Carolyn Riehl

The Principal's Role in Creating Inclusive Schools for Diverse Students: A Review of Normative, Empirical, and Critical Literature on the Practice of Educational Administration

Public schools in the United States are serving a more heterogeneous student population now than ever before. Drawing on normative, empirical, and critical literatures, this review explores the role of school administrators in responding to the needs of diverse students. Three administrative tasks are highlighted: fostering new meanings about diversity, promoting inclusive school cultures and instructional programs, and building relationships between schools and communities. Administrative work that accomplishes these tasks can be thought of as a form of practice, with moral, epistemological, constitutive, and discursive dimensions. Inclusive administrative practice is rooted in values of equity and social justice; it requires administrators to bring their full subjectivities to bear on their practice, and it implicates language as a key mechanism for both oppression and transformation.

Making the Most of Time and Talent: Secondary School Organizational Climates, Teaching Task Environments, and Teacher Commitment

The relationships among teachers’ task environments, more general characteristics of school organizational climates, and teachers’ professional and organizational commitments were examined. Data were derived from the 1987–1988 National Center for Education Statistics Schools and Staffing Survey; the study was based on a sample of 14,844 secondary school teachers. Task environment was operationalized in terms of structural features of teachers’ class schedules, and school climate was measured in terms of administrative support, teacher influence and autonomy, and collegiality. Results suggest that, while teachers’ professional commitment and organizational commitment were unrelated to teachers’ class schedules, commitment was associated with school climate.

Gender Differences Among New Recruits to School Administration: Cautionary Footnotes to an Optimistic Tale

In this study, we examine factors associated with the career move from school teaching to building-level administration, using nationally representative data on about 4,800 elementary and secondary public school teachers. Having administrative experience and a degree in administration were the most important predictors of becoming an administrator. Planning to leave teaching improved men’s chances, while family context decreased women’s chances. Overall, socialization factors—having aspirations, qualifications, and experience—were salient for both men and women. Nevertheless, the positive effects of these factors for women did not counteract other factors, including unmeasured ones, and so women’s predicted probability of becoming a school administrator remained far below that for men.

Reconceptualizing Research and Scholarship in Educational Administration: Learning to Know, Knowing to Do, Doing to Learn

In this article, the authors explore common and emerging conceptions of what consti-tutes knowledge in educational administration, how knowledge relates to practice, and how individuals in universities and schools can engage in a particular kind of knowledge work—research. The authors suggest that a fully articulated perspective on research in educational administration might characterize research as occupying a multidimen-sional space delineated along three dimensions: why the research is done, who conducts the research, and how the research is done. Productive, interesting, and generative research can be situated anywhere on these dimensions, and five principles can be used to guide various forms of research. The implication is that although currently the field of educational administration encompasses two communities of practice, we should strive toward becoming one community of scholars. The authors discuss how doctoral pro -grams might develop students for this community of scholars and provide a case example from one university.

Bridges to the future: The contributions of qualitative research to the sociology of education

This article considers how qualitative research, conducted from an interpretive perspective, has enhanced knowledge of four substantive topics in the sociology of education: educational inequality, socialization and identity formation, school organization, and educational policy. In each area, qualitative studies have generated contextualized, process-sensitive knowledge and have introduced new voices, perspectives, and themes into traditional understanding. This research may enable the sociology of education to meet four additional challenges: generating theoretically rich examinations of schools as organizations; addressing issues of culture and education; developing broader social analyses of schooling and society; and incorporating perspectives on learning as situated, sociocultural activity into the study of schools as contexts for teaching and learning. Two aspects of the qualitative research tradition pose particular dilemmas and opportunities for sociology of education. First, qualitative research brings the sociology of education closer to the worlds of policy and practice, which may mute its critical voice. Second, since the sociology of education has been informed by qualitative research conducted from interdisciplinary vantage points and by researchers who do not identify themselves as sociologists, the boundaries of the field are permeable and fluid.

Feeling Better: A Comparison of Medical Research and Education Research

The education research community sometimes invokes medical research as a model to which education ought to aspire. This article reviews some recent themes and developments in the medical field to provide a more informed basis for comparison. The use of randomized clinical trials in medical research, the role of evidence in medical practice, and the rhetorical strategies for conveying research information in medical journals are discussed. A notable observation is that physicians often participate in clinical research and—in that work, as well as in their routine professional practice—function as knowledge workers. Educators also engage in knowledge work, but their practice is not always regarded in that way. The comparisons between medical research and education research suggest that the two fields face many similar challenges.

Gender, Organizations, and Leadership

Sex and gender are among the most fundamental of human attributes. Of all physical traits, a person’s biologically-determined sex is noticed first and recalled most easily by other persons. Being female or male predisposes an individual towards a complex array of behaviors known as a gender role, but persons socially construct their own gender identities by accepting, resisting, or transforming their assigned gender roles (Epstein, 1988; Lorber, 1994; Oakley, 1972). Gender identity is both a cause and an effect: it structures how individuals encounter the world and is itself a product of that encounter (Epstein, 1988; Goffman, 1967). Since social patterns of power and domination are often closely associated with gender, it can be understood as a fundamental political category within society as well (Burrell & Hearn, 1989). In short, gender is writ large on the narrative of individual character and collective social life.

We Gather Together: Work, Discourse, and Constitutive Social Action in Elementary School Faculty Meetings

Meetings are common occurrences in schools, but to date, minimal analytic research has focused on them This article reports on a case study of faculty meetings in a public elementary school. Three theoretical heuristics are used to examine how the faculty functioned as a task-performing work group, how conversations unfolded as dialogue, and how collective behavior in the meetings both conserved and helped to transform the social structure of the school.

The Principal's Role in Creating Inclusive Schools for Diverse Students: A Review of Normative, Empirical, and Critical Literature on the Practice of Educational Administration:

Public schools in the United States are serving a more heterogeneous student population now than ever before. Drawing on normative, empirical, and critical literatures, this review explores the role of school administrators in responding to the needs of diverse students. Three administrative tasks highlighted: fostering new meanings about diversity, promoting inclusive school cultures and instructional programs, and building relationships between schools and communities. Administrative work that accomplishes these tasks can be thought of as a form of practice, with moral, epistemological, constitutive, and discursive dimensions. Inclusive administrative practice is rooted in values of equity and social justice; it requires administrators to bring their full subjectivities to bear on their practice, and it implicates language as a key mechanism for both oppression and transformation.

Educational Leadership in Policy Contexts That Strive for Equity

In North America and elsewhere, the students educated in public schools have long been diverse along dimensions of race/ethnicity, national origin, native language, socioeconomic status, gender, and physical ability. Even so, social and cultural diversity is accelerating, so that most teachers and schools, whether located in urban, suburban, or rural contexts, can now expect to encounter students from widely varying backgrounds (Natriello, McDill, & Pallas, 1990; Nieto, 1999; Riehl, 2000). Diversity in student enrollment has virtually always led to unequal levels of educational achievement and attainment for students from different backgrounds. Increasingly, however, public officials, advocates, and others are challenging the inevitability of this result and are crafting policies to hold schools and school systems accountable for equitable learning for all students