Ulrich C. Reitzug

Conceptualizing Instructional Leadership: The Voices of Principals.

Instructional leadership has long been advocated as a primary responsibility of principals. What is unclear, however, is the role that instructional leadership plays in the current high-stakes testing era in the daily work lives of principals, how they practice as instructional leaders, and toward what instructional outcomes they strive. This study focused on how principals understand the relationship between their daily work and the improvement of instruction in their schools. The study incorporates the voices of 20 principals. Multiple conceptions of instructional leadership are identified and problematic aspects of these conceptions are discussed.

Reconceptualizing Research and Scholarship in Educational Administration: Learning to Know, Knowing to Do, Doing to Learn

In this article, the authors explore common and emerging conceptions of what consti-tutes knowledge in educational administration, how knowledge relates to practice, and how individuals in universities and schools can engage in a particular kind of knowledge work—research. The authors suggest that a fully articulated perspective on research in educational administration might characterize research as occupying a multidimen-sional space delineated along three dimensions: why the research is done, who conducts the research, and how the research is done. Productive, interesting, and generative research can be situated anywhere on these dimensions, and five principles can be used to guide various forms of research. The implication is that although currently the field of educational administration encompasses two communities of practice, we should strive toward becoming one community of scholars. The authors discuss how doctoral pro -grams might develop students for this community of scholars and provide a case example from one university.

I'm Not Going to Lose You! Empowerment Through Caring in an Urban Principal's Practice With Students.

Urban educators interact with students in a variety of ways. Frequently, practices are grounded in assumptions about the necessity of control, whereas in some instances, practices reflect assumptions about the necessity of empowerment. Contrasting assumptions and practices about empowerment and control reflect a choice that confronts urban educators as they interact with students. This study focuses on the choicefor empowerment made by one urban principal andportrays her practices as she interacted with students. Data are presented via a constructed narrative. Following the narrative, data are discussed in terms of thecaring form of empowerment that emergedfrom data analysis.

School Turnaround Fever: The Paradoxes of a Historical Practice Promoted as a New Reform.

School “turnaround” has received significant attention recently in education literature and policy action, especially as a means to dramatically improve urban education. In current common education usage, “turnaround” refers to the rapid, significant improvement in the academic achievement of persistently low-achieving schools. Employing a conceptual framework informed by research regarding school reform history, the school leadership fashion cycle, and paradoxes in educational innovation and reform, this exploratory study examines policy documents, foundation works, and empirical studies in considering the historical roots, current recommended practices, and outcomes to date of the turnaround reform movement. We present the results of our inquiry in the form of a series of vexing paradoxes that characterize the recent fervor for school turnaround at the same time they signal the promise and pitfalls of the reform idea. We conclude by examining implications for urban school policy makers and school-based leaders.

How Existing Business Management Concepts Become School Leadership Fashions

Purpose: This article examines the history of three management concepts that originated in the business sector and progressed to the K-12 education sector. Framework: We propose a new conceptual model intended to help illuminate how ideas and strategies originally created for business leadership gain influence in the realm of K-12 school leadership. We build upon existing research into the history of educational reform and relevant studies of organizational management fads and fashions. Methods: We focused on three business management concepts that emerged in the past four decades as school leadership fashions: Management by Objectives, Total Quality Management, and Turnaround. We analyzed relevant data by mapping lines of business management influence on school leadership, tabulating fashion-related document appearances in the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database, and charting the appearance of business-inspired fashions in consecutive editions of prominent educational leadership textbooks. Findings: An existing business management concept, after a time lag, crosses borders from business to education. Various stakeholders serve as fashion setters who help the incipient innovation become an influential, attention-grabbing school management fashion that receives broad but fleeting attention in K-12 education before fading away as a discarded reform. Over the last four decades, this cyclical process has served as an accumulating fashion trend in which existing (and possibly outdated) business management techniques are routinely positioned as promising, innovative K-12 educational solutions. Implications: We conclude by offering thoughts on implications and suggestions for future study, including asking whether “locally sourced” management innovation can and should exist in K-12 school leadership.

Accountability, autonomy and stress: principal responses to superintendent change in a large US urban school district

This study investigates how principals in a large US urban school district responded to two different superintendents who employed contrasting leadership styles and utilised divergent organisational schemes. We originally conducted interviews with principals in 2007, when the districts superintendent asserted fierce performance demands and limited principals’ site-based discretion in favour of protecting and exerting central office power. We conducted interviews again in 2013 after a new superintendent had relaxed school test score expectations and distributed the central offices previously tight, centralised control into largely self-directing sub-regions. Our findings demonstrate that superintendent change noticeably affected how principals understood and encountered accountability, autonomy and stress. To help make sense of our findings, we employ a three-part conceptual framework drawn from the study of educational leadership. We conclude by considering implications, including the notion that unrelenting stress has become a permanent part of the modern urban US principalship.

A Developmental Framework for Instructional Leadership

Instructional leadership has long been hailed as one of the most significant responsibilities of school principals. Although there has been much advocacy for principal instructional leadership, there has been far less explicit conceptualization of what instructional leadership encompasses. This chapter reports on interviews with 40 principals from 11 states in which the principals talk about their work in this era of high stakes accountability. Specifically, in this chapter, we focus on their instructional leadership practice. Based on the analysis of the data, we propose a developmental framework of instructional leadership. We categorize instructional leadership into direct and indirect forms, with direct forms including linear, organic, and prophetic instructional leadership, and indirect forms being relational, empowering, and political instructional leadership.

“My Progress Comes From the Kids”: Portraits of Four Teachers in an Urban Turnaround School

This article uses elements of narrative and portraiture to acknowledge the voices of four teachers who participated in a 3-year effort to turn around an urban elementary school. Turnaround is a san...

Discount Stores, Discount(ed) Community? Parent and Family Engagement, Community Outreach, and an Urban Turnaround School

What roles do parent and family engagement and community outreach play in educator efforts to improve low-performing urban schools? To address this question, we considered findings from our 3-year case study of Brookdale Elementary (a pseudonym), which was undergoing a state-mandated, district-directed turnaround reform effort from 2011 to 2014. Specifically, we investigated how and why school personnel engaged with and reacted to parents and families, community-based organizations, and the surrounding locale. In the end, the school’s educators encountered complicated obstacles yet generated some tangible victories in their pursuit of productive school, parent/family, and community connections. We conclude by considering implications of our findings.