Hanne B. Mawhinney

Social Justice Leadership and Inclusion: Exploring Challenges in an Urban District Struggling to Address Inequities.

Research Approach: This cross case study describes the challenges that two principals working in one urban school district addressed while attempting to transform their school cultures to embrace an inclusion model. Analysis of interviews and observations in each school revealed the actions, values, and orientations of the individual leaders and the influences of conflicts and dilemmas that exist in social justice work. Findings: The article describes how two principals enacted social justice leadership by making decisions that addressed resistance and challenges to inclusion. Implications for administrator preparation, future research, and theory are presented.

Theoretical Approaches to Understanding Interest Groups

The evolution of theorizing by political scientists about the role of interest groups in US. politics is explored in this article. Critiques of pluralism and the problems of measuring power are described. The dynamics of mobilization and refinements to incentive theory are outlined. The changing conceptions of how influence is structured through subgovernments, issue networks, and advocacy coalitions are examined. Models of lobbying and changing conceptions of group-state engagement are discussed. The article concludes with a discussion of the need to reframe conceptions of interest and influence to reflect new economic, political, and social contexts that are better captured by postpluralist and social movement theory.

Deliberative Democracy in Imagined Communities: How the Power Geometry of Globalization Shapes Local Leadership Praxis.

Foster’s concerns with the decline of the local are examined in the context of schools’ embeddedness in intersections of social, economic, and political forces of the communities in which they are located. Three readings are taken of Foster’s call to explore political and economic undercurrents when viewing schools as agents of, and for, community. A concluding interpretation of the three readings of Foster’s concerns calls for a new socioeconomics of education and nuanced analyses of the dilemmas of deliberation. Promising approaches to promoting critical praxis are drawn from emerging scholarship on perspectives of educational leadership from native and indigenous populations. Efforts to explore the communicative processes required to mediate ideas and interests and to enact institutional reforms are called for. The author concludes that multidisciplinary scholarship holds promise for enhancing understanding of the praxis of educational leadership in fostering the politics of local convening for deliberative democracy in a globalized world.

Institutional Constraints to Advocacy in Collaborative Services.

In this article, we report on a comparative analysis of the influence of the policy frameworks guiding collaborative initiatives in two schools, one located in the state of Kentucky and the other in the Canadian province of Ontario. We focus specifically on the complex issues related to the professional service ethic and the advocacy role that have been identified in studies of new school-community and interprofessional connections. We draw from two longitudinal studies of collaboration, one taken from a 3-year qualitative evaluation of the Kentucky Family Resource Centers (FRCs), which examines the social influence of FRC coordinators on the character and content of family-school connections in six elementary schools. The companion narrative is based on a longitudinal study of the structures and strategies emerging in one school-based service collaboration for youth under study in a sample of high schools in provinces across Canada.

Institutional Effects of Strategic Efforts at Community Enrichment.

This article lays out a path for an institutional analysis of strategic interventions for collaboration. The analysis is informed by recent theorizing on structures and strategies for collaboration and by the insights of the new institutionalism found in recent work by organizational theorists. The article uses a framework of institutional propositions to guide an analysis of the strategic efforts to promote community collaborative effort to enhance the life chances of students, efforts that are evolving in one Canadian high school from the perspective of school leaders in the initiative. The article extends existing theoretical conceptions of school-community relations through analysis of the institutional effects of these strategic efforts at collaboration.

Introduction: Interest Groups in United States Education

This article provides an overview to this special issue on interest groups and the politics of education. It first maps out the conceptual terrain by discussing educational interest groups and defining interest groups in American politics. This article then concludes with a brief discussion of the issues to be explored in greater depth in the individual pieces.

Introduction: School Leadership and the Politics of Education

This special issue concerns the development of knowledge among scholars studying politics in education. Educational Administration Quarterly sponsors such a special issue because the contentions outlined here strike at the knotty core of purposefully and properly educating all students. The demands of an applied field such as educational leadership always outstrip the available knowledge base (Lather, 1992; Murphy, 1992; Murphy & Louis, 1999). Consequently, the tensions of schooling challenge scholarship to confront the conflicts inherent to practice (Ogawa, Crowson, & Goldring, 1999; Stout, Tallerico, & Scribner, 1995; Wirt & Kirst, 1992). Accordingly, the politics of the education field, which specializes in the study of conflict, appeals to many practitioners and scholars of educational leadership (Ball, 1987; Bolman & Deal, 1991; Boyd, 1974; Malen, 1995; Mawhinney, 1999; Slater & Boyd, 1999). School leaders consistently frame their practice as political (Ball, 1987; Blase, 1986, 1989, 1991; Bolman & Deal, 1991; Lindle, 1994; Marshall & Scribner, 1991). Educational leaders and school administrators find themselves in a continually contentious arena and vie for ways of balancing, directing, controlling, manipulating, managing, and surviving their edgy environments (Ball, 1987; Blase, 1986, 1989, 1991; Iannacone, 1991; Lindle, 1994; Malen, 1995; Townsend, 1990). To what scholarship can they turn to make visible the politics of education that we have so far inadequately understood? Four articles attempt to delineate this dilemma and in doing so provocatively suggest more questions than answers about the prevailing scholarship in the politics of education. This

Patterns of Social Control in Assessment Practices in Canadian Frameworks for Accountability in Education

This article identifies institutional patterns and modes of social control evident in assessment practices across the evaluative contexts in Canadas 10 provinces and two territories. Emergent patterns show loose linkage of provincial-level direction with classroom practice, but also assessment as an instrument of normative control, arms-length oversight promoting system learning, and enhanced accountability and professional autonomy through process evaluation. These emergent institutional patterns suggest that assessment has become a very political and visible part of educational reform in all provinces. Despite strong provincial control over education, there is also clear evidence of a growing national agenda for accountability. Assessment has come to play an equally critical role in the provision for individual and systemic control in many educational policy frameworks. The institutional paterns reflected in changed roles, organizational forms, and technologies associated with new assessment strategies have created an intensified climate of accountability in Canadian education.

Analysis of Evidence Supporting the Educational Leadership Constituent Council 2011 Educational Leadership Program Standards.

This document analysis provides a summary of the research from high-impact journals published between 2008 and 2013 with the explicit purpose of determining the extent to which the current empirical evidence supports the individual 2011 Educational Leadership Constituent Council Program Standards and their elements. We found that the standards are unevenly represented and supported in the research. In general, the research was stronger for Standards 2 and 3 and building-level leadership standards. Without a more substantial research foundation for leadership preparation, program faculty are limited in their ability to design evidence-supported learning content and experiences for the next generation of educational leaders.

Shifting Scales of Education Politics in a Vernacular of Disruption and Dislocation.

Article comments on contributions to an issue of Educational Policy that focuses on glocal politics of education in multiple national and international arenas. Commentary offered considers the ways in which the set of articles in this issue of EP require readers to take scalar leaps across the semiotic landscape of the local into the global.The problematic of scale that undergirds considerations of the glocal is explored. Discussed are the contributions of the set of articles to highlighting the disruption and dislocation associated with contemporary examples of glocal phenomena in education politics. The possibility that `things fall apart’ under conditions of glocalization is contrasted with the hopefulness engendered by stances of vernacular cosmopolitanism. Implications for further research on the shifting scales of education politics discussed in the article focus on questions framing the democratic challenges of technological glocalization.