Ann M. Ishimaru

From Heroes to Organizers Principals and Education Organizing in Urban School Reform

Purpose: Educational leadership is key to addressing the persistent inequities in low-income urban schools, but most principals struggle to work with parents and communities around those schools to create socially just learning environments. This article describes the conditions and experiences that enabled principals to share leadership with teachers and low-income Latino parents to improve student learning. Methods: This study used interviews, observations, and documents to examine the perceptions and experiences of the principals of three small autonomous schools initiated by a community organizing group in California. Data analysis was conducted in iterative phases using shared leadership, social capital, and role theories as lenses to identify themes, triangulate across data sources, and examine alternative hypotheses. Findings: Findings illuminate how a design team process initiated principals into a model of shared leadership with teachers and empowered parents that focused on deep relationships and capacity building. Principals enacted this model of the “principal as organizer” in the newly-opened schools, but they struggled to navigate conflicting leadership role expectations from district administration. Implications: Organizing approaches to education reform can cultivate shared leadership in principals and the capacity to partner with empowered, low-income Latino parents. District expectations and principals’ broader social networks may be critical in navigating and sustaining such leadership. Further research on districts that collaborate with community organizing groups may provide promising insights into the development of a new generation of educational leaders.

Beyond Individual Effectiveness: Conceptualizing Organizational Leadership for Equity.

Despite increasing policy focus on individual leadership effectiveness, the literature offers limited guidance regarding how organizational leadership might address persistent opportunity and outcome disparities by student race, class, ethnicity, home language, and/or ability. We propose a conceptual framework of equitable leadership practice, describing three drivers to catalyze organizational growth in 10 high-leverage equitable practices designed to mitigate disparities for non-dominant students. We articulate what each of 10 key leadership practices might look like along a continuum from little to exemplary equitable practice, offer a tool to catalyze organizational leadership growth, and discuss theoretical and practical implications of the framework.

Radical Recentering: Equity in Educational Leadership Standards

Background: The widely adopted Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium standards are designed to guide the preparation and professional development of educational leaders. However, the standards’ limited mention of race, class, ethnicity, ability, gender, sexuality, or other marginalized identities suggests that addressing persistent inequities need not be a central concern of preparation programs and leaders in P-12 schools. Purpose and Proposed Model: In this article, we put forth a new set of standards with equity at the core. We seek to advance the conversation about why standards centered on equity are needed—particularly in light of a proposed standards refresh—and what implications would follow from equity-focused standards. To this end, we offer 10 high-leverage equitable leadership practices, identified through research and the extant literature as those most likely to mitigate disparities for students who have not been well served due to their race, class, ethnicity, home language, and/or ability. We discuss how a set of equity-focused leadership standards would facilitate radical changes in leadership preparation programs, professional development, and evaluation. Implications: We aim for this work to augment the conversation around leadership standards and compel action to bring equity to the center.

Reinforcing Deficit, Journeying Toward Equity Cultural Brokering in Family Engagement Initiatives

Families are key actors in efforts to improve student learning and outcomes, but conventional engagement efforts often disregard the cultural and social resources of nondominant families. Individuals who serve as cultural brokers play critical, though complex, roles bridging between schools and families. Using an equitable collaboration lens with boundary-spanning theory, this comparative case study examined how individuals enacted cultural brokering within three organizational contexts. Our findings suggest a predominance of cultural brokering consistent with programmatic goals to socialize nondominant families into school-centric norms and agendas. However, formal leadership and boundary-spanning ambiguity enabled more collective, relational, or reciprocal cultural brokering. These dynamics suggest potential stepping stones and organizational conditions for moving toward more equitable forms of family-school collaboration and systemic transformation.

“Darles el lugar” A Place for Nondominant Family Knowing in Educational Equity

Educational researchers, leadership, and policymakers have had the privileged voices and place from which to theorize and address educational inequities. But for some exceptions, nondominant families have been relegated to participation in school-centric “parent involvement” activities. Drawing from a participatory design-based research study using standpoint and critical race theory, our findings suggest key convergences between the lived experiences and insights of nondominant parents and recent educational equity scholarship, while revealing untapped expertise, knowledge, and capacity for addressing inequity. We argue that holding a “place” for the complex understandings of nondominant families can open expansive possibilities for transforming educational systems toward racial equity.

Disrupting Racialized Institutional Scripts: Toward Parent–Teacher Transformative Agency for Educational Justice

Partnerships between teachers and parents from nondominant communities hold promise for reducing race- and class-based educational disparities, but the ways families and teachers work together often fall short of delivering systemic change. Racialized institutional scripts provide “taken-for-granted” norms, expectations, and assumptions that constrain marginalized families and educators in exercising collective agency to disrupt educational inequities. In this paper, we bring together the concept of institutional scripts from organizational theory with transformative agency from sociocultural learning theories to address the moment-to-moment interactions between families and educators that may rewrite racialized institutional scripts and expand collective parent–teacher identities. Drawing examples from a parent–educator participatory design-based research project, we highlight how collaborative activity might (a) reframe expertise, (b) surface and examine contradictions, and (c) attend to power in relational dynamics in order to expand identities and interactions in the presence of racial, cultural, and class differences across roles. We argue that examining parent–teacher activity through these lenses opens possibilities for building parent–teacher relations toward collective agency and critical solidarities toward educational justice.

From Family Engagement to Equitable Collaboration

Policy makers have long seen parents and families as key levers for improving U.S. student outcomes and success, and new cross-sector collaborative policy and initiatives provide a promising context for innovations in efforts to engage nondominant families in educational equity reform. Drawing on a lens of equitable collaboration, this study examined the strategies in three organizational efforts to improve family engagement in education within a common cross-sector collaboration initiative in a Western region of the United States. Although conventional approaches persisted amid regular exchanges across organizations, we identified more reciprocal, collective, and relational strategies: (a) parent capacity-building, (b) relationship-building, and (c) systemic capacity-building efforts. Despite promising strategies, the dynamics of implementation in the cross-sector collaborative constrained change and mirrored limitations in family engagement practice and policy. The article concludes with next steps for research, practice, and policy in the journey toward more equitable collaboration.

Introduction to Beyond Interest Convergence: Envisioning Transformation for Racial Equity in Education

We have reached a critical moment in our nation when deep injustices and stark educational inequities for historically marginalized students, including students of color, threaten our fundamental d...