoretical frameworks of critical Catholic educational research brought to light in this symposium (e.g., Burke, 2012; Garcia-Huidobro, 2017; Manning, 2018) and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017). The initial stage of this line of research (being presented at a research conference in the US on Catholic educational research) reviews literature and conceptual arguments about Catholic leadership formation to offer a critical interpretation of how Catholic school leadership formation has been redefined in light of the emerging NSBECS consensus. The next phase of the study (which we hope will be presented at GRACE) uses qualitative research methods to analyze a data corpus composed of public documents describing programs/program structures, proprietary program documents received from the programs under investigation, and insider interviews conducted by the researchers.
The significance of this study is that there is almost no peer-reviewed, empirical research of leadership formation programs preparing leaders for Catholic schools in the US conducted by researchers outside of a program. At a time when many Catholic universities running leadership formation programs have identified the NSBECS as the clearest way to define school leadership effectiveness, there is a need for independent, complex analysis of the ways this consensus creates boundaries around what counts as leadership formation and the effects of that boundary for the preparation of leaders in the field. This paper provides initial evidence to help make sense of the consequences that emerge for leadership program design as the NSBECS consensus continues to emerge in the field.
The signs of grace in pursuing this research are the opportunities to contribute a new, reconceptualized definition of Catholic school leadership to US Catholic schooling. Catholic education has been undertheorized in the US; we will lose the ability to find moments of grace in our US Catholic schools should this trend continue.
Unpacking Leadership Formation Practices and Policies for US Catholic Schools
There is an emerging consensus in the field of Catholic education in the US about what constitutes effective Catholic school leadership defined by the National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Schools (NSBECS). The professional/trade organization supporting Catholic schools in the US (NCEA) has endorsed the NSBECS and the Journal of Catholic Education recently published a focus section dedicated to the NSBECS focusing on the increasing use of standards to help (arch)dioceses assess leadership and school quality (Ozar, Weitzel-O’Neill, Barton, Calteaux, & Hunter, 2019). Simultaneously, there have been recent efforts to redesign leadership formation programs specifically for aspiring Catholic school leaders in light of the NSBECS (Boyle, 2016). To this point, though, there has been little effort to unpack the assumptions underlying these new consensus definitions of leadership effectiveness or leadership formation.
The proposed roundtable discussion paper will present part of a larger empirical study of Catholic school leadership formation programs identifying major trends shaping the ways educators are prepared to become leaders in US Catholic schools. The study asks: How is Catholic school leadership formation designed and implemented within and across major sites of practice? How do programs define leadership formation and what are the implications of this definition for how programs intend to prepare leaders?
This study draws upon a new conceptual framework proposed by the authors at the AERA Annual Meeting in 2019 articulating the complex interrelationships among narratives defining the current enrollment-driven ideology of US Catholic education policy, practice, and research (Miller & O’Connor, 2019). This study and its conceptual framework are also informed by the complementary theoretical frameworks of critical Catholic educational research brought to light in this symposium (e.g., Burke, 2012; Garcia-Huidobro, 2017; Manning, 2018) and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017). The initial stage of this line of research (being presented at a research conference in the US on Catholic educational research) reviews literature and conceptual arguments about Catholic leadership formation to offer a critical interpretation of how Catholic school leadership formation has been redefined in light of the emerging NSBECS consensus. The next phase of the study (which we hope will be presented at GRACE) uses qualitative research methods to analyze a data corpus composed of public documents describing programs/program structures, proprietary program documents received from the programs under investigation, and insider interviews conducted by the researchers.
The significance of this study is that there is almost no peer-reviewed, empirical research of leadership formation programs preparing leaders for Catholic schools in the US conducted by researchers outside of a program. At a time when many Catholic universities running leadership formation programs have identified the NSBECS as the clearest way to define school leadership effectiveness, there is a need for independent, complex analysis of the ways this consensus creates boundaries around what counts as leadership formation and the effects of that boundary for the preparation of leaders in the field. This paper provides initial evidence to help make sense of the consequences that emerge for leadership program design as the NSBECS consensus continues to emerge in the field.
The signs of grace in pursuing this research are the opportunities to contribute a new, reconceptualized definition of Catholic school leadership to US Catholic schooling. Catholic education has been undertheorized in the US; we will lose the ability to find moments of grace in our US Catholic schools should this trend continue.