Minoritized communities throughout the world engage in spaces of educational decision-making to advocate for equity-oriented policies. In this article, we explore such advocacy at the local level in school board meetings in the United States. Specifically, we examine school board meeting rules from meetings featuring the advocacy of mainly Black…

Boards in higher education organizations (HEOs) play multiple roles. While they govern, boards are also expected to embed HEOs in society. Indeed, recent higher education reforms in Europe have emphasized the embedding role of HEO boards more than their governing role. But, although these reforms are widespread, we still know little about the ways…

School librarians support access to information and resources in the school library. In a time of misinformation and fake news, access to accurate and timely information is key. School librarians work to serve the needs of all students in every learning environment including alternative, remote, and face to face. At the same time, school…

This study explored the role of school superintendents and board of education trustees in closing the achievement gap, which can be defined as "the disparity in academic performance between groups of students" (Muhammad, 2015, p. 14). District leaders (superintendents and school boards) set the priorities and policies in their school…

The purpose of the present study was to explore the nature of hiring a public school superintendent in a context, which challenged school board trustees to select a particular type of leader. The researcher's intent was to study three former school board trustees who were initially involved in what they considered a complex change process,…

This article describes what it means to be a comprehensive teachers union, one that integrates industrial unionism, professional unionism, and social justice unionism, providing a historical context for this evolution. The author relates his own journey in becoming a union organizer and then in building public spaces for teachers to find their…

The number of students manifesting learning, behavior, and emotional problems far outstrips the ways schools deal with these matters. As school board members and administrators know, existing programs, services, and special initiatives tend to be fragmented and often engender fights over turf and counterproductive competition for sparse resources.…

This article examines how school trustees (i.e., elected school-board members) conceive of their own leadership role and work with other levels of leadership within school districts. In a mixed-method study, a total of 121 school trustees were surveyed and 12 were interviewed across Ontario. A framework is proposed to better understand the tension…

The number of international schools is growing rapidly and existing data points to great diversity of their governance structure. The nature of hybrid governance, in which a board comprises both elected and appointed governors, was investigated through a case study of an international school in western Europe and triangulated with interviews with…

According to the California School Board Association, the role of the school board is to ensure that school districts are responsive to the values, beliefs, and priorities of their communities. Even though board members have a complex list of roles and responsibilities, CSBA assigns five primary major responsibilities: setting direction,…

Our study amplifies the voices of Asian educators undergoing career advancement in a large district school board with a significant Asian student population in Ontario, Canada. Our data sources included survey results from 234 Asian educators and focus group transcriptions from 83 Asian educators. Grounded in Asian critical race theory…

While U.S. voters delivered a significant change in the 2024 federal elections, they opted for steady leadership at the state level. No state board of education shifted in partisan control, and only five seats saw a shift in political party out of 27 races that were contested in the general election. This policy update looks at the results of…

The purpose of this article is to examine the critical components to successfully serving on a school board or leadership roles, as a member of the Latino(a) community. According to a 2010 national school board survey, only 3% of the 900 board respondents identified as Latino(a) compared with almost 80% who identified as White. The first author…

Amy Yarborough, a veteran teacher and curriculum resource leader in a rural district in Virginia, facilitates a professional learning community focused on social justice and equity-oriented instructional practices. When allegations of teaching critical race theory are reported via the state's email tip line and community social media groups, Amy…

Despite their growing presence, student members of school boards remain relatively neglected in extant research. Drawing on notions of situational and institutional power, this study examines how seven U.S. student members of the board enacted their roles during the challenging 2020-21 school year and how adults responded. Findings highlight not…