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

Historical perspectives and contemporary challenges to education (Bildung) and citizenry in the modern nation state. Comparative perspectives on Germany and the USA

In this article, we provide a comparative analysis of public education in Germany and the US, focusing on historical and contemporary challenges to education, Bildung, and citizenry in the modern nation state. In particular, we examine relations among nation building processes and education, transnational discourses, mutual influences, and relations regarding public education over time, and identity building and citizenship within and between federal, nation state and international levels. Comparative methods are utilized to examine policy documents as well as the literature, looking for similarities and differences among key concepts and discourses. The article concludes by pointing out that a number of contemporary developments bringing public education to a crossroads today are not entirely new and that foundations of education theory are still relevant. At the same time, we suggest new cross-national dialogues regarding the challenges bringing public education to the crossroads today. (DIPF/Orig.

School Development in Culturally Diverse U.S. Schools: Balancing Evidence-Based Policies and Education Values

This article problematizes evidence-based policies in the USA, using Dewey’s (1916) education theory and findings from a school development project in 71 culturally diverse Arizona schools. The study asked three questions: (1) How do formal and informal school leaders work in teams to mediate between evidence-based policy requirements at federal, state, and district levels and the needs of culturally diverse students? (2) What leadership team practices contribute to school development as measured by improved student outcomes in school letter grades? (3) What values from evidence-based policies and democratic education are evident in effective school development? Evaluation methods featured qualitative interviews with leadership team members in 71 schools as well as a descriptive analysis of school letter grades based primarily upon student outcomes. Results indicated improved student outcomes in letter grades and enhanced leadership capacity and democratic values as well as evidence-based values that contributed to school development. The article concludes with next steps to expand the project to another region of the USA and a call for a balanced use of evidence (including standardized test scores) constructed through Dewey’s notion of democratic values of education

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

Leveraging the Perspectives of Rural Educators to Develop Realistic Job Previews for Rural Teacher Recruitment and Retention

Rurality is perceived by many to be a deficit or challenge when it comes to teacher recruitment and retention. However, recently, some have argued that moving away from a deficit model and treating rurality as an asset may hold promise for teacher staffing. Drawing on Person-organization (P-O) fit theory, we extend this argument in our study by investigating the perceptions of teachers from the rural Lowcountry of South Carolina, a region with documented severe teacher shortages, concerning rural teaching advantages and challenges. These reflections provide the data necessary to develop realistic job previews (RJP) that can be highlighted in the teacher staffing process at their schools. To obtain the data, we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 11 rural teachers and one principal (n=12). Several common themes emerged, which we used to develop a sample web-based RJP content for demonstration purposes

School Development in Culturally Diverse U.S. Schools: Balancing Evidence-Based Policies and Education Values

This article problematizes evidence-based policies in the USA, using Dewey’s (1916) education theory and findings from a school development project in 71 culturally diverse Arizona schools. The study asked three questions: (1) How do formal and informal school leaders work in teams to mediate between evidence-based policy requirements at federal, state, and district levels and the needs of culturally diverse students? (2) What leadership team practices contribute to school development as measured by improved student outcomes in school letter grades? (3) What values from evidence-based policies and democratic education are evident in effective school development? Evaluation methods featured qualitative interviews with leadership team members in 71 schools as well as a descriptive analysis of school letter grades based primarily upon student outcomes. Results indicated improved student outcomes in letter grades and enhanced leadership capacity and democratic values as well as evidence-based values that contributed to school development. The article concludes with next steps to expand the project to another region of the USA and a call for a balanced use of evidence (including standardized test scores) constructed through Dewey’s notion of democratic values of education

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

Continental Pedagogics from a Northern American Perspective : A Language for Practical Pedagogy

How do we give practical pedagogy a language? This question forms the ground for a new interest of Anglo-American educational discourse in the continental tradition of pedagogics.  Contemporary Anglo-American discourse makes little explicit reference to the continental tradition. Traces can be seen in Dewey’s work – we will come back to this. In North American educational discourse, education has always been submitted to society. Contemporary education scholarship in the U.S. has developed in a self-understanding way since the establishment of the What Works Clearinghouse in 2002 to as a digital library of ‘evidence-based’ or instrumental programs that ‘work’ for success in high academic outcomes, or, in another dominant approach, after the civil rights era, with critical perspectives on societal inequities that address the needs of increasingly culturally diverse students. The terminology, thus, refers to innovation, interventions, and economic metrics, on the one hand, or to cultural sensitivity and critique of social inequities, on the other hand, all of which have a normative and socio-political perspective. In this paper, we draw on continental pedagogics to develop a common language for a new cross-national dialogue about practical pedagogy.'Rehumanizing' Educatio

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