Daniel Reyes-Guerra

Building a school leadership programme: an American paradox of autonomy and accountability

School districts within the USA face ever-decreasing autonomy in rendering decisions regarding instruction, curriculum and the leading and managing of schools at the local level due to the ever-increasing accountability measures implemented by district, state and federal governments. This study investigates a joint university–school district partnership designed to develop turnaround administrators by exploring the tensions between autonomy and accountability. The findings indicate that mandates force educators to find new spaces that are contextually appropriate and effective in exercising their autonomy and accountability within a conceptual model for partnerships between schools, districts, universities and the governing bodies that regulate them.

Characteristics of Teachers Nominated for an Accelerated Principal Preparation Program

This article reports the initial evaluation results of a new accelerated, job-embedded principal preparation program funded by a Race to the Top Grant (U.S. Department of Education, 2012a) in Florida. Descriptive statistics, t-tests, and chi-square analyses were used to describe the characteristics of a group of potential applicants nominated to the program by their principals. Demographic and education-related variables for the group were compared to a group of self-selected students enrolled in an existing educational leadership master’s program at the same public university. Initial statistical analysis revealed that more than two-thirds of the nominated teachers belonged to a minority group and had not majored in education as undergraduates. These findings have immediate implications for this new program and for research related to the identification of potential future educational leaders.

Turnaround School Leadership: From Paradigms to Promises

Turnaround School Leadership is a contemporary term for a method of school reform and school improvement. It emerged in the US, circa 2004, as a new category of school leaders: individuals with the skills to turn around struggling or “low-performing” schools into “successful” schools. It is typically an attempt to blend both transformational and heroic leadership theories with business models of accountability. As a result, individual school leaders are held accountable for turning around schools by raising test scores. This definition is rooted in U.S. law (No Child Left Behind), U.S. policy (Race to the Top) and state and local governments’ political cultures. The authors of this chapter deconstruct the U.S. government’s definition as well as research-based definitions grounded in school improvement studies (e.g., Fullan, Murphy, Leithwood, and Duke). The authors argue that turning around schools should be a systemic educational idea grounded in social constructions of meaning based on curriculum inquiry (Reyes-Guerra and Bogotch 2011). The chapter describes the collaborative professional development model (PROPEL) of a university-school district partnership for developing turnaround school leaders. Central to the model is the use of program and course metaphors to help participants articulate effective answers regarding the purpose of U.S. public education in the twenty-first century.

Forging the Needed Dialogue Between Educational Leadership and Curriculum Inquiry: Placing Social Justice, Democracy, and Multicultural Perspectives into Practice

History demonstrates that the relationship between curriculum studies and educational leadership is mediated by the conceptualization of curriculum adopted within specific community contexts. To this end, we identify four conceptualizations of curriculum that have been effected in the USA and explore the varied relationship between our two fields that each context portends. Our analysis demonstrates that only when both fields of study have come together for the benefit of society, the common good, will the emergent leadership and curriculum result in progressive attempts at multiculturalism, democracy and social justice. Towards that end, we offer a developmental dialogical framework transitioning from relations grounded in stratification, homogenization, transformation, and the stage we call leadership for social justice. This progressive dialogue is ever more problematic, as it has to navigate multiple obstacles of temporal policies and politics as well as ideological divides. Thus, the complicated conversations are among those who seek to maintain old values and norms (e.g., stratification and homogenization) with those who take a counterview (transformation), or critical perspective (social justice).

Educational Curriculum Leadership as "Currere" and Praxis.

ABSTRACT The article provides a century-long sociocultural history as it relates to curriculum and educational leadership. Not every historical dialogue between the two fields has been productive: that is, in addition to holding this complicated conversation, there needs to be a focus on the meanings of the public good inside national contexts, in our case, the U.S. Therefore, combining the histories of curriculum and educational leadership requires what William Pinar called currere, and our critiques move from theory and practice to praxis.

The preparation of cognitively agile principals for turnaround schools: a leadership preparation programme study

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine the ability of two educational leadership university programmes to improve the cognitive agility of their graduates. The research looked to discover whether the aspiring principals exited the programmes with an increased ability to employ cognitive agility – the ability to use the multiple thinking skills of systems thinking, reflecting, and reframing – when engaged in their professional work and solving problems. Both Masters programmes were in School Leadership, offered through the same university department and following the same core curriculum leading to Level 1 educational leadership certification. The results indicate that of the two programmes studied, the Principal Rapid Orientation and Preparation in Educational Leadership (PROPEL) programme, designed to prepare leaders for turnaround schools, produced more cognitively agile graduates than the traditional Master’s programme. The mediating variables of participants’ years of experience and budget responsibility increased the level of cognitive agility of both programme’s graduates.

Faculty Perceptions of Race to the Top Policy Influence on a University-Based Preparation Program Partnership

Florida’s Race to the Top (RTTT) competition invited university−district partnerships to compete for funds aimed at improving principal preparation programs. In this article, we report findings from a qualitative case study focused on one program partnership funded by RTTT. Drawing upon interviews with faculty and relevant documents, we conducted a thematic analysis to determine how faculty perceived RTTT, the state, and the district influenced the development of the program. Three themes were identified and suggest that faculty perceived the influence of RTTT was filtered by the state’s existing reform priorities. Implications for preparation and directions for future research are provided.