Curtis Brewer

Successful Leadership in High-Needs Schools: An Examination of Core Leadership Practices Enacted in Challenging Contexts

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the ways principals in three high-needs middle schools enacted core leadership practices in concert with their immediate contexts to institutionalize comprehensive school reforms and support student learning. Research Methods: The schools were selected from a geographically stratified sample of public middle schools in a state in the southeastern United States. Multiple linear regression was used to identify schools performing better than expected considering their levels of poverty and other school-related factors. The final three schools, one from each geographic region, showed steady increases in academic achievement and school climate following the arrival of their principals. Data were primarily collected from interviews with principals, teaching and nonteaching staff, and parents using protocols adapted from the International Successful School Principalship Project. Findings: The findings explicate the large degree to which the leadership practices and beliefs that influenced student achievement in these schools were adapted to and commensurate with each school’s immediate context. Furthermore, they illustrate how principals used these practices to institutionalize school-wide reform efforts as vehicles for leading change within their schools. Implications: The findings substantiate research on successful school leadership in high-needs middle schools. They also extend this research by examining the way core transformational and instructional leadership practices can be adapted to suit various school contexts and institutionalize school-wide reform efforts to enhance student learning. Further research is required to understand how principals decide to adapt their leadership practices, and how aspiring leaders can best learn to do so.

Fear and the Preparation of School Leaders The Role of Ambiguity, Anxiety, and Power in Meaning Making

An uncertainty has developed around the “core technology” of preparing educational leaders, making the general public question whether, in particular, university professors know what they are doing. This sense of ambiguity can also be found within the professoriate, where questioning of the knowledge base, standards, pedagogy, and university expectations have become a new norm, promoting reflexivity, uncertainty, and fear. Such uncertainty is neither healthy nor unhealthy in and of itself; the outcome depends in large degree on how it is fostered. In this article, we examine two contemporary reports that critique educational leadership preparation, viewing their critiques and recommendations as exercises of power within the context of late modernity. Using Nybergs (1981) work on modes of power, Frasers (1989) work on problem definition and contemporary work on the politics of fear (e.g., Glassner, 1999; Gonzalez & Delgado, 2006), we analyze the content of the reports and their impact.

Reframing the Study of Policy Implementation Lived Experience as Politics

This policy implementation study examines the experiences of four elementary school principals using photomethods. We employ Rancière and Merleau-Ponty’s theorizations on democracy and making sense to understand the lived policy experiences of school principals and these individual’s potential for practicing democratic politics. At its heart, implementation by local actors is a political undertaking. Our results indicate implementation is a spatially inhabited practice involving negotiation and strategy, where local actor’s experiences moderate and appropriate policy. Thus, we point out that attention to these spatially inhabited practices requires a fundamental shift in the frameworks and methodologies deployed in the investigation of policy implementation.

Historicizing in critical policy analysis: the production of cultural histories and microhistories

The practice of critical policy analysis often emphasizes the importance of historicizing the present. However, there is very little guidance for critical policy analysts on the methodical production of histories. In this paper, I meet this need by arguing for the use of methodologies embedded in the production of both cultural histories and microhistories. I show how the historical narratives that are produced by critical policy analysts must be able to reveal patterns of long-term social interactions and domination, while simultaneously showing how people on a smaller temporal scale still disrupt and bend these social structures to their needs. Most importantly, I argue that using such methodologies allows critical policy analysts to practice a form of historicizing that explicitly adheres to an epistemological stance that emphasizes the social construction of knowledge through power relationships.

People for Education: a critical policy history

In this paper, we demonstrate how history informs how policy meanings are constructed and the rhetorical strategies used to convince others to accept these meanings. We have two goals: (a) to show how a group of non-governmental actors, People for Education, became part of Ontario, Canada’s policy discursive network; and (b) to demonstrate the utility of constructing cultural and microhistories in critical policy analysis. This article is important because it describes resistance from a critical perspective and offers a methodology for producing histories of struggles over meaning-making in educational politics.

The implicated advocate: the discursive construction of the democratic practices of school principals in the USA

Changes in the public service sector during the last stages of the twentieth century contributed to an international reconfiguration of state-centric governance. Supported by the discourses of individualism, marketization, national governance, and competition, this (re)shaping of governance presents a specific dilemma for the political identity of educational leaders. In response to the troubling lack of international scholarship focused on the political role of educational leaders, this article provides insight into the ways in which the political identity of school leaders within the USA is influenced by dominant discourses. The understandings highlight the ways in which educational leaders are expected to realize their roles as resolute implementers of state policy, while also being directed to act as deliberative advocates within the jurisdiction of educational policy making. We believe that these competing discourses have altered the identity of educational leaders into what we have labeled as the implicated advocate. The purpose of this article is to provide the field of the politics of educational with a concept that may expose the double bind that is experienced by the educational leaders.

Consequential Validity of Accountability Policy: Public Understanding of Assessments.

Educational accountability policy rests heavily on the assessments used to influence teaching, learning, and school improvement. A long-debated aspect of assessment use, consequential validity, plays an important role in public interpretation of assessment use whether for individual students or for state policy. The purpose of this survey study was to explore stakeholders’ perceptions of the variety of tests used in classrooms and schools, especially how testing is used to improve teaching and learning. Results indicated that the majority of stakeholders do not value state assessments and do not see the assessments as useful in the teaching and learning process. However, a proportion of minority respondents were optimistic that state assessments have potential for school improvement.

Successful leadership in a rural, high-poverty school: The case of county line middle school

Purpose – In this paper, the authors present a case study of successful school leadership at County Line Middle School. The purpose of the paper is to identify how particular leadership practices and beliefs were adapted to increase student achievement in this rural, high-poverty school in the southeastern USA. Design/methodology/approach – After purposefully selecting this school, the authors adapted interview protocols, questionnaires, and analysis frameworks from the International Successful School Principalship Project to develop a multi-perspective case study of principal leadership practices at the school. Findings – The findings illustrate the practices which led to students at this school, previously the lowest-performing in the district, achieving significantly higher on state standardized tests, getting along “like a family,” and regularly participating in service learning activities and charity events. A particularly interesting finding was how the principal confronted the schools negative sel...

School Leaders as Political Strategists: William Boyd's Contributions to our Understanding of the Politics of Leadership

William Boyds contributions to the education fields understanding of the political nature of school leadership are formidable. In this article, I describe the growth and development, over a roughly 30-year time span, of his key insight that successful school leaders should have the capabilities of a political strategist and that the actualization of this capacity is related to school leaders’ political and policy context. The perennial question of “who governs education” was central to Boyds work and his various answers are important touchstones for todays educational leaders.

Representing Embodiment and the Policy Implementing Principal Using Photovoice.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on the many dimensions of the principals positionality by using a unique research approach to link the experiences of the policy implementing principal to embodiment.Design/methodology/approach – The researchers employed a form of critical policy analysis that utilized photovoice to examine the experience of two principals in South Carolina, USA.Findings – The findings suggest that these two principals do feel, beyond a cognitive emotional level, the experiences of being the policy implementing principal, where the multiple physically imprinted identities typified one principals experiences and the highly entropic world of her high school causes another principal to physically and metaphorically integrate situations into her physiology.Originality/value – In this paper, the authors are able to expand discussions of the principals’ engagement with policy by using a unique theoretical and methodological approach.