Abstract
School leadership has been concerned about how leadership could improve a school, especially manifested in student learning outcomes. Nevertheless, the link between school leadership and inequality of student learning outcome – let alone social justice – is rarely examined in the field. Rather, the issue of educational inequality at school has attracted considerable scholarly attention in Sociology of Education, where one focus is on the impact of what happen in classrooms and staffrooms – e.g., teaching and learning policies – for students’ learning outcomes. Whether a teaching or learning policy is endorsed and whether some teaching practices are implemented rest with the decisions made primarily, if not solely, by school leaders. This suggests that school leaders could play roles in educational inequality. There is definitely a need for empirical or theoretical efforts to examine the implications of the practices of school leaders for educational inequality and thus social justice in the field of school leadership. This chapter seeks to take the very first step to fill this gap at a conceptual level with reference to the case of Hong Kong. By referring to some general observations about three existing school practices – student admission, ability grouping, and school discipline – adopted by many school leaders in Hong Kong, this chapter underscores that some pragmatic concerns of school leaders posed by the Hong Kong education system in improving a school may have them violate the educational principles of equality, equity, and liberation and thus fail to address social justice.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Arum, R., & Beattie, I. (Eds.). (2000). The structure of schooling: Readings in the sociology of education. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Ballantine, J., & Spade, J. Z. (Eds.). (2008). Schools and society (3rd ed.). Los Angeles: Forge Press.
Bardhan, P. (2002). Decentralization of governance and development. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(4), 185–205.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Counts, G. (1932). Dare the school build a new social order? New York: John Day Company.
Demaine, J. (Ed.). (2001). Sociology of education today. London: Palgrave.
Edmonds, R. R. (1979). Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 37(1), 15–27.
Education Commission. (1997). Education Commission Report No. 7 – Quality school education. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government: Printing Department.
Endacott, G. B. (1973). A history of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.
Feinberg, W., & Soltis, J. F. (2004). School and society (4th ed.). New York/London: Teachers College Columbia University.
Giroux, H. A. (1981). Ideology, culture and the process of schooling. London: The Falmer Press.
Gumus, S., Bellibas, M. S., Esen, M., & Gumus, E. (2018). A systematic review of studies on leadership models in educational research from 1980 to 2014. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 46(1), 25–48.
Hallinger, P. (2005). Instructional leadership and the school principal: A passing fancy that refuses to fade away. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 4(3), 221–239.
Hallinger, P. (2013). A conceptual framework for systematic reviews of research in educational leadership and management. Journal of Educational Administration, 51(2), 126–149.
Hallinger, P., & Murphy, J. (1985). Assessing the instructional management behavior of principals. The Elementary School Journal, 86(2), 217–247.
Halsey, A. H., Lauder, H., Brown, P., & Wells, A. S. (Eds.). (1997). Education: Culture, economy, and society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hambro, E. (1955). The problems of Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong. Holland: Sijthoff.
Hargreaves, A., & Woods, P. (Eds.). (1984). Staffrooms: The sociology of teachers and teaching. London: Open University Press.
Harris, A. (2011). System improvement through collective capacity building. Journal of Educational Administration, 49(6), 624–636.
Hartas, D. (2012). Inequality and the home learning environment: Predictions about seven-year-olds’ language and literacy. British Educational Research Journal, 38(5), 859–879.
Hong Kong Education Bureau. (2018). General Information on DSS. Retrieved 27 July 2018, from https://www.edb.gov.hk/en/edu-system/primary-secondary/applicable-to-primary-secondary/direct-subsidy-scheme/index/info-sch.html.
Hopkins, D., Stringfield, S., Harris, A., Stoll, L., & Mackay, T. (2014). School and system improvement: A narrative state-of-the-art review. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 25(2), 257–281.
Hoy, W. K., & Miskel, C. G. (2006). Contemporary issues in educational policy and school outcomes. Greenwich, Conn: Information Age Pub.
Labaree, D. (1986). Curriculum, credentials, and the middle class: A case study of nineteenth-century high school. Sociology of Education, 59(1), 42–57.
Leithwood, K. (1992). The move toward transformational leadership. Educational Leadership, 49(5), 8–13.
Leithwood, K. (1994). Leadership for school restructuring. Educational Administration Quarterly, 30(4), 498–518.
Leithwood, K., & Jantzi, D. (1990). Transformational leadership: How principals can help reform school cultures. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 1(4), 249–280.
Leithwood, K., & Jantzi, D. (1999). The relative effects of principal and teacher sources of leadership on student engagement with school. Educational Administration Quarterly, 35(5), 679–706.
Leithwood, K., & Jantzi, D. (2005). A review of transformational school leadership research 1996–2005. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 4(3), 177–199.
Leithwood, K., Jantzi, D., & Fernandez, A. (1994). Transformational leadership and teachers’ commitment to change. In J. Murphy & K. S. Louis (Eds.), Reshaping the principalship (pp. 77–98). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Louis, K. S., Deverly, D., & Wahlstrom, K. (2010). How does leadership affect student achievement? Results from a national US survey. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 21(3), 315–336.
Moore, R. (2004). Education and society: Issues and explanations in the sociology of education. Cambridge: Polity.
Oakes, J. (2005). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality (2nd ed.). New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Oakes, J., Lipton, M., Anderson, L., & Stillman, J. (2016). Teaching to change the world (4th ed.). London/New York: Routledge.
Raby, R. (2012). School rules: Obedience, discipline, and elusive democracy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Tam, F., & Kwan, P. (2011). School images, school identity, and how parents select schools for their children: The case of Hong Kong. In S. Mukerji & P. Tripathi (Eds.), Cases on innovations in educational marketing: Transnational and technological strategies (pp. 87–103). Hershey, PA: IGI Publishing.
Van Galen, J. A. (2007). In G. W. Noblit (Ed.), Late to class: Social class and schooling in the new economy. New York: State University of New York Press.
Wong, Y. L. (2007). How middle-class parents help their children obtain an advantaged qualification: A study of strategies of teachers and managers for their children’s education in Hong Kong before the 1997 handover. Sociological Research Online, 12(6), 1–12.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Wong, YL., Kwan, P. (2020). School Leadership and Social Justice: A Conceptual Analysis with Some Observations in Hong Kong. In: Papa, R. (eds) Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14625-2_33
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14625-2_33
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14624-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14625-2
eBook Packages: EducationReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Education