A Re-examination of Leadership Style for Hong Kong School-Based Management (SBM) Schools

Abstract

Leadership style has always been a controversial topic in educational administration and management. Following the recommendation of the Education Commission to introduce school-based management (SBM) into Hong Kong schools in the early 1990s, discussions about the kind of leadership style that is appropriate for SBM schools have never ceased. The government holds a continuing belief that SBM schools work better if they are managed by “better” principals, and emphasises the value of transformational leadership. However, this paper articulates the limitations of that leadership style and argues for complementing it with educational leadership, which purports that principals have an obligation to learn with others about ways of promoting student learning. Secondly, the staff should also be encouraged and helped to carry out certain leadership functions. These arguments are supported by references to the most relevant literature. The discussion is useful to school principals, leaders, and teachers by offering them a better understanding of how to facilitate the implementation of SBM.

Notes

1. As stated in section 4.2 of the Education Commission Report No. 7 (Education Commission, 1997), SMI “provides participating aided schools with more funding flexibility in the form of a Block Grant [that]... helps schools achieve school-based goals and formulate long-term plans”. With other flexible measures in school management, the proposed flexible funding system “should be able to: (a) meet the basic needs of students to ensure fairness across the school sector; (b) provide schools with greater flexibility in the effective use of resources in order to achieve individuality; and (c) encourage schools to take initiatives and achieve better results, and to assist and take appropriate remedial action where necessary”.

2. Wong (1993, 1995a) wrote that in educational administration and management, effectiveness is not the same as efficiency. The latter means the ability to accomplish an objective without wasting effort or resources. Thus, a particular school could be effective but inefficient, meaning that it achieves its objective at too high a cost.

3. Scheerens and Bosker (1997) also identified elements at the classroom level that enhance student achievement. They are “time on task”, “structured teaching”, “opportunity to learn”, “high expectations of pupils' progress”, “degree of evaluation”, and “reinforcement”.

4. According to Yu et al. (2002), variations in teachers' commitment to change can be traced to four variables. These are: (a) personal goals (desired future states that teachers internalise and perceive to possess certain qualities that motivate them to act); (b) capacity beliefs (psychological states such as self-efficacy, self-confidence, academic self-concept, and aspects of self-esteem, that lead teachers to believe themselves capable of accomplishing their personal goals); (c) context beliefs (beliefs about whether the school environment will actually provide the resources that teachers require to successfully implement a change in their classroom practices); and (d) emotional arousal process (a state of “action readiness” or a positive emotional climate that serves to stimulate immediate or vigorous action and to maintain patterns of action).

5. These changes and challenges focus mainly on the five “prior practices”, as suggested in the reform proposal (Education Commission, 2000). These require schools as well as the education system to “reform the admission system and public exam system”, “reform the curricula and improve teaching methods”, “improve the assessment mechanism to supplement learning and teaching”, “provide more diverse opportunities for life-long learning at senior secondary level and beyond”, and “adopt an effective resources strategy” (pp. 43–48).

6. This statement is based mainly on information drawn from observation and informal chats with school principals who participated in some of these programmes organised by various academic and government bodies. The last one the first author attended was the Secondary School Principals Training Programme organised by the Centre for Educational Leadership (http://www.hku.hk/educel, accessed October 2, 2005), Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, in the academic year 2001–2002.

7. Here, we are borrowing Eisner's (1993) concepts of ontological objectivity and procedural objectivity to articulate the possibility of reaching an understanding among colleagues while carrying out a given task.

8. These two studies were conducted by the first author and other researchers. Raftery et al. (2001) examined how professionals in the construction and property industries take risks and make decisions in different economic situations, and Hui and Cheung (2004) explored how church members learn and behave after participating in an adventure team-building camp. Although neither of them focused on educational organisations, they both conclude with the same findings, namely that the risks taken, the decisions made, and the behaviour revealed by the subjects were subordinated to a more dominant organisational objective. In the Raftery et al. (2001) study, it is the company's goal to “keep the business running” that shaped the professionals' attitude to risk and the corresponding decisions made, while for the Hui and Cheung (2004) study, it was the church's consensus that “some missions are good” that was at the centre of its members' behaviour.