The Intersections of Justice-Centered Leadership and Policy
Previous Research
Much of my work has examined justice-centered leaders’ community activism, with a focus on how leaders’ community activism responded to local and national policy contexts. I have published several book chapters examining leaders’ community-oriented work, including analyses of leaders’ anti-racist work and leaders’ use of activism to disrupt neoliberal policy broadly. In a piece published in the International Journal of Leadership in Education, I illustrated how leaders engaged in community work in response to unjust policy contexts in Chicago and more nationally. For example, leaders used school resources to connect undocumented community members to free legal aid in the midst of heightened threats to immigrants during the Trump presidency. This research also revealed that leaders found ways to leverage their community activism to advance their school’s market position in the highly competitive Chicago Public Schools district. This finding departed from other research that has shown leaders may respond to market pressures in unjust ways, such as cream-skimming high-achieving students. This finding also led directly to my dissertation research, through which I sought to examine this topic more fully.
My Dissertation
Increasingly, school districts are incorporating educational marketplaces, commonly-known as “districts of choice,” in which students may choose to attend schools outside of their zoned school. Educational marketplaces are undergirded by theories that increased family choice and competition amongst schools, as in the free market, should create efficiency, improve quality, and lower the costs of schooling. In theory, families will not choose “failing” schools, which will force these “failing” schools to either improve or close, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness of the school system. While choice policies respond to concrete issues in the education system, research has shown that educational markets actually contribute to marginalization, resource deprivation, and segregation. Rather than improving the quality of schooling, research has shown little evidence of positive academic impacts of educational market reforms.
Part of this disconnect between theory and reality is likely related to the fact that school leaders—who often lead a school’s competitive strategy within market environments—do not respond to market pressures in accordance with theory. While market proponents theorize that school leaders might respond to competitive pressure via improvements to academic programs, research has shown that they instead tend to engage in promotional activities or surface-level beautification or glossification efforts that make the school appear to have improved. Leaders might also engage in student selection behaviors (sometimes called “creaming” or “cream-skimming”) that allow them to effectively stack the student body with as many high-achieving students as possible, promoting increased academic scores without actually engaging in improvement work to create a school that can educate all students.
I am drawn to this area of research because of what I have seen in Chicago, both in terms of the readily-apparent segregation across schools in our highly-marketized district, and in terms of the lived experiences of school leaders I’ve interviewed in my research on socially-just school leadership practice. School leaders I’ve spoken with have described facing immense pressures from the school choice model. Yet, interviews also revealed that many of the leaders used social justice work—particularly community activism—as one method to attract student and family attention to get more students in the door. This departs from the other responses to pressure common in the literature.
In my dissertation, I seek to learn how justice-centered leadership intersects with educational market policy. This includes learning how market reforms may constrain justice-centered leaders, and how these leaders conduct their work in spite of these reforms. If markets are here to stay (and they seem to be), how can leaders work to disrupt and contest their effects? What place does justice work have in a market environment? Do the Chicago leaders’ strategies to engage in community activism actually work to attract families? If so, surely this is a preferable response to pressure in comparison to cream-skimming.
To explore this topic, I rely on a mixed methods, convergent triangulation approach, that integrated qualitative and quantitative data from school leaders across seven marketized districts in the United States. The qualitative phase of this study was comprised of a multiple case study that utilized semi-structured interviews with 24 justice-oriented school leaders to examine leaders’ experiences within market contexts. The quantitative phase of this study was comprised of a survey of school leaders, which included questions related to social justice practices, perceptions of competitive pressure, and responses to pressure.
Overall, findings suggest that market policy is incompatible with ideals of social justice, but that justice-centered leaders can leverage their justice work toward disrupting the negative impacts of markets and broader marginalizing structures, while also increasing student enrollment. Findings reveal that school leaders perceived market policy as furthering segregation within and across schools in their districts. Leaders reported this segregation has multiple deleterious effects, including creating an “us versus them” climate within schools, concentrating the number of resource-deprived and high-needs students within particular school buildings, and furthering the unevenness of resources distributed across schools within districts. Findings showed that leaders leveraged in-school and community-oriented justice work to enhance their schools’ reputation within the district, thereby enhancing their schools’ student enrollment. Interestingly, leaders engaged in practices found on Jabbar's (2015) typology, but that leaders engaged in this work in divergent ways. For example, leaders instituted specialized programs to attract students, but pushed all students to enroll in specialized programs, using these programs to create opportunity for and attract traditionally-marginalized students, rather than to attract high-achieving students. In terms of differences in leaders’ justice work across context variables, leaders tended to orient their justice work around the localized needs of their school and immediate community. I also identified several ways in which district policy can help to facilitate justice-centered leaders’ work, forming a sort of “tailwind” for justice-centered leadership.
I anticipate several publications exploring intersections between justice-centered leadership and context/policy will follow the completion of my dissertation. Some of these include:
Social Justice Leadership and Markets: Mutually Exclusive?: Paper targeted to Leadership and Policy in Schools; will explore how leaders used social justice work as a lever to enhance student enrollment and present leaders’ theory of action for this work [I am presenting this paper at AERA 2022]
Comparative piece, targeted to Urban Education, exploring justice-centered leadership practice across seven urban district contexts
School leadership case, targeted to Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, that illustrates how one exemplary leader leveraged justice work within a highly-marketized and competitive environment
Paper, targeted to Journal of Educational Administration, exploring school leaders’ experiences within marketized environments, such as their experiences of increased segregation, resource deprivation, and pressure
I anticipate I will continue to explore this topic in future research, with the goal to conduct research in additional, hyper-marketized districts (e.g., open enrollment districts).