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The purpose of this paper is to reconsider school improvement from the perspectives of community leaders who support urban schools in equitable ways.

This study employs the Delphi method to elicit feedback from community leaders.

Findings highlight how the community equity literacy leadership assessment’s (CELLA) constructs can be expanded to include essential knowledge and practices that improve schooling conditions for students.

This study extends the existing research on school improvement in two ways. First, this study reconsiders school improvement from the perspectives of community leaders who support urban schools in equitable ways. Second, and in doing so, this study examines how a panel of 16 “expert community leaders” offered feedback on the CELLA for principals, an emerging survey instrument to help educational leaders improve school and community conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the ongoing, iterative and empirical work to develop, test and revise the Community Equity Literacy Leadership Assessment (CELLA) for principals through several studies: a sorting study and expert panel survey review.

This study employs several survey development methods, including a sorting study and expert panel survey review.

The findings suggest that each study improved the CELLA’s items and provided useful learning for future testing cycles of inquiry.

Research suggests that principal leadership is a significant aspect of equitable and authentic school–family–community engagement. However, there is a paucity of theoretically grounded and psychometrically sound instruments to assess principals’ knowledge and skills in this area. To address this gap, the authors developed the CELLA for school leaders and their leadership teams.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of aspiring school leaders who utilized artmaking (in this case, photography, poetry, music, collage, and short films) through Microsoft MovieMaker as a means for addressing injustices within surrounding school communities. The paper aims to explore how aspiring school leaders understood contemporary curriculum issues within increasingly culturally diverse school communities in the USA.

This two‐year qualitative study embedded in grounded theory examined the experiences of aspiring school leaders who utilized artmaking (in this case short films through Microsoft MovieMaker) to examine contemporary curriculum issues within surrounding school communities. This study is conducted within the naturalistic tradition.

The significance of artmaking encourages participants to visually articulate the lived realities of disenfranchised populations. Participants engage in artmaking experience self‐transformation and a calling to encouraging human agency.

In the wake of addressing issues of social justice, the highly charged emotions associated with addressing such issues is evident in the range of emotions that surface including, anger, fear, intimidation, deep sorrow, resentment, joy, and others. Very little scholarship exists for aspiring school leaders who confront issues of social justice in relation to the intensity of emotions and their work.

In Arizona’s mature, market-based school system, we know little about how school leaders make meaning of school choice policies and programs on the ground. Using ethnographic methods, the author asked: How do school leaders in one Arizona district public school and in its surrounding community, which includes a growing number of high-profile and “high-performing” Education Management Organisation (EMO) charter schools, make meaning of school choice policies and programs? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The author analysed 18 months of qualitative fieldnotes that the author collected during participant observations and six semi-structured school leader interviews from both traditional district public schools in the area (n=4) and leaders from EMO charter schools (n=2).

School leaders’ decision-making processes were influenced by competitive pressures. However, perceptions of these pressures and leadership actions varied widely and were complicated by inclusive and exclusive social capital influences from stakeholders. District public school leaders felt pressure to package and sell schools in the marketplace, and charter leaders enjoyed the notion of markets and competition.

As market-based policies and practices become increasingly popular in the USA and internationally, a study that examines leaders’ behaviours and actions in a long-standing school choice system is timely and relevant.

This study uniquely highlights school leaders’ perceptions and actions in a deeply embedded education market, and provides data about strategies and behaviours as they occurred.

Schools in resource challenged communities require principal approaches that break patterns of low expectations and low student achievement. This study identifies Alabama’s “outlier” schools that have been consistently successful in attaining higher student outcomes than their neighboring schools despite their similar community conditions. Then, it describes the perspectives and practices of principals leading these outlier schools. The purpose of this paper is to discuss findings on principal leadership in five of Alabama's outlier schools.

In a sequential, explanatory mixed-methods design, the authors first use state administrative data to identify which Alabama schools had better results than their peers as evidenced by standardized testing between 2016 and 2020. Then, through semi-structured interviews, they examine the beliefs and approaches of five principals who are currently leading an outlier school. The frame of contextual leadership provides a deeper understanding of how these principals navigate successful schools in the midst of challenging community influences.

The evidence demonstrated that (1) community factors of low education, high unemployment, single-parent households and generational poverty are associated with considerably lower levels of student growth and achievement; (2) measured school and community factors do not explain student growth and achievement in these outlier schools; (3) outlier principals have a realistic view of their community’s challenges but focus on supporting students through a context sensitive, relational approach that emphasizes assets over limitations.

While research has attended to leadership in turnaround schools and effective schools, there is little literature on principals leading in positive outlier schools. This study contributes to the literature on school leadership in resource challenged contexts by identifying high performing, resource challenged schools and then showing the perspectives and practices of principals who lead in schools that have consistently achieved better than expected student outcomes. It extends the construct of “outlier leadership” in education and connects it to contextual leadership in schools.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of trust in a school community related to the leadership response to crisis.

This study was a multiple-source qualitative study of a single case of a PreK-12 international school called The Learning School.

