Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell

Overcoming Overwhelmed and Reinventing Normal: A District Administrator's Account of Living in Hurricane Katrina's Aftermath

This article is an autoethnographic account of the events and impacts of, as well as the response to, Hurricane Katrina on the East Baton Rouge Parish School System (EBRPSS). During the aftermath of the storm, thousands evacuated to Baton Rouge. The purpose of this study was to examine how 1 district systematically dealt with an influx of over 7,000 displaced children, and to explore how I operated and behaved as an upper-level district administrator in a chaotic, unpredictable context. No blueprints for response, no established procedures, and no policies existed for a disaster of this magnitude, and although other storms had impacted smaller segments of populations temporarily, Katrinas impact was, for many, profound and lasting.

A Case Study of Middle Grades Leadership in a Conversion Charter School.

This 3-year case study examined middle grades principal leadership in a takeover charter school. The researcher analyzed principal and teacher interviews, field notes, and documents in relationship to a middle grades model of principal leadership. Results suggest the principals’ limited experience, organizational factors unique to takeover charter schools, an emphasis on student test scores, and a personal educational philosophy of teacher autonomy, precluded the advocacy and implementation of elements of the middle grades principal leadership model.

Guest Editors' Introduction: The Promises of Charter Schools

As the guest editors of this issue of Equity & Excellence in Education, we intentionally included the language “The Promises of Charter Schools” from the original call for charter research, in this issue. The word “promise” can invoke visions of possibility and potential, of optimism and confidence. A promise can suggest hopefulness and is used to inspire confidence. Charter schools began as a concept that held the promise of social justice—more autonomy for teachers, more choice for families, more innovative teaching in terms of curriculum and instructional practice, and more equitable educational outcomes for students (Abowitz, 2001; Budde, 1988; Bulkley & Fisler, 2003). Charters have been viewed by some as a means to disrupt the historical institutional effects of racism and systematic neglect in public schooling for under-served parents and children by creating voice and space for transformational change. Unlike other educational reforms, the charter school concept had the promise of correcting inequitable outcomes by unsettling the underlying framework that generates the outcomes, rather than pursuing affirmative remedies that tinkered around the edges of substantive change (Abowitz, 2001). For readers of Equity & Excellence in Education, we pose the following question to frame this special issue: How is the promise of charter schooling, as a vehicle for social justice in public education, playing out? This question is timely and warranted, considering that currently over two million students attend more than 5,500 charter schools in the United States (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2012) in a national political context that advocates for the continued, rapid expansion and, in some states and locales, proliferation, of charter schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2009). Answering the question we posed is problematic on several levels, but most fundamentally, as Brown (2004) stated, because of the “conflicting views of social justice” (p. 79). However, she continued by noting, “the evidence is clear and alarming that various segments of our public school populations experience negative and inequitable treatment on a daily basis” (p. 79). The persistent achievement gaps experienced between white, middle class students and students of color, those of low socioeconomic status, those whose primary home language is not English, and students with special needs, is a politically persistent indicator of the inequity of public schooling (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Ladson-Billing, 2006). Yet, the identification of the achievement gap is only a limited expression of issues of power and marginalization in public schooling, where low teacher expectations, inequitable allocation of resources, and limited voice in the decisions that affect parents and students occurs in public schooling (Abowitz, 2001; Darling-Hammond,

Addressing the Complexities of Literacy and Urban Teaching in the USA: Strategic Professional Development as Intervention.

Teaching quality impacts classroom instruction. Teaching is difficult, demanding and draining work; teaching in urban environs exacerbates the difficulties, the demands and the complexities of teaching. Through the eyes of an assistant superintendent, charged with implementing a new vision for literacy teaching and learning, this manuscript describes an intervention study conducted in a large, Southern urban district in the USA, designed to build upon and expand teacher knowledge initially acquired through teacher education. The intervention was designed to increase efficacy in an effort to halt the decline of student outcomes by standardizing literacy teaching across kindergarten through third grade.

Editors’ introduction: On the promise and possibilities of arts integration in education

Arts integration has the capacity to transform education by nurturing students’ creativity and critical thinking. The current status of education in the United States (US) is stuck in a reductive, deficit-model paradigm that is frankly, not good for anyone – students, teachers, or the general public. Within the last several decades in the US, reform efforts, driven by privatization and commodification of public education, have compromised teaching and teacher education (2005; Allington, 2004; Altwerger, 2005; Bracey, 2001; Buras, 2014; Coles, 2003; Garan, 2004; Schneider, 2014, 2015; Shannon, 2003), influencing and controlling the types of instruction received by public school children, especially impoverished children. Unfortunately, this is not only a US problem as the same forces – rooted in neoliberalism – sweeping the states are prevalent throughout the world, often referred to as the Global Education Reform Movement (Sahlberg, 2006). Neoliberalism is an economic theory that emphasizes making economic gains despite the costs, involves ruthless competition, and is constructed within a market-driven mentality that negates ethical considerations (Giroux, 2011, 2014). Viewing education through a lens of economics has a way of filtering out meaningful activities deemed superfluous; art often finds itself on the chopping block. Art can make learning and just about anything more beautiful, memorable, meaningful, and fun. Arts integration – briefly, the educational approach of accessing curricular and art goals by having students create through an art form – positions students differently in their learning, moving from variations of passivity in school to being active, in charge of connecting content and skills in meaningful, evocative, and profound ways. Since neither of us began our teaching careers using arts integration techniques, we offer our individual stories to provide a sense of the journey and how we arrived at the proverbial studio. While Margaret-Mary began teaching in the early 1980s and Chris in 2000, neither of us was required to enrol in an arts course as part of their preparation as secondary English teachers. As recently as 2014, just 34 states in the US require arts requirements for their teachers (Arts Education Partnership, 2014). Given the benefits to arts integration as a pedagogical approach, both of us advocate rethinking teacher education in the US by situating arts-integrated learning directly into teacher education programming at all levels.

Repositioning the Hook

The framing of this volume has centered on the notion of unhooking from Whiteness as a mechanism to dismantle racism. For many scholars of color, being hooked by Whiteness has represented not only a well-researched problematic of race (Fasching-Varner, 2009), but being hooked by Whiteness has assigned a particular property value to Whiteness and Blackness determined by the White majority (Harris, 1995; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Fasching-Varner, 2009).