Kelleher, Paul & van der Bogert, Rebecca. (Eds.) (2006). Voices for democracy: Struggles and celebrations of transformational leaders. Reviewed by Ali Mageehon, New Mexico State University-Alamogordo

Kelleher, Paul & van der Bogert, Rebecca. (Eds.) (2006). Voices for democracy: Struggles and celebrations of transformational leaders. The 105th Yearbook of National Society for the Study of Education, Part I. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pp. viii + 252         ISBN 978-1-4051-5610-3 Reviewed by Ali Mageehon New Mexico State University-Alamogordo July 31, 2007 In their co-edited book Voices for Democracy: Struggles and Celebrations of Transformational Leaders, Paul Kelleher and Rebecca van der Bogert have compiled a series of reflective essays that provide insight into the role of the superintendent as a transformational leader within his or her school district. The book contains a series of eight essays, told either from the first-person perspective as a narrative of a superintendent’s struggles and accomplishments in a school district or from transcribed interviews between co-editor Kelleher and three superintendents. In addition, the book has a forward and two commentaries that provide an analysis of the essays and topic area itself. In the first chapter, Kelleher and van der Bogert provide a clear introductory essay pointing out the six key issues that the narratives in the book address. The book does not explicitly discuss its use of qualitative research to explore the themes; however, the first person narratives in which superintendents (and one board president) either directly or through the moderated form of an interview transcript transformed into a narrative essay focusing on a superintendent’s experience as a transformational leader is an approach bordering on phenomenology. The first chapter, then, is the primary effort in the book to draw specific themes out of the subsequent essays and discuss the applicability of those themes to the job of superintendent as a transformational leader. This is a clearly written overview in which the following issues that form the cornerstone of the superintendents’ narratives are briefly described: The pervasiveness of poverty The importance of context Authoritative but collaborative leadership Vision setting Facing skepticism about educational change Authentic personal relationships Hardwired tension with the board Leading through managing (pp. 14 – 22) This look at the themes of the issues that superintendents describe in the essays provides a context and some theory for understanding the subsequent narratives. Kelleher and van der Bogert also summarize the common lessons learned in each of the superintendents’ stories including: The importance of good entry strategies The complexity and unpredictability of school organizations The importance of learning The importance of self-growth Support for extraordinary people (pp. 24 – 27) One of the strengths of the essays is the diversity of backgrounds of the superintendents as well as the geographic locales of the school districts being discussed. Kelleher, a co-editor of the work, presents an interview with Beverly Hall, who tells her story about her first year working as superintendent for the Atlanta Public Schools and her struggle to fight a pervasive attitude throughout the school district that poor students could not learn or perform as well as students from middle-class backgrounds. A significant achievement that Hall identifies in her recounting of her seven year tenure in the Atlanta Public School System is her success in being able to “develop the capacity of others – in other words, to foster the growth of leadership throughout their organizations…to locate [her] feeling of pride in the accomplishments of others, to feel personal satisfaction and fulfillment when others are recognized” (p. 48). Allan Alson recounts fourteen years of working in what he describes as an urban-suburban school district to narrow the achievement gap in a highly diverse setting. His particular concerns in his school district focused on the achievement gap for minority students in math classes. Along the way, he learned that change is a slow process (data to support Alson’s curricular changes did not occur until nearly seven years into his superintendency) that can only be achieved through consistent leadership that creates the appropriate context for that change to occur. Larry Leverett (also interviewed by Kelleher) recounts his experiences as an African-American male urban superintendent changing jobs and joining a school district in Greenwich, Connecticut as new superintendent. And though most essays provide a recounting of positive outcomes despite potentially overwhelming struggles, Kelleher and van der Bogert include one narrative based on interview transcripts from a superintendent who chose to remain anonymous in his contribution, such was the strife resulting from his superintendency of an impoverished school district in the southern United States. Another strength of the collection of essays is that they are told from the perspective of superintendents who are in various stages of their careers, including an essay written by John Weins, (now the dean of faculty education at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), which considers educational leadership and civic humanism. Perhaps the most theoretical of the selections in the text, Weins describes his own experiences throughout a thirty-one year career as an educational administrator and frames it within the context Hannah Arendt’s (1958) discussion of “the ancient differentiations of human activity – labor, work and action” (p. 211). One of the most compelling essays in the collection is that by Linda Hanson. Hanson, a first year superintendent for a school district in suburban Chicago encountered a situation with her school board within the first months of being hired. As several superintendents