The article examines how zero tolerance policy is enacted in schools, and how the policy is supported by developments in technology, crime and prison policy, and social science theories of delinquency. The reseach is based on qualitative research and policy analysis, and has an interdisciplinary focus that would be of interest to educators, policymakers, and school administrators.

Major cities in the United States, unhappy with persistent achievement gaps between students of different races and socioeconomic backgrounds, now search for highly effective medicine men who will upgrade urban school productivity. These efforts stand in stark contrast to the first two hundred years of the Republic, when villages relied on local ministers, elders, or farmers with extra time in the winter to visit the schools, many of which operated for only a few months of the year.

This commentary argues that we must understand and respond to the emotional issues posed for students by violent school environments so that all students can begin to prepare for the academic challenges envisioned by the No Child Left Behind Act.

Study examines the relationship between pedagogy and classroom control in traditional and progressivist teaching practices. Based on study of current Israeli school reform program, I argue that this relationship has been inadequately addressed, both in theory and in practice.

This case study describes how one urban elementary school in a high-reform district and state has been able to develop strong connections with community businesses and organizations as part of its program of school, family, and community partnerships. The case study identifies four factors that allowed the school to build successful bridges to its community. These factors are: a) the school's commitment to learning; b) the principal's support and vision for community involvement; c) the school's receptivity and openness to community involvement; and d) the school's willingness to engage in two-way communication with potential community partners about their level and kind of involvement.

Through a narrative, participatory research process the voices and experiences of three bilingual high school students are presented and interpreted through a critical pedagogical lens.

Buffeted during the past 20 years by successive waves of educational reform, educational administration is more aware today than at any time in the field’s history of the complexities and challenges of public education, and of the importance of effective educational leadership to the enduring good health of that institution (Murphy & Louis, 1999).

This chapter seeks to map the contextual terrain facing contemporary educational leaders, noting six key interrelated features of the ever-shifting landscape: the political, the economic, the financial, the accountability, the demographic, and the staffing terrain.

This chapter consists of two main sections. The first section reviews what we know about the challenges facing leaders in highly accountable contexts and the nature of productive responses on their part. This review encompasses both theoretical and empirical literatures, and most of it is specifically focused on school-level leadership. While little evidence has been reported about district-level leadership in accountability-oriented contexts, such leadership appears to be central to success. The second main section of the chapter reports a case study of an exemplary district’s efforts to make the most of large-scale reform initiated in the state of Illinois.

I begin by reviewing the methods traditionally used to define the profession and its work. I suggest that these methods will not prove successful in reculturing school leadership and argue for an alternative method to locate an appropriate portal to the future. In so doing, I retrace the steps that led to a new perspective, one that is based on the powerful unifying concepts of social justice, democratic community, and school improvement. Second, using this alternative way of framing the profession, I present one framework for recasting the concept of leadership.

Our goal in this paper is not to undertake an exhaustive review of the literature on school improvement, but rather to frame or perhaps reframe this work. Specifically, we stand back from scholarship that falls under the school improvement rubric and develop a conceptual scaffold for thinking about this line of research and its relation to teaching and learning in schools.

What would it mean for democratic community to be the center for educational leadership in schools, and how would this choice re-culture the profession?

Researchers and leaders for social justice, then, seek to define the theories and practices of leadership that are vital to creating greater freedom, opportunity, and justice for all citizens—citizens who, through public education, are better able to participate in and sustain a free, civil, multicultural, and democratic society.

We begin with a brief historical review describing the evolution of teacher leadership since the early 1900s. Then we examine teacher research as a form of teacher leadership. We explore several models of distributive school leadership. Finally we consider self-managed teams as means of teacher leadership and substitutes for administrative leadership.

This chapter begins with an identification of how work roles have changed, and are changing, in the 21st century. This change is represented primarily by greater complexity in how work is performed. In light of this change, the remainder of the chapter focuses on the internal and external complexities that contribute to reshaping the principal’s role.

In this chapter, we seek answers by examining the discourse of the superintendency to try to determine what has shaped the role previously and what is likely to shape it in the future.

