‘Reality-check’: the possibilities and impossibilities for non-discriminatory principal practice in multiethnic schools

This paper rests on critical management literature, sociological theory and research on racial/ethnic inequalities to demonstrate the situatedness and complicatedness of day-to-day principal practice as it evolves in three actual multiethnic secondary schools in Greece. The question pursued is what makes it possible or impossible for a school principal to practice non-discriminatory pedagogy for ethnic minority students. The author works with the theoretical paradigm of Pierre Bourdieu – underpinned by analyses on racism/ethnicism in education – to question the conditions and tensions within principalship in offering an education-for-all. The concepts of institutional (Reay, David and Ball, 1995) and principal habitus (Lingard et al., 2003) are used as thinking tools to analyse the ethnographic data. The research suggests that principals are involved consciously and/or unconsciously in practices of everyday inclusions and exclusions of students. The paper serves as a ‘reality-check’ of the constraints placed on principals by context and themselves regarding what is advocated as ‘managing’ diversity.