The findings revealed the nature of how leadership influences and is influenced by context and community. These led to a discussion about two shifts, the focus on self to focus on others and the collective community, and a shift from a focus on self-preservation and protection to learning and growing together as a community. Communication, decision making, and collaboration in the community played a significant role in the community learning and growing from the crisis.

The study was limited by the nature of the topic, crisis in schools. The nature of crisis limits the ability to engage in inquiry before the crisis, and the inquiry was limited to the specific case that occurred in a unique context. The author proposes future cross-case research to develop an understanding of school and leader responses to crisis varies across individuals and contexts, and culture.

While there is a growing literature about trust, it is difficult to study schools in crisis due to the limitations of the topic and sensitivity of issues of crisis in schools. This study gives insight into the dynamics of leadership and trust in a school in crisis.

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound with mine, then come, let's work together”. These words of Lill Watson, an indigenous activist, frame the context for this article. The purpose of this research was to examine the historical evolution of “grassroots movement leadership” model and its incarnation in the present time. A corollary purpose focused on how this model can transform urban schools by focusing on “movement” efforts of one large urban school district that espouses the values of this form of leadership. As part of a larger reform effort, the district engaged students, parents, teachers, school leaders and communities in becoming equal partners in urban school reform in an effort to co‐create schools and communities that might lead all of us toward liberation and learning.

Theory and practice come together through the lens of three researchers who operate from a similar philosophical stance for educational transformation, best described in the words of grassroots leader Ella Baker, who said, “We are the people we have been waiting for”. Qualitative research procedures (i.e. interviews, field notes and observations) were used to generate data on a “movement model” for grassroots leadership. This model is best demonstrated in various youth‐oriented initiatives (i.e. Student Exhibits, Action‐Research Projects, Algebra Project) within a local urban school district. This model, influenced by Civil Rights legend Robert Moses, has implications for educational leadership and urban school reform and simultaneously grounds our scholarship and research in liberation epistemology.

It is argued that children are often the victims of ideas, structures, and actions that come to be seen by the majority of people as wholly natural, preordained, and working for their own good, when in fact they are constructed and transmitted by powerful minority interests to protect the status quo that serves those interest. The words of Ella Baker epitomize the authors' struggles to steer away from models of hierarchal leadership in education and stay connected to the practice of excavating community wisdom through the “Movement Model”.

This study bears a substantive argument for community leadership efforts that focus on “grassroots leadership”. It further fosters new insights and propositions for future research in the form of a “Movement Leadership Model”.

The purpose of this paper is to explore theoretical connections between educational leadership for social justice and support for immigration. The authors seek to identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for further study and improved practice.

This is a theoretical research paper that introduces, evaluates and expands two frameworks for understanding leadership and immigration.

Findings suggested that there is a need for educational leadership scholars to more purposefully investigate issues related to social justice and immigration.

This study offers a novel theoretical perspective on leadership, social justice and immigration.

The purpose of this study is to explore mathematics teachers' collaboration within their professional learning communities (PLCs), and to gain insight into how the teachers developed their collective efficacy through it to focus on improving student learning.

Using a qualitative approach, data were collected from three high-performing secondary schools, mainly through semi-structured in-depth interviews with the Heads of Mathematics Unit. For explication and triangulation purposes, focus group interviews with the mathematics teachers and students and document analysis were also conducted.

The findings indicate that PLCs were the vessel through which a culture of disciplined teacher collaboration was fostered. More importantly, this culture encouraged teachers to participate in reflective dialogues that became a driver for their learning, and eventually led to their changed professional practice for improved student learning. The collaborative setting within the PLCs allowed teachers to pool their resources, knowledge and individual expertise to identify their student learning focus, and administer and measure their student intervention strategies. This collaborative professional learning reduced professional isolation, and as a result, improved teachers' collective pursuit of professional growth to impact student outcomes.

The aim of this qualitative study was to provide a detailed description of the teachers' collaboration within their PLCs based on the researchers' interpretation of how the participants make sense of their PLC practices and experiences. Hence, findings are indicative, and not definitive. In addition, the Heads of the Mathematics Unit, and the mathematics teacher participants in this study illustrated salient aspects of subject subcultures, where their beliefs, norms and practices were non-generic, or specific only to their subject context. Therefore, the implications to practice were built from commonalities shared only among the mathematics units.

This is a study in a Malaysian context that provides empirical evidences that are concerned primarily with the process of teachers developing their collective efficacy through disciplined collaboration within their PLCs.

Character is at the core of leadership. Leaders with virtuous character provide benefit to their schools and communities. Whereas, leaders with character flaws create harm for themselves as well as their community. The ethical lapses among teachers, principals, and superintendents create an even larger issue when one considers the fiduciary trust placed in educators by the public. Character development requires behavioral change as well as knowledge acquisition. Incorporating behavioral change into university administrator preparation programs requires faculty to consider recent findings in neuroscience on how the brain learns and the incorporation of these findings into program design and instruction.