James Joseph Scheurich

From the Field: A Proposal for Educating Leaders for Social Justice

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to suggest the structure and content of an educational leadership program whose aim is to prepare principals for social justice work. Research Design: The authors have conceptualized foundational components for a comprehensive principalship program focused on social justice. They assert that educational leaders for social justice must have three goals at the forefront of their efforts: (a) They must raise the academic achievement of all the students in their school, that is, high test scores do matter; (b) they must prepare their students to live as critical citizens in society; and (c) both of these goals can only be achieved when leaders assign students to inclusive, heterogeneous classrooms that provide all students access to a rich and engaging curriculum. The components addressed for this social justice—oriented principalship preparation program include (a) how students should be selected for such a program and (b) an outline of the knowledge and content for educating social justice leaders. The importance of induction/praxis after students graduate from these programs is discussed. Conclusions: The aim of this article is to provoke a discussion in the field and spark faculty to engage in ongoing conversations and thinking about their own programs and to imagine new avenues for future research in this area. Faculty also can use these suggestions as a guide to assess their efforts and to bolster program quality, sensitive to the unique needs and schooling contexts of their particular students.

A postmodernist critique of research interviewing

Since the emergence of qualitative research in education, research interviewing has been naively accepted as a reasonably straightforward method for gathering information. Even Lincoln and Gubas ground‐breaking postpositivist work, Naturalistic Inquiry (1985), largely treated interviewing in this manner. More recently, other postpositivists, such as Mishler (1986), have criticized the traditional approach to interviewing and suggested new ways to conduct and understand the research interview. But these latter postpositivists still retain thoroughly modernist assumptions that they embed in their reconstructions of research interviewing. This paper presents, in contrast, a postmodernist perspective that critiques both positivist and postpositivist characterizations of interviewing. This paper also shows how one aspect of interviewing – the power relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee — might be reconceptualized within a postmodernist perspective. The paper ends with a call for appreciatio...

Equity Audits: A Practical Leadership Tool for Developing Equitable and Excellent Schools.

Persistent achievement gaps by race and class in U.S. public schools are educationally and ethically deplorable and, thus, need to be eliminated. Based on their research on schools and districts that haven arrowed these gaps, the authors have developed a simplified reconceptualization of equity auditing, a concept with a respected history in civil rights, in curriculum auditing, and in some state accountability systems. This reconceptualized equity auditing is a leadership tool that can be used to uncover, understand, and change inequities that are internal to schools and districts in three areas—teacher quality, educational programs, and student achievement.

Toward a White Discourse on White Racism

Few would disagree that racism continues to be a serious social problem. More problematic for many White academics is the judgment that the academy itself is racist. In this essay I argue that the judgment that the academy is racist is frequently misunderstood by us White academicians because our socially learned investment in individualism eclipses our awareness of our racial positionality. I conclude with suggestions on how we White academicians could, with less divisiveness, begin to address White racism within the academy.

Highly Successful and Loving, Public Elementary Schools Populated Mainly by Low-SES Children of Color: Core Beliefs and Cultural Characteristics.

The widespread existence of highly successful elementary schools populated mainly by low-socioeconomic-status students of color substantially undermines popular assumptions about the pervasive school failure of these students. Indeed, the fact that these highly successful schools are academically competitive with-and even superior to-the better Anglo schools suggests that these highly successful schools may have developed a better model for schooling. That these schools have been developed by school-level educators rather than by university researchers is also critically important. What is provided here, then, is a description of the core beliefs and organizational culture of these highly successful schools.

Equity Traps: A Useful Construct for Preparing Principals to Lead Schools That Are Successful With Racially Diverse Students

The concept of equity traps evolved from a qualitative study that revealed the conscious and unconscious thinking patterns and behaviors that trap teachers, administrators, and others, preventing them from creating schools that are equitable, particularly for students of color. Although the results of this original study exposed these equity traps, merely exposing the traps is not sufficient. Hence, the purpose of this article is to offer a useful, pragmatic construct to professors in educational administration departments to help them prepare their principal candidates to be able not only to identify these equity traps but also to understand them and be able to implement strategies to avoid or eliminate these traps. Therefore, the authors clearly define the four equity traps—the deficit view, racial erasure, employment and avoidance of the gaze, and paralogic beliefs and behaviors—and offer practical, successful strategies to avoid or free educators from these traps.

Policy archaeology: a new policy studies methodology

Policy archaeology is a radically different approach to policy studies in education, drawn from the post‐structuralist work of Foucault, which completely reconceptualizes policy studies and, thus, significantly expands it as a critical problematic. Rather than beginning after social and education problems have emerged into social visibility, policy archaeology studies the social construction of these problems. Rather than acquiescing to the range of policy solutions debated by policy makers and policy analysts, it interrogates the social construction of that range. Rather than accepting policy studies as a ‘neutral’ social science, it questions the broader social functions of policy studies. And, finally, rather than concluding that social and education problems, policy solutions and policy studies are created by the conscious interplay of the free agents of history, policy archaeology proposes that a grid of social regularities constitutes what is seen as a problem, what is socially legitimized as a poli...

Sexism, Silence, and Solutions: Women Superintendents Speak Up and Speak Out

Women as a group continue to be underrepresented in the ranks of American public school superintendents. Since the mid-1970s, researchers have attempted to account for the continued domination of the public school superintendency by men, but even in research that has moved beyond traditional paradigms, barriers to gaining insight into women superintendents’ experiences from their own viewpoints have persisted. The qualitative case study on which this article is based was designed to break down some of those barriers by using a participatory research design that included the women participants’own analyses of their experiences and that explored their proposed solutions for the problems surrounding their inequitable treatment. The authors discuss three interrelated parts of the study results—the sexism that is part of the culture of the superintendency, the silence of the educational administration profession about women superintendents’discriminatory experiences, and the study participants’proposed solutions for the problems of sexism and silence.

Accountability for Equity: Can State Policy Leverage Social Justice?.

This paper advocates working carefully through a tactical, practical engagement with accountability policies for the purpose of increasing educational equity and social justice for children of colour and children from low-income families. It discusses the pervasiveness of systemic racism and its effects in US schools, and explores the complexity surrounding issues of accountability and the possible disruption of this racism. Also described is the possibility of a convergence of interests between supporters of accountability and advocates for social justice. Finally, evidence is presented, from state and school district levels in Texas, that increased educational equity can be leveraged through the careful use of some accountability measures.

The masks of validity: a deconstructive investigation

Postpositivists, such as Mishler (1990) and Lincoln and Guba (1985), have commonly claimed that there are substantial methodological and epistemological differences between their framework and that of the conventional or positivistic approach. On the face of it, this claim is indisputable. For example, Lincoln and Guba in Naturalistic Inquiry (1985) lay out five key differences in terms of ontology, epistemology, generalizability, causality, and axiology (p. 37). In contrast, it is argued here, as a result of a deconstructive investigation, that the conventional approach and more radical versions of postpositivism are, in a primary way, profoundly and disturbingly similar. This point is pursued by investigating the transgressive practices of validity across both conventional and more radical postpositivist research orientations and ends with new imaginaries of validity that make problematic conventional and postpositivist validity practices and celebrate the play of multiplicity and difference.