The many pressures facing school districts -- academic and social-emotional recovery from the pandemic, educator shortages, fragmented funding streams and programs, and more -- can easily overwhelm educators and distract from the core work of instruction and student learning. Locally elected school boards, the governing bodies responsible for…

For this comprehensive literature review, we begin by framing our study with a scholarship review of the theorizing of place-based leadership and rural administrators. We then synthesize research on the practice and experiences of district administrators, including superintendents, school boards, and other ancillary leaders. We identify multiple…

As school board meetings are integral sites of local education policymaking, scholars must consider how structural racism manifests in these spaces across various district contexts. We examine how racialized institutional logics undergird the interactions between majority-Black district leadership and a local Black community during school board…

Media reports suggest that parent frustration with COVID school policies and the growing politicization of education have increased community engagement with local public schools. However, there is no evidence to date on whether these factors have translated into greater engagement at the ballot box. This paper uses a novel data set to explore how…

The school district superintendency is one of the most challenging occupations within public education today and is characterized by high turnover rates (Yates & De Jong, 2018). At times, a public school superintendent experiences difficulties leading to their departure. Examples of such difficulties that require strong leadership skills are…

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to explore community engagement experiences as perceived by board members, the superintendent, and community members in a high-performing school district in North Texas. Interviews with ten participants (five current school board members, one past school board member, one district superintendent, and…

For decades, Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) has blatantly disregarded and ostracized Black caregivers and community members who have attempted to address concerns about the educational experience of Black students. The only moderately successful strategy was political activism led by Dr. Barbara Sizemore in the 1970s to secure a board majority,…

Democratically elected school boards in the United States play a crucial role in school governance because they enable community voice in educational practices and programs. Research on locally controlled boards finds they can be undemocratic and unproductive. However, little research has been conducted in rural or small towns, where local control…

This article examines how school boards in New Jersey navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, which also coincided with the national trauma and reactions related to the George Floyd murder and subsequent backlash. The politicization of issues during that first year of the pandemic foreshadowed profound changes in the world of many school boards in New…

Media reports suggest that parent frustration with COVID school policies and the growing politicization of education have increased community engagement with local public schools. However, there is no evidence to date on whether these factors have translated into greater engagement at the ballot box. This paper uses a novel data set to explore how…

Purpose: In the wake of school board protests nationwide, it is essential for educational leaders, policymakers, and researchers to understand locally controlled educational governance. The stability of educational districts depends on superintendents navigating relationships with their school boards, yet little research exists that addresses…

Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Whilst pervasive in policy documents, however, discourses surrounding 'parent engagement' are often elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that shape policy enactments in schools. In this paper, we…

The advent of social media has, in many ways, changed the way people communicate with one another as it has added a real-time component and multiple platforms from which people can communicate. School districts are not exempt from the evolution of communication into the digital realm. Districts have an obligation to maximize their home-school…

This qualitative multiple case study is a follow-up to a study completed in 2007 that examined characteristics of rural school districts experiencing a high rate of superintendent turnover. The original study design incorporated extensive interviews with participants across four rural school districts; triangulating interview results with…

Research has shown that effective support systems are key to an educational CEO for success and tenure in the position. This qualitative secondary analysis (QSA) of women educational CEOs from the United States and Canada allowed for the reexamination of interviews from 37 participants focused on the importance of support systems. Findings…