Administrative responses to hurricane-induced mobility

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita posed serious challenges to school systems as children displaced by the storms attended schools across Louisiana and in most of the states of the Union. This qualitative case study examined the administrative challenges of one school district that received over 6,800 new students in less than a month. Research questions posed in the study focused on the planning, placement, and support of displaced students, the leadership of the superintendent and principals in integrating displaced students into the district and schools, which problems arose, and whether any policies or procedures were changed as a result hurricane-induced mobility. An oral history methodology was used to examine the problem from an organizational learning perspective. The case study utilized an embedded single case design to examine the efforts of the central office and several schools to integrate thousands of students into the district. Two distinct leadership styles emerged as driving forces in shaping the responses at the central office and within the schools. Evidence of transformative leadership practices combined with practices focused on maintenance of the status quo and attention to administrative detail served to stabilize the district through the year. Although no permanent administrative changes resulted that year the district and schools evidenced great flexibility in taking on temporary duties, satisfying state and federal mandates, and addressing the needs of the displaced families. District and school staff managed to create a welcoming, inclusive climate with clear expectations of high achievement for all students, both displaced and indigenous. Test scores in several of the study schools declined, but the average school performance scores of the district improved. The single greatest problem faced by the district was the mobility of students during the year. Recommendations for practice and a model of crisis planning are proposed. A model of emergent themes from the data suggests similar patterns across schools and the district office

Valuing disorder: perspectives on radical contingency in modern society

This thesis explores the relationship between social and individual forms of ordering social life on one hand, and the emergence of a number of ‘spheres’ of disorder in the experience of life on the other. In modern society such evidence of disorder can only be characterised in terms that reinforce the negative or formless experience of the human confrontations with disorder. Manifestations of radical contingency (taken as the cognitive residue of such disorder) in experience are thus contrasted with the progress and limits of reason and desire (which create the ‘valuable’ part of life), and these are further examined within a language of being that establishes the discordant nature of the relationship. It is argued that reason and desire, in creating value, always construct an edifice of social and personal expectation that is justified on the basis of the reliability of causal relations between phenomena in lived experience, and in so doing ‘make’ an objective and orderly social world. Several notions central to an understanding of the accumulation of categories of being in modern society are examined as the positive expression of the conditions of autonomous action, and thus as crucial determinants of value and identity. The central relationship is further investigated through the elaboration of three negative categories of experience, which are seen to contain individual and social forms of action that forcefully remove, or contradict order and autonomous freedom as it is here defined. The thesis is therefore divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the loss of autonomy through gambling, and specifically through the singular experience of the wager, which is seen to be an intensification of the motion that constitutes life, but that boldly refuses to be contained, as rational autonomy would dictate. Part 2 deals with the atomisation of knowledge and experience in modern society, looking specifically at instances of ‘non-representational’ art of the twentieth century as the residue of developments that had as a positive aim the refinement of experience. Part 3 deals with the material exclusion of various kinds of garbage resulting from both social and technological progress, and from the emergence of a multiplicity of opportunities for the establishment of self-identity that are seen as both a product of dividing the world of experience into ever smaller categories (i.e., the refinement of the ‘objective’ world) and of the subjective relationship between the individual in modern society and the world of objects