Pressure for increased school accountability is a distinctive hallmark of the present period of educational reform. Accountability, as presently defined in state and local educational policy, includes four major ideas: the school is the basic unit for the delivery of education and hence the primary place where teachers and administrators are held to account; schools are primarily accountable for student performance, generally defined as measured achievement on tests in basic academic subjects; school-site student performance is evaluated against externally-set standards that define acceptable levels of student achievement as mandated by states or localities; and evaluation of school performance is typically accompanied by a system of rewards, penalties, and intervention strategies targeted at rewarding successful schools and remediating or closing lowperforming schools (Ladd, 1996). These accountability policies are typically directed toward individual schools or teachers, and increasingly, students, as in Texas, New York, Virginia, and Florida where exit exams or proficiency requirements are central to educational reform policies. Coupled with these new accountability systems, states and localities often are pursuing policies such as charter schools and choice programs that move schools outside the existing bureaucratic structure and are intended to sharpen the focus on academic quality and student performance. Growing political and fiscal pressure on schools lies behind this conception of accountability. The political pressure stems from the increasing visibility of school performance as a policy issue at the state and local levels and the increasing capacity of states and localities to measure and monitor student achievement. The fiscal pressure derives from heightened awareness of accountability present in the literature on school reform, but to leave the definitions as open as possible.This study is focused primarily on schools and how they construct their own conceptions of accountability. We chose this focus for conceptual and practical reasons. First, we are interested in understanding how teachers, administrators, students, and parents think about and behave toward accountability issues in schools, apart from how they respond to new external accountability systems. Schools function, in part, as accountability systems in their own right, and these systems are worth understanding in and of themselves. Second, we are interested in learning, from the variations we observe among schools, about the range of responses that schools of various types formulate to the problem of accountability. To the degree that schools vary in their responses to the accountability problem, we learn something about how conceptions of accountability are formed and how they change in the daily life of schools. Third, we are ultimately interested in joining our research on school-level accountability with research on external accountability systems to understand the sources of school-site variation in response to state and l...

While much has been written about preparing educational leaders to lead for social justice, much less has been written about how to do so. This study is one of the first to analyze the reflections and written assignments of aspiring administrators to determine what they are currently thinking about poverty, race/ethnicity, and social justice leadership and how that thinking is shaped throughout one course. Results indicate that students were variable in their individual reflections, but that assignments, which required them to analyze the inequities in their schools and develop an implementation plan, led all of these aspiring administrators to seek to redress those inequities. The article discusses implications for other programs, which prepare educational leaders.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the written reflections of aspiring principals in two principal-preparation courses where social justice is at the core of the content and which address sexual orientation as part of the responsibility of a social justice leader. Data Collection: Two instructors in a leadership-preparation program incorporated reflection assignments into their respective social-justice-related courses. One course was offered at the beginning of the program; the other offered at the end. Aspiring principals from two different cohorts of students participated in the study. The students’ reflections were coded to identify themes and patterns that were found in their reflections and to see if any of their reflections changed over time. Findings: The authors found that students had varied experiences with people who identified as LGBTQ. Second, we found that discussion of sexual orientation was complicated by students’ Christian beliefs. Third, we found that there was some change in the way in which students responded to sexual orientation, from a more passionate to a more analytical stance. We discuss these findings in light of the need for better assessment of future leaders’ attitudes and actions and of our own heteronormativity and heterosexism. We discuss implications for our own teaching as well as for other teachers in preparation programs.

This study explores student reflections about issues related to equity, diversity, and social justice from an educational foundations course. Online reflections and course assignments were analyzed from 15 aspiring administrators for patterns. Findings indicate that (1) students were willing to engage and reflect on their experiences and cultural identity, (2) students used their worldviews as filters for these experiences, (3) students were not necessarily willing to experience discomfort for the sake of learning about difference, and (4) students thought about their identities in a range of distinct developmental ways. If educational administration programs are to prepare future administrators who are reflective practitioners and critical thinkers working for social justice, professors must prepare these individuals to acknowledge their cultural identity and its implications for the schools they lead, and professors must account for their students' developmental differences in class. Disciplines

No abstract