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Secondary school leadership provides multiple challenges in terms of the diversity of tasks, multiple demands on time, balancing communities and attending to instructional programming. An emerging scholarship suggests the importance of a distributed instructional leadership approach to high school leadership. However, what has been less thoroughly explored is how secondary school leadership is distributed leaders across a school district. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social structure and positions urban high school principals occupy in the district system.

This study was conducted in one urban fringe public school district in southern California serving diverse students populations. The data were collected at three time points starting in Fall 2012 and ending in Fall 2014 from a district-wide leadership team including all central office and site leaders. All leaders were asked to assess their social relations and perception of innovative climate. The data were analyzed through a series of social network indices to examine the structure and positions of high school principals.

Results indicate that over time high school principals have decreasing access to social capital and are typically occupying peripheral positions in the social network. The high school principals’ perception of innovative climate across the district decreases over time.

This longitudinal study, one of the first to examine high school principals from a network perspective, sheds new light on the social infrastructure of urban high school principals and what this might mean for efforts at improvement.

This study aims to draw on elements of diffusion theory to understand leadership reform. Many diffusion studies examine the spread of an innovation across social units but the objective is to examine diffusion of a collective leadership model within school units. Specifically, the strength of reform diffusion is tested to account for differences in instructional capacity and to explain the spread of leadership reform within Title I elementary schools.

A mixed method design was used to understand how social factors facilitated the diffusion of leadership reform, and to test for a diffusion effect. Qualitative data were derived from interviews, field notes, observations, and documents using a grounded theory approach. Open and axial coding techniques were used to develop coherent categories of major and minor themes. Quantitative data were hierarchical, with teachers and students nested in schools. A random‐intercepts, means‐as‐outcomes model was used to test for a diffusion effect on instructional capacity.

Strong principal leadership, a commitment to collective responsibility and shared influence, frequent and open communication, and time to build capacity were conditions that supported diffusion of the leadership model. Diffusion of the leadership model mattered for instructional capacity. Each indicator of instructional capacity was more prevalent in schools that had diffused the leadership model to the mentoring and sustaining stages.

The study is limited to one type of reform and 36 Title I elementary schools from an urban and urban fringe district in a Southwestern state. Further, the study does not delve deeply into facilitative factors within various stages of the diffusion processes. It focuses on social factors that enable schools to bring the leadership reform to scale.

Framing reform as an intervention to be implemented in schools, rather than a social process that institutionalizes planned change, trivializes the actual complexity of transforming practice. Regular interactions among school members around the school's vision, coupled with leadership and time, contributed to reform diffusion and improved instructional capacity in this study. Reform diffusion, a process that takes time, strong leadership, and regular social interactions, needs to be given more consideration as a valuable process to improve school performance.

The findings suggest that facilitative factors of diffusion can advance reform and improve capacity simultaneously. Successful reforms, defined as ones that disrupt traditional cultures and achieve goals, evolve through developmental stages that eventually lead to a changed culture. The rate of this evolution may vary, but the temporal process of establishing a shared understanding; designing, experimenting, and developing new tools; fostering expertise; and forming strong social networks are foundational supports for authentic and sustainable reform.

Reform diffusion offers an alternative framework to better understand the institutionalization of planned change in schools. The findings, while limited to elementary schools engaged in leadership reform, provide support for studying reform as an holistic social process that encompasses the design, adoption, implementation, and institutionalization of planned change.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the district effectiveness literature. It begins by summarizing the school effectiveness research, the correlates of effective schools, and the conceptual and methodological characteristics of this field. It then describes the findings from a review of 50 studies of district effectiveness, the most frequently identified correlates of effective districts, and the conceptual and methodological features of this research. From there, it compares and contrasts the two fields, paying attention to the ways in which they frame notions of success, purposes of education, the contextualized nature of school performance, and theoretical explanations for student success.

Data sources for this literature review included 50 primary documents on district effectiveness. The studies were bound to those that presented the original results from investigations of the relationship between district‐level policies, routines, behaviors, or other characteristics and classroom‐level outcomes.

Several themes run through the literature on district effectiveness. These include findings that standards‐aligned curricula, coherent organizational structures, strong instructional leadership, frequent monitoring and evaluation, and focused professional learning lead to higher test scores. Most of these investigations are framed from technical perspectives that explore the relationship between organizational regulations and improved test performance. Less common are inquiries about the socio‐political and normative forces that shape districts’ improvement experiences. One consequence of this technical focus is that the field of district effectiveness has come to share several of the conceptual and methodological properties that characterized the former school‐level research.

