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The purpose of this paper is to focus on social justice issues identified by American principals. A research question that guided this qualitative study was: do educational leaders relate to the concept of leadership for social justice?

The standardized protocol for focus group discussions was based on Krueger and Casey's work on how to conduct effective focus group interviews. Each focus group carefully followed the protocol, which was designed to give voice to the informants and not to be led by the moderator in preconceived directions. This procedure provided a framework to maintain consistency in eliciting and collecting information but not leading participants to discuss social justice issues just to please the researchers.

This paper both confirmed that principals are concerned with social justice and identified that some principals do not explicitly discuss issues that relate to social justice. Principals who raised social justice issues felt that leaders should be courageous enough to make decisions that are best for children, even though they may not be popular.

Qualitative research such as this adds to the breadth and depth of human understanding, but findings cannot be generalized to any larger population.

The term social justice has become pervasive in US academic discussions, yet there has been little dialogue with practitioners and even less data examined concerning if the term has any relevance to practitioners. This paper explores the voices of practitioners in relation to a pervasive term in US academic discourse.

This study describes one university’s effective management process for identifying dispositions of pre‐service teacher candidates. Identification of specific dispositions was solicited from university professors, pre‐service teachers, practicing teachers, professors, and administrators through 221 surveys, and was analyzed through the Delphi method. To evaluate if the teachers at differing levels similarly valued identified dispositions (i.e. professors, pre‐service, practicing, elementary, high school) a Pearson chi‐square analysis was conducted. Findings from this analysis showed that there was not a significant difference between the dispositions valued by various groups. This led to the development of an instrument to measure and monitor the dispositions of pre‐service teachers. A monitoring system to provide managers with a process to assist pre‐service teachers in improving areas of weakness was then developed.