Linda Skrla

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.

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 influence of school social composition on teachers' collective efficacy beliefs

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine how school social composition is related to perceived collective efficacy. Several hypotheses tested in this research were derived from social cognitive theory and based on the extant literature. Participants: Data were drawn from 1,981 teachers in 41 K-8 schools in a diverse urban school district in the southwestern United States. Findings: The results of two-level hierarchical linear models indicated that a school’s past academic achievement, rate of special program placement for gifted children, and faculty ethnic composition explained 46% of the variation among schools in perceived collective efficacy. The article also reports a much smaller but statistically significant relationship between collective efficacy beliefs and teacher race and experience. Teachers of color and those with more than 10 years experience reported slightly higher levels of perceived collective efficacy. Conclusions: The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

The Social Construction of Gender in the Superintendency.

The public school superintendency in the United States is overwhelmingly socially constructed as masculine even though the educator workforce from which superintendents are drawn is 75% female. Predictably, those who teach, research and write about the superintendency in the US, again overwhelmingly male, have largely reinforced the sexist gendering of this critical leadership position. In contrast, this study explores how three women superintendents engaged, in a complex fashion, the gendered social construction of the super intendency as they conducted the daily work of leading school districts in the state of Texas. This study also verifies for feminists in other national contexts the critical need for feminist research to be conducted in a wide variety of national contexts, especially because the feminist work of one specific context may be very different than that of another. The study ends with recommendations that fit Texas and the US at the beginning of the 21st century.

Infusing Gender and Diversity Issues into Educational Leadership Programs: Transformational Learning and Resistance.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to consider the impact of incorporating a set of readings focused on issues of gender, diversity, leadership, and feminist thought into the curriculum of a statewide educational leadership doctoral program.Design/methodology/approach – Based data from open‐ended surveys, semi‐structured interviews, and reflection statements, the article presents a qualitative analysis of how students react to, learn from, and resist social justice‐oriented curricula and teaching strategies, particularly those related to gender issues.Findings – The analysis of the data collected in this research suggests that, after a year of exposure to readings and written assignments about gender and other diversity issues, few students had undergone significant transformations in their learning regarding gender issues. Moreover, it was found that many students demonstrated resistance to reading, reflecting on and discussing gender issues.Originality/value – Programs and professors that endeavor...

Leaders as Policy Mediators: The Reconceptualization of Accountability

In this article, the authors explore the role of district and school leaders in reconceptualizing accountability policy by adapting and mediating it using three primary strategies. Specifically, they discuss how leaders cultivate relationships and interactions, reculture the district and schools, and integrate and align school and district purposes, goals, policies, and practices to support the achievement of all children. The discussion and illustrations are drawn from two separate multiyear, multiphase research projects. The authors researched districts and schools in two states (North Carolina and Texas) that have more than a decades experience with implementing accountability of the type required by the No Child Left Behind Act. These districts and schools have demonstrated success in raising achievement for all students and in closing achievement gaps between white students and students of color and between children from middle- and upper-income homes and children from low-income homes.

Mourning silence: Women superintendents (and a researcher) rethink speaking up and speaking out

This article uses Derrida?s (1994) concept of philosophical mourning as an analytic to explore the aftermath of broken silence about sexism and discriminatory treatment in the public school superintendency. The two major sections of the article focus on the mourning work done by a researcher and three female former superintendents in reconstructing their thinking following the participants? speaking up in research interviews about their differential treatment as women working in the most gender stratified executive position in the United States.

Accountability, Equity, and Complexity:

The degree to which any U.S. child is likely to benefit from her or his public schooling historically has been and continues to be strongly tied to the child’s race (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995; Tatum, 1997). Academic underachievement by and negative treatment of children of color remain persistent, pervasive, and disproportionate (Lomotey, 1990) in every region of the U.S., in every state, and in the vast majority of school districts and individual schools. This is an enormously destructive situation for the more than 17 million African American, Latina/o, Native American, Asian American, and other children of color (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2000) who daily experience the effects of systemic racism in U.S. public schools. Evidence of this daily destructiveness, what Angela Valenzuela (1999) has termed “subtractive schooling,” is overwhelming. Researchers from a broad range of academic disciplines have documented that children of color are overidentified for special education; tracked in low-level classes; pushed out of the system and labeled dropouts; subject to more and harsher disciplinary actions; provided with less financial resources and substandard facilities; taught by less experienced teachers and more teachers teaching out of their subject fields; segregated based on their home languages; and immersed in negative, toxic school climates (see, for example, Artiles, 1998; Ingersoll, 1999; Oakes, 1993; Parker, 1993; Sheets & Gay, 1996; Skiba, Peterson, & Williams, 1997; Trueba, 1989; Valdés, 1998; Valencia, 1997). These persistent inequities have played a significant role in driving successive waves of U.S. school reform, as educators and policymakers have grappled for solutions to both the gap between the achievement of children of color and that of White children and the inequitable treatment of children of color in public schools (Reyes, Wagstaff, & Fusarelli, 1999). This ongoing struggle for educational equity, likewise, has played a prominent role in the most recent wave of school reform sweeping the U.S. (and other western liberal democracies such as the U.K., Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand), which can be, as Education Week’s Lynn Olson (1999) put it, “summed up in one word—accountability” (p. 8). The emergence of accountability movements in U.S. and international education is due to extremely complex political, economic, social, and cultural forces (Popkewitz, 2000). This worldwide, postmodern shift toward discourses, models, technologies, and manifestations of accountability (e.g., standards, effectiveness, efficiency, quality, choice, markets, testing, and entrepreneurship) has been the focus of a growing body of research literature, much of which has been grounded in critical perspectives concerned with the impact of accountability movements on democracy and educational equity (e.g., Apple, 1998; Ball, 1999; Blackmore, 1999; Smyth & Shacklock, 1998). This body of work, in general, has been sharply critical of the effects of accountability policy—and its attendant reliance on standardized testing— on equity in school settings. For example, Michael Apple (1998), drawing from Whitty, Power, and Halpin’s (1998) policy research, asserted, “The market did not encourage diversity in curriculum, pedagogy, organization, clientele, or even image. . . . Of equal significance, it also consistently exacerbated differences in access and outcome based on race, ethnicity, and class” (p. 26).

The Politics of Superintendent Evaluation

The evaluation of the superintendent by the school board can be a process characterized by mutual respect or, conversely, it can be an intensely stressful, highly political process. This article gives an overview of the superintendent evaluation process, explores the politics that surround it, and provides strategies/processes for improvement.