The article concludes by discussing the implications for the growing volume of district‐level research on educational leadership, district improvement, and educational equity.

This article details the ways in which a sharp focus on questions of what works in the district effectiveness literature has deepened researchers’ and practitioners’ knowledge of the specific mechanisms that may produce more desirable results in test performance, yet these questions alone, decoupled from corresponding inquiries about the complex, highly contextualized character of higher or lower scoring districts, leave researchers and practitioners vulnerable to the same scholarly and practical pitfalls of their predecessors.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the relationship between business and education and thereby offer a research agenda for examining the influence of business on education. Educational research has given relatively limited attention to the impact of business on education.

This paper describes a theoretical framework drawn from organization theory that identifies five types of influence of business on education. The emerging literature on business‐school relations is accessed not to present a comprehensive review of research on the impact of business on education, but rather to identify issues regarding the impact of business on education that bear the scrutiny of researchers and educational and business leaders and policy makers.

The types of influence include business consuming the outputs of schools, supplying inputs to schools, competing with public schools for students and state funding, shaping educational policy at various levels, and distributing wealth in ways that indirectly affects education.

This paper identifies an issue that requires further research and policy attention and offers a conceptual framework and research agenda.

The purpose of this study is to understand how superintendents leading large, high-profile and politically complex urban districts make sense of their district–community context and advocate for issues of equity.

This qualitative multi-case study took place over the 2017–18 school year and involved superintendents leading large urban districts in the United States, with data derived from semi-structured interviews, observations of school board and other public meetings and document collection.

This article describes how superintendents' sensemaking around equity was situated within the context of interactions with district board members and other stakeholder groups within their communities and influenced by their sense of professional vulnerability of public advocacy. Leaders often felt the need to attenuate their personal sense of equity and act strategically when framing related policies or practices. This study highlights examples by which superintendents were forced to confront instances when community support and prioritization of equity issues did not match their own and subsequently struggled to make sense of how to frame issues that were not in alignment.

Despite their positional authority, relatively little attention has been paid to the experience of school district superintendents in fostering equity. This study provides practical examples of superintendents making sense of complex leadership scenarios and taking strategic action to promote equity in authentic circumstances and has important implications for research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of both the school counselor and the school psychologist in preparing students in urban school settings for college and/or the workforce. Throughout this paper, the authors discuss how collaboration is critical to ensuring students are successful at every school level (e.g., elementary, middle and high) to avail themselves of various postsecondary opportunities upon graduation. The authors give recommendations for practice and future research to implement and increase knowledge around collaboration between school counselors and school psychologists in preparing students in urban school settings to be college- and career-ready.

This is a conceptual paper on school counselors and school psychologists using the Eight Components of College and Career Readiness Framework to collaborate on preparing students for postsecondary options.

With support from key stakeholders like administrators, teachers and parents, school counselors and school psychologists can work collaboratively to increase students’ college and career readiness. For example, school counselors and school psychologists may start by creating and implementing a needs assessment, as it relates to the developmental tasks of students (i.e. self-regulation, self-efficacy, self-competence) that must be negotiated to ensure college and career readiness. School counselors and school psychologists should also examine out-of-school suspension, expulsion, school arrest and disciplinary referral data (Carter et al., 2014).

Collaboration around college and career readiness is important to the academic success and future of students in urban school settings. School counselors and school psychologists complement each other in preparing students for college and the workforce because their training has prepared both for addressing academic needs, assessment, mental health issues, career development, behavioral concerns and social–emotional needs of students (American School Counselor Association, 2012; National Association of School Psychologists, 2014). Further, school counselors and school psychologists are in a pivotal position to create a college-going culture by using evidence-based activities, curricula and practices.

Reflecting on professional learning networks (PLN) in rural and equity-seeking spaces, the authors foreground the importance of “relational space” in studying PLNs in this commentary. The authors argue that while the complexity of taking a relational approach is challenging, it offers an important and necessary perspective, one which is often implicit in the studies featured in this book but not explicitly considered. The chapter is organized around three broad concepts from social network theory – boundedness, connectedness, and mutuality – which serve as starting points for shifting our gaze from formal system structures to more deeply interrogating the informal relational spaces within PLNs. The authors conclude with a call to make use of network theory and methods on their own, and in complement to other literatures, to do so.

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.