The primary purpose of this article is to describe how school administrators operating from an ethic of care conduct their daily practice and how that practice differs from administrators operating solely from traditional leadership models. Via a secondary analysis of data that were gathered in our previous work with career assistant principals, we show how the practices of these assistant principals do not fit traditional administrative theories. Instead, the ethic of care was evident. Because it is difficult to separate administrative practice from organizational structure and professional norms, a secondary purpose of this article is to identify how the demands of both the organization and the profession interfere with enactment of caring.

The high dropout rate in urban high schools, particularly among poor and racial minority youth, continues to be a vexing problem confronting public education in the U.S. Although much research and many prevention efforts have been devoted to this issue, dropout rates continue to soar. In this article, the authors present a case study analysis of an urban high school that was attempting to address the high dropout rate. Instead of focusing on social and academic risk factors that assume the problem lies in the student and his or her family, we examine how the culture and structure of the high school influenced teachers' instructional practices and resulted in contradictory beliefs about students and their families. These contradictions between school culture and structure, instruction, and many students' home culture contributed to the school's high dropout rate.

In this article, we compare two North Carolina public schools that were simultaneously implementing reforms with seemingly different orientations, the A+ School Program and the ABCs of Public Education. We use the literature on caring and critiques of bureaucracy as a framework to look at the concurrent implementation of two educational reforms in North Carolina. We discuss data from a 5 year longitudinal study and critique our own assumptions as we develop portraits of schools that are both situated and complex. We do this to explore the question: In what ways does educational reform actually change educational practice? We develop a framework that articulates a critique of bureaucracy from the standpoint of caring, locate the culture of each school within the theoretical framework, and analyze how the culture of schools affects the implementation of educational reform. We conclude that reform is deeply cultural and that ethnographic methods are essential to understanding educational reform efforts.

The policy issues surrounding implementation of special education programs are multiple, complex, and ever-changing. What strategies, coursework, and certification requirements do principals need to pro vide effective instructional leadership to special education programs in site-based managed schools?

Weick's theory of sensemaking is used to analyze findings from a qualitative study of the implementation of a district-initiated adolescent intervention literacy course in two urban secondary schools. The authors concluded that implementation of the literacy course was hampered because district administrators, building leaders, teachers, and students all constructed multiple meanings of the course's purpose and priority within the district. Teachers expected to implement the initiative constructed their identities as Language Arts and English teachers and did not see themselves as literacy specialists.

In this paper, we critique the study of school leadership for its normative, singular, and evolutionary tendencies. Through an empirical study of leadership we offer an approach that suggests new possibilities for the field. Through the use of a qualitative, grounded theory methodology, we developed profiles of principals that illustrate a variety of different leadership types. We describe the types of leadership that teachers and principals negotiated in the contexts of reform and principal succession. Our exploratory analysis suggests that different types of leaders were considered effective in different settings. The notion that there are many effective types of leadership distinguishes our work from much of the leadership literature, which tends to maintain that one kind of leadership is effective in any setting.

In this paper, we consider Tracy’s proposal for universal criteria to judge the goodness of qualitative studies, and we explore her criteria by applying them to our own work. As a test of Tracy’s claim to universality, we situate her ideas within a womanist caring framework, using it as an exemplar to theorize deliberately Tracy’s criteria. We do this to evaluate just how theoretically limber Tracy’s criteria actually are. We conclude that Tracy’s criteria are useful because they are universal but not fixed and we build on her thinking to foreground ethics as an overarching framework for criteria rather than a standalone category. We highlight the urgency of returning the debate about criteria for qualitative work to the qualitative research community during a period when the legitimacy of qualitative work is under assault.

This article examines the legacy of segregation and desegregation in the town of Parsons, Kansas. We argue that school desegregation, the goal of which was to increase access and equalize educational opportunities for African Americans, did not have that desired affect. Fifty years after the closing of the all-Black Douglass School, Parsons' citizens had not openly acknowledged the effects this event had on the African American community. Three generations later, African American student achievement still lags behind that of White students. These unresolved issues have contributed to a number of losses in the Black community, including loss of Black teachers and loss of talented Black young people. We use theories of social capital and cultural capital as a framework to illustrate how White, middle class students had greater access to school resources, and to identify the social and cultural resources within the Black community that the school district could build upon, such as strong leadership and a sense of resolve and resiliency.