Over the past two decades, colleges of education along with a number of national organizations and specialized professional associations have sought to improve educational administration programs through the incorporation of a broad policy framework designed to develop socially just leaders. Central to the growth of these new leaders is a commitment to acknowledge and embrace difference and to create educational spaces within which all children can learn. As the notion of social justice within education has been evolving, certain students, particularly those with disabilities, have been railing against persistent inequities within schools. Special education has emerged as one of the most litigious issues that school leaders must confront in their daily practice. Nevertheless, content related to special education and special education law has been a long neglected area within university-based administrator preparation programs and has been strangely absent in conversations relevant to the creation of administrator preparation programs that embrace a social justice model of leadership. Beginning with the current literature base of social justice and leadership preparation in special education and special education law, and using the recently revised Educational Leadership Constituents Council Advanced Programs in Educational Leadership Standards for building-level administrators for context, this article proposes an imperative to include curriculum content and leadership training that embraces and honors the inclusion of students in K-12 special education programs and enables building-level administrators to fulfill their role as socially just leaders.

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A mainstay in NCLB and the Obama administration education plan is turning around low-performing schools. This study utilized surveys and interviews with school leaders from four turnaround urban high schools in Texas to understand student outcomes before and after school restructuring and reconstitution. Although some organizational changes were apparent; overall, respondents cited rapidly changing technical strategies and haphazard adjustments from external sources as a great challenge. Reconstitution also magnified challenges that existed before and after restructuring efforts. Most importantly, the evidence suggests that school reconstitution did not immediately improve student achievement, impact grade retention and decrease student dropout in the study schools.

The Every Student Succeeds Act redefines the priorities of our nation’s education system. Prior to its passage, turnaround strategies advanced solutions for low-performing schools. Research literature examining how these reforms impacted the schooling experiences of students attending these schools is lacking. We present the results of a qualitative case study of a reconstituted urban school in the Southwest United States, providing the perspectives of 10 students with dis/abilities and the effects accountability reform efforts had on their high school experience. Three expressed needs and desires were identified: (a) a positive school identity, (b) stability, and (c) to be recognized and heard.

While teacher quality is recognized as a critical component in school reform and the pursuit of new teacher evaluation systems has gained national attention, the question of whether proposed teacher assessment models recognize and account for the unique roles and responsibilities of special education teachers has gone largely unnoticed. The purpose of this article is to (a) provide a review of current efforts to reform practices in teacher assessment, (b) describe recommendations for emerging teacher evaluation systems that accurately distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers, and (c) consider the difficulties of implementing these reform measures in the evaluation of teachers who serve students with disabilities. Important consideration is given to understanding the unique roles and responsibilities of the special educator, as well as the use of observation protocols to evaluate instructional practices in the general and special education setting. In addition, this article elucidates the difficulties of incorporating valid measures of student performance as a component of the teacher evaluation process for special education teachers. A summary of recommendations for policy makers serves as the conclusion.