School Leadership for Diversity

Two Approaches to Human Diversity

This entry describes the forms of human diversity within schools today and explores the nature of inclusive leadership that promotes inclusiveness, creative and courageous teaching, and broad as well as deep learning. Allison Skerrett and Andy Hargreaves call this Diversity 1. Its development is a long-term organizational and social necessity, and its acknowledgment is a basic human right.

Public education, though, increasingly advances what Hargreaves and Skerrett call Diversity 2. All too often, public education treats diversity as simply a demographic category. Educational leadership for diversity should acknowledge the state of human diversity as Diversity 1 and promote diversity and cohesion as a social and professional value. Instead, by responding to categorical diversity as Diversity 2 by narrowing measurable achievement gaps between racial or other categories, educational leadership increasingly supports professional standardization among teachers, and monocultural standardization of test-driven curriculum and learning for students. Diversity 2 leads to exclusion through denial of cultural differences, and limits sustainable growth and social cohesion because of the limited range of legitimate practices that it acknowledges.

Leadership for Diversity 2 can be and often is interpreted as leadership of cultural, racial, and linguistic minorities (or oppressed majorities), by, perhaps, a leadership group that is or is not demographically representative of the populations it serves. The standardized content of Diversity 2, which assumes that standards should be raised and gaps narrowed in terms of a monocultural curriculum, is not questioned.

Attempts at leadership for diversity less frequently address the values-based aspects of diversity that are promoted in the inclusive approach of Diversity 1, but ignored and denied by the ecologically standardized approach of Diversity 2. Values-based approaches to diversity manifest themselves in at least two ways. First is the unalterable condition of natural and human uniqueness and diversity, as networked profusion of and cohesion among species, or human behaviors, personalities and cultures. Second is the value of diversity as a moral recognition of the uniqueness of all humans, and indeed all life, and as an acknowledgment of ecological and organizational sustainability where robust and healthy environments are not uniform or standardized but ecologically diverse. This ecological diversity gives them the capacity to grow and flourish through cross-pollination of natural or human cultures, and to be resilient and have the broad capacity of skills or strengths to rebound in the face of adversity. Diversity 1, in this sense, is a cornerstone of sustainability, not as mere maintainability, but as the capacity to produce desired social value without harming one's capacity to do so in the future or harming the capacities of others around you in the present.

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