Political risk-taking: a requirement of today's instructional leadership

Today's instructional leaders across the U.S. must comply with accountability policies that determine the effectiveness of their curriculums based upon a single standardized test score. This political context places enormous pressures on educators to purchase canned programs that promise to raise these test scores quickly. At considerable risk, some instructional leaders resist these political pressures and use instructional practices they determine are best in their particular school districts. This paper draws on empirical findings from a qualitative study that investigated what happens in districts that make educators willing to take political risks and resist accountability pressure

Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik: Non-affirmative Theory of Education

This volume argues for the need of a common ground that bridges leadership studies, curriculum theory, and Didaktik. It proposes a non-affirmative education theory and its core concepts along with discursive institutionalism as an analytical tool to bridge these fields. It concludes with implications of its coherent theoretical framing for future empirical research. Recent neoliberal policies and transnational governance practices point toward new tensions in nation state education. These challenges affect governance, leadership and curriculum, involving changes in aims and values that demand coherence. Yet, the traditionally disparate fields of educational leadership, curriculum theory and Didaktik have developed separately, both in terms of approaches to theory and theorizing in USA, Europe and Asia, and in the ways in which these theoretical traditions have informed empirical studies over time. An additional aspect is that modern education theory was developed in relation to nation state education, which, in the meantime, has become more complicated due to issues of ‘globopolitanism’. This volume examines the current state of affairs and addresses the issues involved. In doing so, it opens up a space for a renewed and thoughtful dialogue to rethink and re-theorize these traditions with non-affirmative education theory moving beyond social reproduction and social transformation perspectives

Political risk-taking: a requirement of today's instructional leadership

Today's instructional leaders across the U.S. must comply with accountability policies that determine the effectiveness of their curriculums based upon a single standardized test score. This political context places enormous pressures on educators to purchase canned programs that promise to raise these test scores quickly. At considerable risk, some instructional leaders resist these political pressures and use instructional practices they determine are best in their particular school districts. This paper draws on empirical findings from a qualitative study that investigated what happens in districts that make educators willing to take political risks and resist accountability pressures

Political risk-taking: a requirement of today's instructional leadership

Today's instructional leaders across the U.S. must comply with accountability policies that determine the effectiveness of their curriculums based upon a single standardized test score. This political context places enormous pressures on educators to purchase canned programs that promise to raise these test scores quickly. At considerable risk, some instructional leaders resist these political pressures and use instructional practices they determine are best in their particular school districts. This paper draws on empirical findings from a qualitative study that investigated what happens in districts that make educators willing to take political risks and resist accountability pressures

Uljens, Michael, and Rose M. Ylimaki, Non-affirmative Theory of Education and Foundation of Curriculum Studies, Didaktik, and Educational Leadership, Chapter 1, pp. 3-145 in Michael Uljens and Rose M. Ylimako, eds., Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory, and Didaiktik: Non-affirmative Theory of Education. New York: Springer, 2017.

Provides an extensive exploration of the historical literature on theorizing educational leadership, curriculum, and Didaktik; makes a plea for bridging the work of all three types of theorizing; offers a non-affirmative theory of education as a framework for accomplishing this effort of bridging all thre

Critical curriculum leadership : a framework for progressive education

xvii, 214 p.; 23 c

Ylimaki, Rose M., and C. Cryss Brunner, Power and Collaboration-Consensus/Conflict in Curriculum Leadership: Status Quo or Change? American Educational Research Journal, 48(December, 2011) 1258-1285.

Provides a sociological analysis of organizational change as the basis for a qualitative study of curriculum leaders\u27 rhetoric and philosophies of change in two schools\u27 literacy programs; points to the need to incorporate notions of power and conflict into models of collaboration-consensus