Purpose: Building on research in educational leadership, dual language leadership, and leader identity development, this study examines how principals of schools with dual language immersion (DLI) strands perceive and enact their leadership roles and identities. As DLI strands proliferate in schools and districts, this research contributes to…

Purpose: This study explores how school principals can effectively integrate instructional leadership with social justice leadership, recognizing their dual roles in promoting academic excellence and fostering a socially just school environment. Research Methods: Participants in this qualitative study were 32 principals from elementary schools in…

Purpose: A growing number of school districts have recently added a position to the superintendent's cabinet, often titled chief equity officer. While the chief equity officer position is still in its early stages, we have an opportunity to examine insights from this work in the higher education context--both to support the adoption and…

Purpose: We examine the ways state education agency (SEA) and local education agency (LEA) leaders interpret and use educational policy to guide the provision of services for multilingual students classified as English learners (ELs) in their contexts. Our inquiry focuses on the external factors leaders describe that either enable or constrain…

Purpose: School leaders become arbiters of educational opportunity by shaping how policies are implemented within their buildings. Yet the role that school leaders play in enacting policies designed to expand equity for historically marginalized groups of students such as English learners (ELs) has received little attention in the research…

Purpose: This study analyzed leadership structures, processes, and practices that have enabled and constrained an ambitious career and college readiness reform within an urban school district. It was designed to discern how leaders worked across cross-sector boundaries to support district-wide high school career academy implementation. Research…

Purpose: A common strategy used in school improvement efforts is a mandated process of formal planning, yet little is known about the quality of plans or the relationship between plan quality and implementation. This mixed-methods article investigates plan quality, factors associated with plan quality, and the relationship between plan quality and…

Purpose: This article seeks to enhance our understanding of the ever-present challenge of developing organizational capacity to implement complex education reform initiatives. We analyze the strategies in one large metropolitan education system used to address the district-level and site-level capacity challenges that surfaced as they implemented…

Purpose: Educator evaluation systems have recently undergone scrutiny and reform, and district and school leaders play a key role in interpreting and enacting these systems. This article uses framing theory to understand district leaders' interpretation and advancement of a state's new educator evaluation policy. Research Methods: The article…

Purpose: New teacher evaluation systems have expanded the role of principals as instructional leaders, but little is known about principals' ability to promote teacher development through the evaluation process. We conducted a case study of principals' perspectives on evaluation and their experiences implementing observation and feedback cycles to…

Purpose: This multiple case study investigated district leaders' orientations and strategies as their elementary schools proceeded with state-mandated implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). We identified differences between schools achieving above-predicted outcomes on state CCSS assessments ("odds-beaters") and…

Purpose: Researchers and scholars have called for greater attention to collaboration among and between educational leaders in districtwide reform. This work underlines the important social aspect of such collaboration and further investigates the type of professional interaction among/between district and school leaders particularly around the…

Purpose: This study examines the outcomes of one regional intermediate school district's effort to promote literacy coach role implementation in its 20 constituent districts. The findings from this study provide information about the kinds of district-level contexts that influenced literacy coach role implementation and how those contexts were…

Purpose: This study tests key constructs of sociocultural and organizational learning theories with quantitative methods to better understand the nature and impact of district and school leadership and actions on the quality of programs of family and community involvement. Research Design: Survey data from a "nested" sample of 24 districts and 407…

Purpose: Coburn's (2003) multidimensional conception of scale includes four interrelated dimensions--depth, sustainability, spread, and ownership--that provide a framework to understand scale at both the school and district levels. This study was conducted to understand how reform leaders in four districts implementing the National Network of…