The chapter begins by examining the natural tensions that exist among groups, both lay and professional, that have different local, state, and national perspectives and responsibilities. It then explores the potential of lay volunteers in altering school culture for the better, and the role of laypeople in formally defined roles on school boards and advisory councils. The chapter concludes with a proposal for repositioning lay leadership to better meet the needs of our increasingly diverse public.

The organizing framework for this chapter is school improvement, democratic and collaborative community, and social justice and how educational leadership preparation programs can meet these collective challenges. Specifically, the authors discuss the needed content and instructional focus of preparation programs, as well as various preparation program design elements, such as program structure, field experiences, and faculty and students.

This chapter discusses the professional development of principals as it exists and as it might be. We begin by examining the problems and paradoxes traditionally associated with the professional development of principals. Next, we propose a new conceptual framework to enhance the continuous learning of school leaders.

To explore the gendered construction of educational management, two metaphors--mother and visionary--are deconstructed to expose gendered assumptions in these alternative images of leadership.

The author describes his own mixed feelings regarding The American School Superintendent: Leading in an Age of Pressure.

How do values of "learner-centeredness" get played out in schools? How do leaders work within their schools to build community? How are norms and structures built and sustained that keep a school focused on students' lives and their learning? What does it take to build commitment and motivate teachers to become an inquiring community? How do leaders think about and act on their own individual interests and concerns while dealing with the collective work of running a school? How do they cope with the distractions of daily problems as they struggle to improve the quality of life and learning in the school? To find answers to these questions we held individual and group interviews with both the current and past school directors, made a series of observations in their schools, and studied the documents produced by the schools. These research efforts provided us with an opportunity to learn not only about issues of leadership, but also about how these schools were created, and how norms, values, and practices have been maintained through successions of leadership and variations in style.

Thomas Edison Elementary School in Sacramento is a prototype of the California challenge. Edison is one of fifty-one elementary schools among the eighty-nine schools in the San Juan Unified School District. Edison's early success in meeting its challenges are due to a major transformation of the school that has been undertaken by Edison staff, students, and parents. Edison is one of the growing number of schools that are following the Accelerated Schools process to bring all students into the academic mainstream by the end of their elementary schooling and to give them further support at the middle and secondary levels.

Despite the failure of SDM to live up to its hype, there is something intrinsically appealing about the notion that school administration derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, at least the adult governed. At a time when industry has moved toward greater worker participation in management, it seems only fair that teachers, too, have a say in conditions that affect their work lives.

The purpose.of this chapter is to show how teacher leadership emerges, what teacher leaders do, and how teacher leaders think about themselves as they take on new roles. Data for the study were collected through written responses to questions, interviews, observation, and analysis of documents.

In this chapter I report on Aguilar Elementary School's rather remarkable story, using numerous quotations taken from taped records of my group sessions with the faculty. Then I reexamine teacher leadership through the lens of Aguilar; its case offers fresh insights on the problems and possibilities for educational change.

In this volume, the authors wrestle with the changing contexts that surround the work, the roles, and the responsibilities of educational leaders for the next generation of children and youth. What we have learned and are learning about children, their families, their teachers, their schools, their communities, and about how children learn and how they are taught is important for how we plan to organize and administer tomorrow's schools. The focus is on how educational leadership relates to ideological, institutional, and individual transformations that occur in abundance as society evolves. It is a volume where the authors audit some dimensions of the human condition relevant to teaching and learning and extract meaning and significance for those who expect to lead and administer our schools.

I am interested in how images of loss, belonging, and becoming are shaping social policy and school reform in late twentieth-century America. In particular, I want to explore what challenges the collusion and collision of these three themes place on educational leaders for tomorrow's schools. Thus, this chapter is organized as follows: (a) a critical explanation and examination of loss, belonging, and becoming as central themes in human development and social policy for public education; (b) a look at the implications of these three themes on how we govern, administer, and operate public schools; and (c) a discussion of how recent social policy and school reform responses to loss, belonging, and becoming relate to the sociohistorical pursuit of educational equity and excellence.