Bridging the Opportunity Gap offers an empowerment tool that investigates and analyzes the experiences of school principals and the processes they underwent in their promotion from educator to principal. Author Dr. Danielle Hyles-Rainford interrogates the notion of career mobility in school systems. The purpose of this study is to explore actual career barriers that impede the mobility of aspiring educators, with a specific focus on race and gender, and also to give agency attributes and navigational tools to attain personal empowerment and systemic resiliency for career success. Previous research in the field of mobility and leadership in education has rarely brought together issues of race, gender and identity politics with the notions of human, social and cultural capital accumulation. Bridging the Opportunity Gap explores a variety of closely related topics, including the impact of horizontal versus vertical mobility, the career community web, spiral and the traditional ladder, under-representation and overqualified candidates, and family/childrearing and its effects on promotion in different global contexts. Most importantly, it explores how to navigate a complex system like the public education system and gives individual and collective agency attributes for success, such as political astuteness, influential mentorship, personal style, higher education, and superior job performance.
Bridging the Opportunity Gap
Leadership, Social Difference, Career and EducationBy Danielle Hyles-RainfordiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Dr. Danielle Hyles-Rainford
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-8827-9Contents
Acknowledgements...........................................................................viiForeword...................................................................................ixDr. Chris Spence and Karen Falconer........................................................ixPreface....................................................................................xiIntroduction...............................................................................xiiiRace To The Top Case Study.................................................................xiv1. Educators Swimming Upstream.............................................................1Multi-Positioned Location..................................................................2Multi-Positionality and The Study..........................................................5Sketching the Study........................................................................6Educators Flowing Through History: Rapids, Waves and Calm Waters...........................10Structuring the Flow of the Study..........................................................21Hearing the Voice of Principals through Data...............................................23Research Challenges and Possibilities......................................................352. Ripples: Educators Experience Swimming Upstream.........................................39Education Systems and Trends in Occupation and Career Mobility.............................40Hegemonic Practices within Promotion Processes in the Education System.....................45Career Mobility............................................................................48Education Career Mobility..................................................................51Educational Leadership.....................................................................57Career Mobility, Leadership and Emergence of Agency Attributes Data........................593. Waves: Educators Embocy Swimming Upstream...............................................75Race, Power and Leadership.................................................................76Understanding Everyday Racism..............................................................80Gender, Power and Leadership...............................................................81The Emancipation of Women – A Ghanaian Perspective...................................86Gender Leadership - Western Context........................................................87Social Difference - Race and Gender Data...................................................894. Rapids Educators Engender Swimming Upstream.............................................99Capital and Social Difference - Hierarchies of Career Opportunity..........................103Human Capital..............................................................................104Social Capital.............................................................................106Cultural Capital...........................................................................107The Three Dimension Mobility Field.........................................................109Interactive Capital Data...................................................................111Integration of Interactive Capital Data in the Mobility Field..............................1225. Changing the Direction of the Flow......................................................125Synthesis of Multiple Factors in Interaction...............................................126Conscious Career Elevation.................................................................1406. Moving the Flow Forward.................................................................147Overall Themes Emerging From the Data......................................................148Reflections on my Journey as the Researcher................................................152Implications of the Study..................................................................154Flowing With the Stream....................................................................157Afterword..................................................................................165Dr. Njoki Wane.............................................................................165References.................................................................................167Index......................................................................................189
Chapter One
Educators Swimming Upstream Leaders hear and incorporate the agenda – but often in ways that extend beyond the particulars-find and seize upon common visions yet extend the horizons of possibility.
(Carol Ann Tomlinson & Susan Demirsky Allen, 2000)
This chapter provides an entry point for the critical examination of social difference and inequity that influence career mobility aspirations for elementary school practitioners. To understand the blueprint of the study, it is important to understand the architect: the researcher and her personal location. The architect designs the plans of the study. Historically, many marginalized professionals including visible minorities and women have been denied access to positions of responsibility in school leadership. Today, there remain threads of barriers to accessing these positions of added responsibility such as elementary school principal. There are serious implications for the next generation. The current marginalized students including visible minority and girls have a stake in this complex problem involving lack of access, equity and representation within educational promotion.
This study explores the factors that implicate social difference and career mobility access for elementary school practitioners, asking if there are built-in mechanisms in the elementary education system working to keep marginalized professionals including visible minorities and women off the promotional ladder? If so, this suggests a repeating cycle sustaining and mutually reinforcing set of hegemonic ideologies in school leadership; and simultaneously will reveal agency attributes and navigational tools. While paying particular attention to the architect's identity politics in an increasingly neo-liberal landscape, the researcher's plan encompasses her politics, reviews theoretical and empirical research. This connects the research back to the larger plan which shapes the direction of the innovation created; the new blueprint expounding on a previous notion and making contributions to the field.
This chapter will frame the relevance of the study for education professionals and will help us to grapple with its necessity at this time when marginalized individuals are becoming increasingly educated and will continue to knock on the school boards' doors for school leadership promotions. With this context in mind, the material in this chapter is informed by the following objectives:
1. How do the three central research questions impact aspiring educators and current students, the next generation of educators?
