Catherine Marshall

Social Justice Challenges to Educational Administration: Introduction to a Special Issue:

Challenging the field of educational administration to take an activist and prosocial justice stance, this article introduces the special issue. Some professors and preparation programs are inadequately attuned to equity concerns. Standards and testing for administrator licensure touch only the surface of cultural diversity, equity, and democracy. Disproportionally small percentages of administrators are women and minorities. Still, with the high turnover of administrators and with the work of scholars in Leadership for Social Justice, the time for transforming the field is now.

Culture and education policy in the American states

A cultural framework for studying state policy the subculture of state education policy makers state policy mechanisms as cultural products public values in the policy culture political culture and policy patterns among the states cultural values embedded in statutes understanding cultural influences on educational policy.

Researching the Margins: Feminist Critical Policy Analysis

The powerful define the mainstream policy problems and determine the appropriate concerns for research in education. Those in power have operated for years from a male-normed paradigm. As a result, the needs and contributions of women have been marginalized. This article uses frameworks from the politics of knowledge and discourse to analyze ways in which gender research has been controlled and depoliticized. It identifies ignored feminist research and then poses challenges to researchers.

Caring As Career: An Alternative Perspective for Educational Administration.

The primary purpose of this article is to describe how school administrators operating from an ethic of care conduct their daily practice and how that practice differs from administrators operating solely from traditional leadership models. Via a secondary analysis of data that were gathered in our previous work with career assistant principals, we show how the practices of these assistant principals do not fit traditional administrative theories. Instead, the ethic of care was evident. Because it is difficult to separate administrative practice from organizational structure and professional norms, a secondary purpose of this article is to identify how the demands of both the organization and the profession interfere with enactment of caring.

Are Principals Prepared to Manage Special Education Dilemmas

The policy issues surrounding implementation of special education programs are multiple, complex, and ever-changing. What strategies, coursework, and certification requirements do principals need to pro vide effective instructional leadership to special education programs in site-based managed schools?

The Context of State-Level Policy Formation

To identify the relative power and influence of various state education policy groups, data were collected by elite interviewing as part of a larger study by the authors. This article displays the variation among six states in the ranking of policy groups. The relative rankings show how the configurations of power differ among the states. Using the qualitative data, the article provides short analyses of the policy processes that explain these differences. History, recent political battles, and the action styles of policy actors are part of the context that explains the differences (e.g., showing how teachers’ associations may rank first in one state and twelfth in another). The research explores further the qualitative data to search for policy actors’ sense of the rules that must be followed to gain and maintain power in the cultural state policymaking. The article introduces the theory of assumptive worlds; the common action principles understood by all state policy actors and learned from their socialization in the culture of politics. It concludes by showing how assumptive worlds build cohesion, translate values, and are barometers of change.

Like It Or Not: Feminist Critical Policy Analysis Matters

The authors reply to Haithe Andersons critique of their conceptualization of feminist critical analysis. They reaffirm and elaborate on what makes conventional policy analysis incapable of undoing the power asymmetries that characterize relations between male and female academics.

Gender filters and leadership: Plotting a course to equity

Equity for women and women’s ways of leading remains elusive in the profession of educational administration. This article reports research that led to the development and validation of a construct called gender filters, lenses used by individuals to actually navigate gender‐related issues or gender dynamics in educational settings. Our findings suggest that filters frequently reify the institutionalized gender inequity, or silence ideas and people that might disrupt dominance and therefore protect and privilege the profession as a dominant White‐male culture. Other gender filters work as interventions, modifying the helplessness people feel when they try to confront their prejudices, thus providing insights for educating potential educational administrators in ways that promote gender equity in the profession.

Culture and Education Policy: Analyzing Values in State Policy Systems.

Reference to values in education policy studies is commonplace, but close analysis is never done. This article provides behavioral definitions of four basic values—quality, equity, efficiency, choice—that render them amenable to quantitative analysis. The concept of culture is offered to explain policy behavior, specifically the meritocratic, egalitarian, and democratic cultures within our national culture. These value definitions are applied—via content analysis—to state education codes in Illinois and Wisconsin to demonstrate how policy choices are moved by different cultures. The results also demonstrate evidence for Elazar’s “political culture” concept. The conflict and complementarity inherent in these values are also discussed.

The Assistant Principalship: A Career Position or a Stepping- Stone to the Principalship?

Provided here are case studies of assistant principals as they become socially oriented to their positions. The writers used a field-study approach to identify 20 subjects from 11 school districts in three states to examine the assistant principal posi tion and career mobility. All names of informants, schools, and districts have been changed to protect anonymity.