January 27, 2022
Neoliberalism and Public Education Finance in Canada: Reframing Educational Leadership as Entrepreneurship is a new book by Faculty of Education authors Dr. Wendy Poole, Dr. Vicheth Sen and Dr. Gerald Fallon.
Situated in the world of BC’s school district administrators (SDAs), the book reports on research into a neoliberal public education policy environment that is characterized by retrenchment of government expenditure on public education, and the imperative for school districts to actively generate supplementary revenue through entrepreneurial and other means. SDA initiatives to protect public funding and to generate new sources of funding through business-like activities are discussed, with attention to the ways in which SDAs responded to the policy environment in locally contextual conditions.
The book’s themes include:
- The impact of entrepreneurial public education finance policy on financial equity between school districts in a spatially diverse province, and the implications for equity of student access to quality education; and
- How SDAs negotiated their subjectivities as educational leaders within a policy rationality that compelled a business-like model of leadership.
The authors propose a vision of educational leadership that transcends the parochialism and self-interestedness of entrepreneurial leadership at the school district level, and moves toward public education and educational leadership for the common good.
The book will appeal to those whose interests include K-12 education finance, K-12 international education, K-12 education policy, critical analyses of neoliberal K-12 education policy and its impacts and K-12 educational administration and leadership.
