Session Information
26 SES 04 C, Ethics, Trust and Professional Discretion in the Realm of Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
The paper aims to analyze how schools understand and encounter legal issues and work in everyday life, and how principals warrant students’ right to equal educational opportunities. Our particular interests are related to two sections of the Norwegian Educational Act (1998): 1) regulation to secure adapted education of individual students; 2) students’ right to special needs education. While adapted education is a common principle to ensure that individual students receive equal education adapted to their abilities, the regulation of special needs education is an individual right. These sections are central in securing equal education opportunities for individual students during primary and secondary education. Hence, how principals and teachers interpret and apply these regulations is crucial in providing fair education for all students.
Accordingly, the paper addresses the following questions: To what extent do regulations and legal standards in the Norwegian context give room for discretionary decision-making by principals and teachers? How is the discretionary power of the profession justified?
Although lawmakers regulate actions, there is space for discretion in professional work. Discretion is dependent not only on discretionary space, but also on reasoning, as the entrustment of discretionary power is based on a notion that professionals can make reasoned judgments and decisions (Wallander and Molander 2014). Hence, professional discretion rests on trust in the ability to make sound decisions on behalf of social authorities.
Professionalism has historically been seen as a distinct model for organizing work, marked by the capacity to manage an exclusive area of expertise by way of commitment to profession-specific values, collegial control and occupational closure (Abbott 1988; Freidson 2001). During the last decades, this model has been challenged (Anderson and Cohen 2015). One aspect of this debate is related to the marketization of professional work, in which professions adopt business logic and begin to understand their work in terms of efficiency and customer orientation (Brint 1994, 2001). Another aspect is related to the emergence of managerialism, which brings the logic of the bureaucracy to the foreground and generates regimes of accountability in which external actors and systems audit the indicators used to measure professional performance (Dent and Whitehead 2002). The latter aspect has been seen as a threat to the professional space of discretion and professional autonomy, as discretionary judgement guided by codes of professional ethics and monitored by the profession itself is losing ground (Evetts 2009).
In this study we base our theoretical approach on an analytical framework presented by Molander and Grimen (2010) where they describe discretion as having a structural and epistemic aspect. According to Molander et al. (2012, pp. 214-215), discretion can be seen as an “opportunity-concept,” as it designates a space where the agent has the autonomy to judge, decide and act according to his or her own judgement. If the space of discretion is narrow and there are predefined procedures and standards to follow, the profession has little discretionary power. On the other hand, it is an “exercise-concept,” as it designates the kind of reasoning that results in conclusions about what to do under conditions of indeterminacy. If decisions to a lesser extent are bound to standards and procedures, the profession has considerable discretionary power. Hence, the profession must make reasoned judgments and justify them in relation to given rules (Larsson and Jacobsson 2013). By employing this lens, we examine how principals and teachers carry out discretion between structural aspects, such as national regulations and standards, and epistemic aspects, such as reasoning and judgment. The main significance of this study is to explore the importance of the epistemic side of discretion with regard to achieving equal educational opportunities for all.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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