mention in this collection, Hanson had listened to the board discuss particular concerns during the interviewing process, but had not followed up with further research to find out just how much of an impact that these concerns might have on the curricular philosophy of the district. Immediately into her superintendency, Hanson was confronted by a situation in which the board had passed a strict reading policy during the interim superintendent’s period in office. The policy would require that all seniors “pass the Gates McGinitie reading test with a 10.5 grade equivalent in both vocabulary and comprehension” (p. 107). The business community was widely in support of the policy as were many parents. However, many teachers realized that there were many of their students who would not be able to pass, and thus, would not graduate, despite positive evaluations on the part of their teachers. Hanson’s solution was to work toward educating the board about best practices in reading instruction and assessment by engaging board members in learning sessions that involved both teachers and parents. Ultimately, the board policy was overturned, and Hanson continued to involve the board, parents and teachers in creating a reading curriculum that was research based and founded on best practices. While the individual essays in the collection have strength because of the superintendents honesty in reflecting on difficult situations, the real strength of this collection is all the stories taken as a whole document reflecting the sum of experiences in a particular leadership position from a particular leadership philosophy within schools that has not heretofore been examined in this kind of detail from the practitioner’s point-of-view. One caveat to this is that all the superintendents share a specific world view about education and that is that it should be democratic, collaborative, equally accessible to all, focused on curriculum, and that all students can achieve to a high standard. Those who disagree with this stance might want to look elsewhere for a book on the role of the superintendent. Superintendents who are already well advanced in their careers may also feel that these essays are telling them what they have learned through their own experiences. Those who may be most interested are school administrators who are considering reaching for the superintendent position or who have just entered the field. Another potential audience for this book is members of school boards. Not only does this book describe the process that superintendents’ use to make decisions, there is extensive treatment of the superintendents’ perception of their role in the school district as it relates to the school board, for better or for worse (as in Juan Martinez’s case). As an additional bonus, Becky Bair Hurley writes about being a school board president during van der Bogert’s superintendency. Rebecca van der Bogert, a co-editor of the work, also recounts her side of the story and since the essays are back-to-back in the collection, this is allows the reader to see both sides of the leadership story for comparison. Not only does this enhance the credibility of the first-person narrative, it opens the way for further dialogue between superintendents and boards, through a description on both van der Bogert and Hurley’s sides of collaborative leadership in action. In this case, it is very useful to see van der Bogert’s description of a failed effort to collaboratively negotiate teacher contracts with Hurley’s perspective in the next essay. It would have been helpful if the editors could have included several paired essays of this nature to show the various perspectives. In fact, the greatest weakness of the book is the dangerous path of unexamined self-reflection. The final commentary in the book, written by Barry Jentz, points out the following, that while some stories in the collection do show a writer who steps back to examine his/her own mind as an object for learning, fully acknowledging human foible and change in perception of one’s own actions, there are other stories in which “leaders speak as if they share an unspoken assumption that the superintendent mind is an entity, stable and nonchanging, at once wise and considerate, if sometimes frustrated and perplexed. These superintendents reveal little of their own minds” (p. 230). Of the eight essays in the collection, three are based on transcriptions of interviews that Kelleher (one of the editors) conducted with superintendents and the other five are personal narrations from four superintendents and one president of a school board. In the introduction to the three essays based on interviews, Kelleher describes the method used in gathering information for these essays, which included conducting two interviews with each participant; transcribing the interview materials; gathering information from external sources, including newspaper articles and board of education minutes; and involving the participants in review and revision of both the transcripts and the articles that appear in the book. Such methodology is akin to Jentz’s discussion in his commentary of watching his own golf swing on videotape and realizing that what he perceived of his own capabilities was not necessarily the same as what he was actually doing as he swung. Allowing one’s self to be interviewed and then have comments reviewed and discussed by someone external to the situation allows for a deeper reflection on the situations being discussed and lends more reliability to the essays that were a combined effort between the superintendent and the co-editor. The remaining five essays, while all compelling and well-written, do not have the same kind of research-based support. About the reviewer Dr. Ali Mageehon, Assistant Professor, Developmental Writing, New Mexico State University-Alamogordo, New Mexico; Adjunct Faculty, School of Education, Jones International University, Centennial, Colorado