In this action research study, I explored and developed a means to address the challenge of developing, supporting, and retaining effective elementary school principals skilled in instructional leadership and serving in historically marginalized communities. Evidence from the research literature and earlier action research cycles indicated…

Twelve years after passage of No Child Left Behind, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report on 510,000 fifteen year-olds in 65 countries ranked the U. S. 31st in math, 24th in science, and 21st in literacy. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan commenting on the PISA report said that the brutal truth must serve as a…

Shared governance has been a key historical characteristic of higher education although this form of governance has come under increased pressure in recent decades. It is often argued that shared governance is less relevant for tackling the challenges related to a more dynamic environment of the sector. This paper discusses underlying premises for…

Educators in the state of California have struggled to reduce the number of minorities being suspended and expelled annually and significantly improve overall school climate and culture. To address this area of improvement, educators have begun to turn to a proactive approach to improve overall school climate and culture at their sites by…

The purpose of this paper was to test the relationship between principal leadership and teacher collaboration around instructional improvement to determine whether these measures were statistically related and whether, together, they were associated with academic achievement in elementary schools. Data were obtained from 1,600 teachers in 96…

This study was originally designed to explore the impact of a distributed approach to developing curriculum leadership among schoolteachers. Previous papers have focused on reporting evidence of teacher learning in the process of engaging teachers in various types of curriculum decision-making in an innovation project based on interview data. This…

The purpose of this study was to explore teacher leaders' and principals' perceptions of instructional leadership in a shared context. The multi-stage multiple-case study examined roles and relationships of teacher leaders and principal teams across four schools within a Midwestern urban school district engaging in what has been identified in…

This paper examines the impact of implementing democratic school leadership via advisory school councils in Philippine public secondary schools. Through an experiment with empirical surveys and interviews, this study reveals that the experimental group had higher levels of commitment, empowerment and trust compared with the control group after one…

Research suggests that school reform initiatives have had minimal success in engendering systemic instructional improvement in schools. Within this evaluative context, this paper explores the means through which the paradigm of thinking about school instruction dominant in the profession (that is, Hirsch's "thoughtworld") potentially…

To broaden the scope of effective schools research by including change processes and a wider unit of study, this project investigated three Georgia school districts demonstrating improvements in student achievement for three consecutive years. Research identified these elements: (1) the sequence and influence of events, factors, and people…