Advocacy Leadership: Toward a Post-Reform Agenda in Education

In this timely and important new book, Gary Anderson provides a devastating critique of why a managerial role for educational leaders is counterproductive, especially for improving opportunities for low-income students and students of color, and instead proposes ways of re-theorizing educational leadership to emphasize its advocacy role. Advocacy Leadership lays out a post-reform agenda that moves beyond the neo-liberal, competition framework to define a new accountability, a new pedagogy, and a new leadership role definition. Drawing on personal narrative, discourse analysis, and interdisciplinary scholarship, Anderson delivers a compelling argument for the need to move away from current inauthentic and inequitable approaches to school reform in order to jump-start a conversation about an alternative vision of education today. 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) "Gary Anderson restores balance to the preparation of leaders for U.S. schools. He moves the focus from support of testing and free market ideology to leadership for social justice and a Deweyan authenticity in all matters educational." --Jean Anyon, author of Theory and Educational Research: Toward Critical Social Explanation "For educational leaders who genuinely seek to make a difference, Advocacy Leadership offers practical and insightful strategies for what can be done to create schools that expand opportunity and counter the effects of inequality in our society. Anderson speaks with the authority and understanding of someone who understands leadership both from an academic and experiential perspective. During times like these when the pressures on school leaders are greater than ever before, this book will be an invaluable resource." --Pedro A. Noguera, Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Development Executive Director, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, New York University "After most of the current reforms fail, as they are doing right now, what will we have left? Anderson nicely fills that gap with a vision of school leadership compatible with what is good in the current reforms and our authentic democratic traditions. Strongly recommended to those who choose to make a difference as school leaders." -- David C. Berliner, Regents' Professor, Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, Arizona State University "There has been scarce guidance for principals and other administrators who wo