Ethics, Equity, and Community Engagement: Urban School Administrators Rate Their Preparation Programs

Abstract

School administrators from three mid-Atlantic cities were surveyed regarding the levels of emphasis given to components from their university-based leadership preparation programs. Three components—ethics, equity, and community engagement—are explored for this article due to their influential relationship with school response to changing demographics. Using a sliding scale, participants indicate that tasks related to all three components were emphasized in their programs, with ethics highlighted the most and community engagement highlighted the least. Negative statistical significance was found between the independent variable, time since program completion, and the components equity and ethics. This indicates that those who completed their programs longer ago perceive less emphasis on the two components. An analysis follows on how educational leadership program standards may influence what programs emphasize.

Preparing Social Justice Leaders in the Era of High-Stakes Licensure Assessments: Student and Faculty Perceptions of a Redesigned Principal Preparation Program

“…On the national stage, school leadership standards have included a focus on social justice since the creation of the Interstate School Leadership Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) standards in 1996 (Robey, 2019). The ISLLC were replaced by the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) in 2015, which strengthened the focus on equity by adding emphasis on ''each student'' throughout the 10 standards and explicitly mentioning equity, social justice, and culturally responsive leadership throughout the elements (NPBEA, 2015, pp.…”

“…California's leadership standards, especially the elements of the California Administrator Performance Expectations (CAPE), also focus on principles of equitydriven leadership and social justice (CTC, 2017c(CTC, , 2021. Despite this heavy emphasis on equity and social justice leadership in the leadership standards in California and nationally, the extent to which principal preparation programs focus on equity and social justice varies greatly (Brown, 2004;Capper et al, 2006;Robey, 2019).…”

K-12 school leadership perspectives from the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Field experiences should assess how interns manage real-time crises in school. Second, an opportunity exists to create meaningful and sustainable community relationships that may foster long-term benefits between school personnel and families ( Robey et al, 2019 ). This value-added investment promises to pay dividends for a new generation.…”

Academic Leadership During a Pandemic: Department Heads Leading With a Focus on Equity

“…Among the demands for better preparation, faculty of LPP create knowledge through research and teaching (McCarthy et al, 2017) while simultaneously implementing such social justice principles and practices as finding and naming systemic prejudices such as color-blindness, stereotyping, and other coded expressions of biases and racism (Davis et al, 2015;Hernandez and Marshall, 2017). Within the combined scholarships of teaching and research, LPP faculty strive for further identity development of mid-career educators as aspiring school leadership who recognize and work to change systemic bias in schools' teaching practices or allocation of human and material resources (Ryan, 2010;Carpenter et al, 2015;Robey et al, 2019). This work also has implications for LPP faculty's well-being and success as professors (Hackmann et al, 2017;Martinez and Welton, 2017), as well as graduate students' satisfaction with LPP quality and the adequacy of their preparation to lead within educational organizations.…”