As a result of inter- and intranational migrations, urban schools in early 21st-century Western nations serve more ethnoculturally diverse populations than ever before. The impact of global events resonates in these schools at the local community level. In this article I argue for the administrative fusion of local and global perspectives, a…

A growing body of literature has highlighted the affordances of distributive forms of instructional leadership as a means to broaden and deepen instructional leadership capacity within schools. Yet, specifically how the capabilities of such key leaders as high school department chairs can be fostered to realize enhanced instructional capacity…

Scholarship on parent-principal relationships often ignores how some parental involvement can create challenges for school leaders. We analyze parent-principal relationships at an urban public K-8 school over a 30-year period, exploring how three different principals "managed" parental involvement. Our analysis reveals how these…

The purpose of this study was to learn whether focusing on strengths through appreciative inquiry would be related to measurable changes in school climate and trust within a small urban school district. The district studied was a beleaguered, underperforming school district in the Midwest Rust Belt. Through an appreciative inquiry initiative, the…

The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education is a 360-degree assessment of the effectiveness of principals' learning-centered leadership behaviors. In this report, we present results from a differential item functioning (DIF) study of the assessment. Using data from a national field trial, we searched for evidence of DIF on school level,…

This article problematizes conventional school-family partnerships, as geared toward narrow school agendas or mandates for collaboration, and documents efforts to lead more authentic partnerships as part of socially just urban schools. Just as meaningful parent involvement needs to go "beyond the bake sale," so, too, must leadership for…

Influential texts have long identified principals as being essential to school success. Accordingly, high expectations and pressures have attended the principalship and affected the professionals who occupy it. This exploration asked three interrelated questions: What pressures have urban school principals typically faced, in the past and today?…

This article presents the findings of a qualitative study of four middle school principals in one urban school district. It focuses on principals' almost exclusively negative descriptions of the families and communities served by their schools. Whereas much previous writing on this topic has attributed such deficit attitudes to a few bad-thinking…

This article presents a critical discussion of the implications of allocating the most experienced and skilled teachers in schools to teacher leadership positions. Placing such teachers in leadership positions supports school improvement initiatives, but it can also pull valuable teaching resources from the classroom. The article examines this…

As informed by scholarship on transformative leadership, cultural work in educational leadership, and preK-20 collaborations, this article draws from a qualitative research project between a university that is a Hispanic-serving institution and an elementary school located in a Latino/a area. We examine the perspectives of a Latino principal and a…

This study evaluated the predictive validity of two preemployment screening devices--the Urban Teacher Perceiver Interview and the Academic Skills Assessment portion of the Praxis Series test--as used by an urban high-need and hard-to-staff school district. Specifically, we compared predictor scores with subsequent teacher assessment scores…

This article highlights the boundary crossing and brokering work of two instructional coaches in one Washington State urban district. A distributed leadership frame helps foreground how the coaches, based in the central office, exercised instructional leadership across the district. This inquiry contributes to emerging pictures of the kinds of…

Leadership continues to be a central focus for research in educational administration. Until recently, many studies about leadership have been based largely on the experiences of white males and interpreted based on the structural-functionalist perspective. In this paper the writer explores the phenomenon of leadership through the eyes and…

Parent involvement has increasingly been mandated as a key component of school reform, and school-community relations courses (as well as standards for administrators) call for collaborating with diverse families and communities. Yet the role of school leaders in engaging parents is underdeveloped in the literature and in preparation programs. How…

Beginning teachers continue to exit the classroom in alarming numbers, despite numerous recruitment and retention strategies. High teacher turnover rates result in a deficit of quality teachers and instruction; a loss of continuity and commitment; and time, attention, and funds devoted to recruitment versus support. The purpose of this empirical…