A 2022 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner
Critical Transformative Educational Leadership and Policy Studies - A Reader is a comprehensive collection of critical contributions from most of the leading voices in the fields of educational leadership and educational policy studies, pushing back against the current neoliberal authoritarian environment. The volume offers alternative ways to perceive and to formulate education leadership and policy from a critical transformative perspective. Individual chapters discuss such topics as social justice in education; poverty, race and public education; counter-hegemonic education movements; the privatization of schools; and school reform and advocacy leadership, among others, all from a critical perspective. It is a crucial and timely volume for educators, school administrators, educational leaders, social activists, and union leaders concerned with the current state of our universities and our education system.
Perfect for courses such as: Political Economy of Urban Education | Leadership and Policy Studies | Educational Policy and Reform | Politics of Education | Cultural Studies | Curriculum Theory and Development | Socio Historical Foundations | Indigenous Knowledges and Methodologies | Cultural Studies and Education
“Critical Transformative Leadership and Policy Studies is a masterpiece in education for social justice and creative freedom, a crucial oeuvre for those really committed with the struggle for dignified living conditions for humanity. It is such critical education that these leading voices point to, which is represented in this work by an unrepentant educator, João M. Paraskeva. Thus, as eminent creators, they show the way of change—towards respect for life. Although the night of the world spread its darkness, the light of the sun will continue to shine! Of this, it is a commendable example, and this work is priceless."
Jacqueline Zapata, Universidade de Querétaro, México
“Judging from most of this book’s authors, the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth has put together an excellent series of talks involving some of the finest committed and progressive public intellectuals around. Thanks to their commitment and the efforts of João M. Paraskeva, himself a very inspiring and insightful public intellectual, their talks are now made available to a wider global public. As somebody ensconced in a Mediterranean island (Malta) I am grateful to Myers Education Press for extending the contents beyond North America. By drawing on a number of public intellectuals, not all easily identified with education as an area of specific enquiry, this book helps generate discussions around the connections between educational critiques (not just criticisms) and larger social-economic and political efforts sounding either discordant or complementary notes. This is a great book, quite refreshing and insightful in its scope.”
Peter Mayo, University of Malta
“Too many struggles against genocide, ecocide, epistemicide and omnicide that have emerged from the wheelhouse of the academy have been tragically undermined, not necessarily by the policy wonks themselves, but by the toxic fix of neoliberalism that for decades has been rushing through the veins of college planning councils and boards of trustees, turning universities and colleges into little more than ivy-covered crack houses where a fatal addiction to profit augmentation results in an ideological pathocracy more suited to hustling on the Vegas Strip than for the nourishment of critically transformative leadership and policy practices. Yet the struggle for democracy has not ceased, thanks to the efforts of João Paraskeva, his colleagues, and his comrades throughout the field of education. Which is why this magisterial collection of essays becomes so urgent. The essays included in this stellar collection can provide the necessary seedbed of ideas and practices for rethinking how to refashion our leadership and policy agendas for the refurbishing of a radical democracy for a post-pandemic era.”
Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, Chapman University
“Critical Transformative Educational Leadership and Policy Studies is not only a call for international solidarity in critical times but also an example of it. Background to the book, there is a constructed community of ‘intellectual relatives’ when Paraskeva engaged the faculty and students at UMD in conversations with scholars and practitioners from different fields, thus modeling a critical transformative praxis, a microcosm of the community. This exceptional volume addresses real problems and emerging trends in education, matters on the intersection of politics and education, on critical issues concerning democracy such as the educational and curriculum epistemicide, public schooling, minorities, curriculum, teaching, and learning.”
Fatma Mizikaci, Ankara University, Turkey
IntroductionCritical Transformative Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
João M. ParaskevaPart INeoliberal Political Economy of EducationChapter 1Market Democracy in a Neoliberal Order: Doctrines and Reality
Noam ChomskyChapter 2Against Schooling: Education and Social Class
Stanley AronowitzChapter 3Rationality Crisis in Higher Education
Clyde BarrowChapter 4Austerity Politics, Coercive Neoliberal Urbanism and the Challenge of Counter-Hegemonic Education Movements
Pauline LipmanChapter 5The Failure of Corporate School Reform: Towards a New Common School Movement
Kenneth SaltmanPart IICritical Transformative Leadership, Policy and ReformChapter 6Effects on Inequality and Poverty versus Teachers and Schooling on America’s Youth
David BerlinerChapter 7Dominant Issues, Themes, and Prospects in the Education of Mexican Americans in the United States: An Overview
Cori Salmerón and Ángela ValenzuelaChapter 8Turn Around Schools: Towards Authentic School Reform: Eroding Authenticity and the Need for Advocacy Leadership
Gary AndersonChapter 9Resisting and Rolling Back Neoliberalism: The Opt-Out Movement and Teachers’ Unions
David Hursh, Zhe Chen, and Sarah McGinnisChapter 10Non-Rationality, Education, and the Ritual Performance of Sara Palin
Richard QuantzPart IIIOpen up el padron colonial de poderChapter 11Decolonizing University Leadership: Transforming What It Means to Lead
Antonia DarderChapter 12Itinerant Curriculum Theory: An Epistemological Declaration of Independence
João M. ParaskevaChapter 13Facing the Limits of Modern-Colonial Imaginaries
Vanessa de Oliveira AndreottiChapter 14Beyond US-Centered Multicultural Foundations
James Jupp and Miryam Espinosa-DulantoChapter 15From Paulo Freire to Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Democracy, Education and Emancipation
Ines Barbosa OliveiraPart IVAlternative ways to Think AlternativelyChapter 16What Is Really Taught as the Content of School Subjects? Teaching School Subjects as an Alchemy
Thomas PopkewitzChapter 17Image Management? Sites of the Real, Visual Culture, and Digital Present-Futures in Education
Bernadette BakerChapter 18Critical Transformative Leadership: Seeming to Change Only One Thing
John WillinskyChapter 19Can Post-Structuralist and Neo-Marxist Approaches Be Joined? Building Composite Approaches in Critical Educational Theory and Research
Thomas PedroniChapter 20Education and Equality: Learning to Create a Community
Ana Sanches BelloPart VThe Struggle to Democratize EducationChapter 21The Freirean Factor
Gustavo Fischman and Sandra R. SalesChapter 22Teacher Education as an Inclusive Political Project
Jurjo Torres SantomeChapter 23Walkouts Teach U.S. Labor a New Grammar for Struggle
Lois WeinerChapter 24Culturally Responsive Teaching: Learning to Teach Within the Context of Culture
Fernando NaiditchChapter 25National Learning Standards, Global Agenda, and Teacher Education
Alvaro Moreira Hypolito
About the Author
João M. Paraskeva is a Professor and founding Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and of the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Founder of the journal
Curriculum Sem Fronteiras, his latest books include
Curriculum Epistimicides, which won an AERA Book Award;
Towards a Just Curriculum Theory:
The Epistemicide; and
The Generation of the Utopia: Decolonizing Critical Curriculum Theory. His work has been translated into Greek, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and Finnish.