James W. Koschoreck

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.

Accountability and educational equity in the transformation of an urban district

In the fall of 1999, began to work as part of a research team that was assembled to explore the effects of district leadership on academic outcomes with low-income children and children of color. During the course of that project, I was able to interview a considerable number of central office personnel, administrators, teachers, parents, and other community members in four districts in Texas that were experiencing remarkable levels of successful achievement with African American and Latino children. That study focused on identifying the best practices in four school districts across the state: Aldine Independent School District (ISD), Brazosport ISD, San Benito Consolidated ISD (CISD), and Wichita Falls ISD. The explicit objective of the project was to learn how certain districts in the state of Texas are managing to achieve high levels of performance with low-income children of color and to disseminate the findings to key organizations and persons in hopes of effecting statewide reform quickly and efficiently. Although I acknowledge that the plan to identify the best practices across several school districts represents a legitimate approach given the objective of bringing about statewide educational reform, I feel it is also imperative not to lose sight of the richness that the study of the singularity (Bassey, 1999) can provide. Hence, in this article I adopt a case study approach to explore, in depth, the details of how Aldine ISD has managed to move from being a district in which token representations of minority achievement were conceptualized as evidence of districtwide success with children of color to becoming a district in which success for all children is the operating paradigm.

Complex and contested constructions of accountability and educational equity

We very much appreciate Walt Haney’s and Stephen Klein’s willingness to engage with us in dialogue about accountability and educational equity, clearly issues about which we all care deeply. Both of their responses to our article ‘Accountability for equity: can state policy leverage social justice’ (pp. 237–260) provide scholarly and substantive critique of our work and raise important questions. As we said in that piece, we strongly believe that careful consideration, from many viewpoints, of the intensely complex and often highly emotionally charged issues surrounding accountability policy and its equity effects is sorely needed. We also strongly believe that the implications of this discussion are critically important to the future of children of colour and children from low-income families. We are, thus, grateful to Professors Haney and Klein for responding to our work, and we are pleased to have the opportunity to offer a rejoinder to their critiques. We do so in three major sections. First, we discuss areas of agreement, or shared constructions of meaning, between our views and those of our critics. Next, we discuss issues of disagreement, or contested constructions, between our views of accountability and educational equity and those of Haney and Klein. We end the article with a brief conclusions section.

The Building Blocks of Educational Administration: A Dialogic Review of the First Three Chapters of the Handbook

The first author was asked to write a review of the first three chapters of the Handbook. Rather than approach this task in the conventional way, he decided to involve several others in his department. He asked three of his doctoral students—Gerardo R. Lopez, James W. Koschoreck, and Kanya Mahitivanichcha—and one of his colleagues—James J. Scheurich—to work with him. The five of us then began to discuss how we might do this together. What we decided to do is a kind of structured dialogue. In this dialogue, there are three “blocks.” For “Block 1: Introductory Comments,” each of us independently read and responded to the first three chapters of the Handbook. This means that none of us knew what the others were writing for Block 1. For “Block 2: Response,” each of us continued our response to the first three chapters but also responded to what everyone else had said in Block 1. For “Block 3: Final Comments,” each of us, once again, continued to respond to the Handbook‘s first three chapters as well as respond to what others had said

Exploring online identity representation: a response to ‘heteronarrative analysis’

This paper represents a response to Kaufmanns article in this issue on the subject of heteronarrative analysis. The author highlights three elements of Kaufmanns argument to be especially persuasive: the use of narrative as an organizing principle of identity; the propensity of identity to be inflected by heteronormative logic; and the use of photographic and electronic media to disrupt identity. This analysis concludes with a suggestion that emerging methodologies designed to explore gender and identity should be carefully interrogated at the philosophical level of understanding if they are to provide useful insights.