2. What are the limitations and implications of the study for marginalized professionals with regard to career mobility?
In order to address these questions, this chapter is organized as follows:
I. Multi-Positioned Location
II. Multi-Positionality and the Study
III. Sketching the Study
IV. Educators Flowing Through History: Ripples, Waves and Rapid Waters
V. Structuring the Flow of the Study
VI. Hearing the Voices of Principals Through Data
VII. Research Challenges and Possibilities
Multi-Positioned Location
Upon reflecting on an analogy based on a forest metaphor, when you look at a forest in the distance, it is like looking at your community of trees. Yet, as you walk closer you see that all of the individual trees are placed at different locations in your community, resulting in the uniqueness of positionality. Keeping in mind, intersectionalities such as race, gender, class and age, we can see an individual tree as growing complicated with thorns and flower buds, with different levels of aliveness that shift depending on context. Understanding that positionality is shifting, contextual and fluid, the effects of social class, human capital accumulation, striving goals of educational attainment, age and gender can be both a mixture of flower buds and thorns. Positionality morphs again, at another level such as marital status, being foreign or Canadian born, immigration status, place of origin, ethnicity and race. The complex and fluid nature of identity and its politics, drawing on this metaphor of the forest, is why I feel one's unique location needs to be heard. It is important to take the time and reflect on your own positionality, grounded in your identity politics to see how you can be read in your current organization. This is the piece of the inequity puzzle we can resonate with. What are your multi-positionalities in your personal and professional identity? What tension does your multi-positioned location evoke in your career aspirations and your daily interactions?
"All of us are multi-positioned, implicated in unequally empowered ways of understanding and doing; people share positioning in common and yet are not simply defined by sets of binaries; black/white, working class/ middle class, female/male" (Arber, 2000). We all inhabit many unequally empowered positions. As a multi-positioned elementary educator and now administrator, I have been preoccupied with this perplexing phenomenon of seeing some marginalized professionals including visible minorities and women being denied opportunities to advance in their chosen career. They have the relevant experience, credentials, qualifications and academic achievements, as well as political and social astuteness; however, they can and still are denied access to higher level positions.
I would like to research the question: what barriers in the education system halt marginalized educators from gaining access to school leadership promotion and what empowerment tools can assist in circumventing these barriers? However, I would like to also develop applicable tools for marginalized professionals. In this study I ask questions that explore the attributes aspiring educators need, the criteria that inform career decisions, and how these relate to the systemic and highly interactive sets of barriers that prevent career mobility for some professionals in elementary education. Our challenge is to understand our own entry-point as a professional in the education system, with the societal advantages and disadvantages, and to engage elementary school administrators in a discourse that benefits all who have a stake.
In my experience as an international educator, the presence of social barriers appeared to be reinforced in the systems evidenced in the study. I actively began to seek out people and have informal conversations to ask them about what they experienced, and ask how the presence of social barriers was affecting and not affecting their careers. I received a range of responses about how women were mistreated, or being discounted for their age or rejected for their class and/or the village they live in, or being ostracized because of their race in many nations, foreign or otherwise such as England, South Africa, Brazil, United States, India, Japan, etc. This compelled me to consider another layer in my research - a cross- cultural one. By experiencing other people's realities and oppressions in other places and comparing them to those in Canada, I decided to choose Koforidua, Ghana and Ontario, Canada to compare. I chose Ghana because of its unique history, being the first African nation south of the Sahara to gain independence from colonial rule. It was also the first post- colonial African country to begin the re-appropriation and reconstruction of its education system. In addition, Ghana is the country from where the descendents of my own ancestors from Trinidad and Tobago where forcefully relocated via the Middle Passage: a fact I learned visiting the Elmina Castle, the Slave Trade Dungeon in Ghana. This particular cross-cultural comparison is reflective of the historical roots of my own identity, and it offers an ideal location to make cross-cultural comparisons. Specifically, it offers a chance to see if visible minorities and women from various cultural and socio-economic backgrounds experienced some of the same educational career mobility barriers, and how that compares to visible minorities and women educators in Ontario. In Ghana, I explored how, despite independence, elements of colonial practices may still be embedded in the education system and how, in particular, these practices work to prevent elementary educators from gaining access to higher levels in their careers. In this context, the similarities and differences in terms of internal, colonial practices and dynamics of inequity across dimensions of class, gender and race would be, in my view, particularly noteworthy and requiring explanation.
According to Tuhiwani Smith cited in Dei & Johal (2005), "[t]o resist is to retrench in the margins, retrieve what we were and remake ourselves. The past, our stories local and global, the present, our communities, cultures, languages and social practices all may be spaces of marginalization, but they may have also become spaces of resistance and hope." Colonialism, racism and gender discrimination are all connected to interlocking systems of hegemonic practices of oppression that I am investigating in both the Ghanaian and Canadian education systems. Being a Canadian born, visible minority female, my personal location gives a sense of hope and added meaning to my study by having shared experience and understanding of the social barriers that exist, as well as striving to build capacity with the existing personal and professional agency with our communities. I will explore the social construction of these dynamics, while also attempting to identify personal attributes and examine the professional actions and acumen that need to be lived on a daily basis in order to attain success. It is important to look at leadership, and understand how to access information from social professional groups. In this sense, the study aspires to balance relevant empirical-theoretical inquiry with my desire to produce an applied outcome tool to support all marginalized educators on an individual and community level.
