John B. Diamond

Investigating School Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective

actions, and interactions of school leadership as they unfold together in the daily life of schools. The research program involves in-depth observations and interviews with formal and informal leaders and classroom teachers as well as a social network analysis in schools in the Chicago metropolitan area. We outline the distributed framework below, beginning with a brief review of the theoretical underpinnings for this work—distributed cognition and activity theory—which we then use to re-approach the subject of leadership practice. Next we develop our distributed theory of leadership around four ideas: leadership tasks and functions, task enactment, social distribution of task enactment, and situational distribution of task enactment. Our central argument is that school leadership is best understood as a distributed practice, stretched over the school’s social and situational contexts.

Towards a theory of leadership practice: a distributed perspective

School‐level conditions and school leadership, in particular, are key issues in efforts to change instruction. While new organizational structures and new leadership roles matter to instructional innovation, what seems most critical is how leadership practice is undertaken. Yet, the practice of school leadership has received limited attention in the research literature. Building on activity theory and theories of distributed cognition, this paper develops a distributed perspective on school leadership as a frame for studying leadership practice, arguing that leadership practice is constituted in the interaction of school leaders, followers, and the situation.

Managing in the Middle: School Leaders and the Enactment of Accountability Policy

This article investigates how mid-level managers make sense of and mediate district accountability policy. Arguing that teachers’evolving perceptions and understanding of accountability policies are likely to be mediated by school leaders, the authors explore how school managers enact their policy environments, focusing chiefly on the ways in which they construct district accountability policies. Adopting a cognitive or interpretive frame on implementation, the authors illuminate how school leaders’ sense-making is situated in their professional biographies, building histories, and roles as intermediaries between the district office and classroom teachers.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road : Rethinking the Connection Between High-Stakes Testing Policy and Classroom Instruction

In this article, the author examines the link between high-stakes testing policies and classroom instruction. Using data from classroom observations and interviews with teachers, he argues that these policies influence instruction but are mediated by teachers and filtered through their collegial interactions. He shows that teachers link the influence of high-stakes testing policies to instructional content (the knowledge and skills that they emphasize) more often than pedagogy (how they engage students around instructional content). As a result, didactic instruction dominates, especially in predominantly low-income and African American schools, in a policy environment that encourages addressing racial and class achievement gaps by increasing the use of interactive forms of instruction. The author concludes that researchers should be cautious not to overstate the impact of these policies on pedagogy and educational equity.

African American Parents’ Educational Orientations The Importance of Social Class and Parents’ Perceptions of Schools

Research on race, social class, and parent involvement in education often implies that parents’ educational orientations result directly from their social class or racial group backgrounds. In this article, the authors study the involvement of working-class and middle-class African American parents. They argue that these parents’ educational orientations are informed by the educational environments they navigate, their resources for negotiating these environments, and their prior social class and race-based educational experiences. Middle-class African American parents studied were more likely to select their children’s schools, assess them favorably, and adopt supportive orientations toward them. In contrast, working-class African American parents studied were assigned to schools, tended to assess them less favorably, and adopted more reform-based orientations toward them. The article extends prior work by studying social class and parent involvement within the African American community and by highlighting the interaction between parents’ perceptions of school context and their educational orientations.

Accountability Policy, School Organization, and Classroom Practice Partial Recoupling and Educational Opportunity

In this article, the author examines the links between high stakes testing policies, school organization processes, and instructional practice using data from a study of K-5 and K-8 schools in Chicago. He argues that although the policy environment penetrates the classroom, this penetration is partial—stronger on some aspects of instruction than others—and its impact unpredictable. He highlights four organizational patterns in the schools he studied that have implications for the link between accountability policy and instruction. These patterns include the stronger influence of accountability policy on content as opposed to pedagogy, the centrality of teaching colleagues in teachers’ advice-seeking networks, the predominance of didactic as opposed to interactive forms of instruction, and the differential responses to accountability policy and unequal distribution of resources across schools. After outlining these patterns, he discusses their implications for understanding the links between accountability policy, instruction, and educational equity.

Race and school achievement in a desegregated suburb: reconsidering the oppositional culture explanation

Recent research suggests that oppositional culture and a burden of acting White are likely to emerge for Black students in desegregated schools in which Whites are perceived as having greater educational opportunities. Using interviews with Black and White students in one desegregated secondary school, this ‘school structures’ argument is assessed. While Black students perceive race‐based limitations to their opportunities for getting ahead and are cognizant of racial patterns of track placement within the local school context, the authors found no evidence that Black students oppose school achievement. These findings are important because they shed light on some of the educational dilemmas that Black students encounter, which have received limited attention in prior work on oppositional culture. These dilemmas include cross‐race peer pressure from Whites among high‐achieving Black students and dilemmas of low achievement among Black students who struggle academically. Based on the findings, future lines of research are suggested that might help researchers better understand racial achievement disparities in such contexts.