Multi-Positionality and The Study
The term visible minority throughout this study is a central descriptor for racialized groups or people of colour within a Canadian context. An ethnic minority is a central descriptor for an under-represented ethnicity within the education system such as Ewe and Ga ethnicities. These distinctions express different dynamics, in culturally and historically bounded ways, across the two countries from which I drew my data. In the case of Ghana, for example, I necessarily address the matter of ethnicism: a form of ethnic nationalism, characterized by close identification with other members of the group for whom identity politics is crucial. (Bailey & Gayle, 2003) Generally speaking, the term social difference addresses processes of marginalization affecting groups in terms of gender, socio-economic class, age, disability, ethnic origin, sexuality, etc. For the purposes of this study, the two social difference identities of focus are primarily race and gender understood in culturally specific ways. However, this study and its findings can be meaningful and empowering to all marginalized education professionals. Identity politics brings complexity to the study. The identity politics emerges from an educator's point of intersectionality. Identity politics has emerged as a response to challenges by groups of working-class and women of colour to the assumption of universal woman. It assumes that cultural, racial/ethnic, and other identities are diverse and that presentation of identity in social life should be determined by those within particular groups, rather than by media representation or some other outside entity. The concept of identity politics is endemic to post-modern societies and is the major focus of feminism and multiculturalism.
Philomena Essed (1991), Florence Abena Dolphyne (1991) and Aruna Rao, Rieky Stuart and David Kelleher (1999) suggest structural changes are needed to counter-act the social reproduction process pertaining to race and gender in various social class discussions. However, these authors ideological continuum includes both structural (systemic, institutional or community) and individual empowerment. Will the educational and occupational outcomes have more similar or different patterns of barriers and supports in the Ghanaian and Canadian education systems? What is the relationship between structural forces and cultural innovation? How much autonomy do individuals have at an economic and cultural level, amidst conditions of gendered, racial and class differences? Although the Ghanaian and Canadian contexts are obviously different, such questions are crucial to our understanding of how social inequity is reproduced, and prevents marginalized groups and individuals from gaining access to upward career mobility within an educational work system.
Sketching the Study
The study attempts to show gaps in the knowledge of the existing research, particularly research on career mobility in educational settings for marginalized groups. I will discuss how my research will contribute to new knowledge. Through the literature, we will explore and assess various conceptual and theoretical issues as a basis for developing a specific theoretical approach to understanding the data. The overarching themes are: career mobility and leadership in education, social difference focusing on race, gender and institutional power, expressed and reproduced through the mutually constituting interaction of multiple forms of what I refer to as accumulation practices – i.e. the accumulation of educational or human capital, social capital and cultural capital. These themes are organized to address the historical traces and current values of career mobility, educational leadership, racial and gender scholarship. I choose to see educational leadership themes and challenges through a lens of social difference in order to explore how each social inequity uniquely, yet collectively influenced by various structural conditions.
From a sociological perspective, I am critically analyzing educational workplaces in international contexts to understand how marginalized groups including visible minorities and women are impacted by the limits of the educational work system and in turn may impact such institutions.
This research analyzes how the social barriers of race and gender intersectionalities are implicated in school promotion; and how multiple forms of capital supports or suppresses career mobility in Ghana and Canada.
Taken as a whole, answers to these three research questions will provide an exploration of the themes emergent from both data sets in terms of career mobility, leadership and social difference representation in the two global education systems. The applied dimension of this research is strongest in my view:
(1) Through the inclusion of my investigation of personal attributes and professional navigational actions that have led to successful progression to positions in education administration.
(2) I combine this discussion of attributes and navigational actions with my analysis of the extent to which social difference and various processes of capital accumulation create barriers or opportunities for the promotion of elementary school practitioners in two cross- cultural contexts.
(3) By the end of the analysis, all of these elements inform my construction of a "Conscious Career Elevation" model which is intended to allow individual practitioners to make better strategic decisions about their career.
It is important to note that there is an agency and structure dialectic that is analyzed throughout this study: specifically, I seek to address the individual, their potential for agency and change located within specific social contexts that I refer to as a tension field. For decades, many marginalized groups including visible minorities and women have been overlooked or denied access to key leadership positions and promotional opportunities in education and other fields. This study is designed to identify a standard set of personal and professional attributes which will give concrete navigational tools to aspiring visible minorities and female educators and others trying to find occupational openings for achievement to attain leadership. Yet, the personal agency supported by even the best navigational tools is not enough. We must also understand the social context and the reproductive structure that these aspiring educational leaders face and thus, analyze the dynamic interactions of multiple forms of capital.
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