Line in the Sand: An Essay on Principal-Teacher Relationships

was a fall Saturday morning, and I was in my Auburn doctoral program monthly seminar where we talked of various topics of interest to our group of 15. Somehow the topic came around to the relationships between teachers and principals. Consensus of the group was that the proverbial line in the sand was an inevitable and unchangeable part of being a school principal. I, to the surprise of no one then or now, disagreed. This time I was not playing my well-honed role of Devil’s Advocate, I really believed that there was no good or logical reason that there should exist, a barrier between teachers and principals

Bibliometrics for Faculty Evaluation: A Statistical Comparison of h-indexes Generated Using Google Scholar and Web of Science Data

The growing need for quantification of research performance for promotion and tenure and grant funding decisions has lead many to rely on citation metrics. There are many metrics to choose from but one of the most common is the h-index. While the h-index has been criticized by many, the metric itself is not the only concern. The source of the citation information used to calculate the h-index is also important. In this case study the h-index was calculated using citation data from Clarivate’s Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar (GS) for a selection of faculty working at a large public university. The h-indexes from the two sources were statistically compared using a student’s t-test and Spearman correlation to determine if the two sources produced significantly different results. Google Scholar data produced h-indexes that were greater in magnitude (M=18.52, SD=13.641) than those produced by Web of Science data (M=13.13, SD=10.400) however the rank order of the h-indexes from the two sources showed a high degree of similarity

A Selected Bibliography: Protest Song in the United States

Paper

The Development of Oral History in the United States: the evolution toward interdisciplinary

This article discusses the development of oral history in the United States and how this has led the field to becoming interdisciplinary in interesting and useful ways. It traces its origins in the 17th century and explains its establishment as method (oral data collection), a subfield of history (oral historiography) and a resource for teachers, communities, and researchers of all kinds (oral history). The author describes the practical applications of oral history in other fields such as anthropology, education/ teaching, ethnic studies/ethnohistory/American studies, folklore, gerontology, legal studies, literary history, media studies and media production, and women and gender studies. A review of oral history guides is also given. The article ends with an update on how oral historians are coping with the new, anti-intellectual orientation of President Trump and his right-wing agenda. Keywords: Oral History. USA. Oral Data Collection. History-Telling

Review of \u3ci\u3eLand of Enchantment, Land of Conflict: New Mexico in English-Language Fiction\u3c/i\u3e By David L. Caffey

Nearly seventy-five years ago, in The Phantom Herd, novelist Bertha Bower summed up the tension between the presentation of the West and its reality. A movie director and crew are sent out from Hollywood to New Mexico to film a western. Halfway through, the director\u27s disgusted crew demands more realism. The director complains that the problem isn\u27t his but the audience\u27s: the only West he can tell is served hot and strong and reeking with the smoke of black powder. These images still plague us today in the West-in television dramas and in sometimes dangerous school yards . David Caffey has crafted a handsome and valuable book tracing the development of such images in New Mexico\u27s English-language fiction. This is a book every general library in New Mexico should own and every class on New Mexico\u27s literature should welcome. Caffey examines New Mexico\u27s history between the twin poles of enchantment and conflict, in the tradition of Southwestern literary studies by Frank Dobie, and New Mexico\u27s own T. M. Pearce, Mabel Major, and Tom Lewis. The author states his task as literary archaeology, analyzing approximately thirteen hundred novels set in New Mexico. Many of the earliest writings about New Mexico were by Anglos who had never approached the region. Timothy Flint, author of the oldest fiction set in New Mexico (Francis Berrian; or, the Mexican Patriot, 1826) never ventured west of the Mississippi Valley. Yet he set in place clichés and fixed images that persist 175 years later: The imposition of American values on an alien society; the westering hero\u27s romantic conquest of a desirable Spanish girl; the hero\u27s triumph over wild Indians and natural hazards; and the presence of such stock characters as the American hero, his Spanish rival, the delicate heroine, and the conniving priest. Over the next two hundred pages, the author traces the development of such stock characters in a natural sequence of heroes: the trapper gives way to the frontiersman; the frontiersman to the soldier and cowboy on the Plains. Caffey suggests that in this transition from outlander to cowboy, the westerner lost sovereignty and became a hired hand. Presently, when much English-language fiction concerns middle-class Anglo immigrants, The contemporary immigrant ... suffers not from spears and arrows of a hostile people, or from exposure to hazards of climate and wild animals, but from his own neuroses .... He is not looking to tame a wilderness or take on an antagonistic rival, or even necessarily to commune with nature. He would be satisfied just to get himself centered. (69) How accurate have New Mexico\u27s portrayals in fiction been? Of the early westerns, Caffey concludes, They [readers] didn\u27t mind being kidded; they just didn\u27t want to be bored. As any folklorist will tell you, the accuracy of what is told about a time and place is not so important as how such fabulous tales are spread, or how they are believed. From Beadle\u27s dime novels in the 1870s to the present, Europeans have been eager for Western fiction and American exotica; writing at the same time as Timothy Flint, Chateaubriand had monkeys swinging in the trees overlooking the Mississippi. Later, German author Karl May attributed fantastic customs to the Southwest\u27s Native Americans. In New Mexico\u27s fiction, along the trail from trapper to cowboy and rancher, one finds incidents quite as improbable as Mississippi monkeys. Though this book never challenges New Mexico\u27s most persistent stereotypes, or pauses in its narrative to examine related questions (just what is an Anglo, anyway?), Caffey has nonetheless done New Mexicans an invaluable service. And if the once mighty Anglo hero takes a horrendous beating in the literary western of the 1990\u27s, it is also true that women, Hispanic, and Native American characters have found increasingly realistic self-portraits in our fiction. The careful reader will find considerable information about the western Great Plains in this work. In the nineteenth century, the westering hero customarily left Bent\u27s Fort or St. Louis to follow the Comanchero paths-some, such as the Old Fort Smith wagon road, preceded Route 66. Early fictions, such as Prairie Rifles (1869) and The Lone Ranch (1871), discuss the Llano Estacado or the Staked Plains, a region covering the eastern third of New Mexico, north to south. The interest in this region continued in the 1940s with the novels of John L. Sinclair, and in the 1960s with Max Evans\u27s Hi-Lo Country and Frank Tolbert\u27s The Staked Plains. The Plains material continues into the 1990s in Cathryn Alpert\u27s Rocket City (1995), where a California expatriate lands in Artesia until driven crazy by a howling dust storm: His ashes would mix with hers and blow forever over the plains of New Mexico. Two principal topics seem to come up in New Mexico Plains fiction: this dusty wind, which even civilization\u27s paving cannot suppress, and the famous expeditions from the Republic of Texas that invaded New Mexico to reconquer what Texans considered their rightful portion of the state. New Mexicans resisted, and continued to hold together a land of high mountains to the north, river-watered farming in the center and the south, and those high desert Plains which slope downwards toward Texas-a land of much time and wind and little rain

Review of \u3ci\u3eLand of Enchantment, Land of Conflict: New Mexico in English-Language Fiction\u3c/i\u3e By David L. Caffey

Nearly seventy-five years ago, in The Phantom Herd, novelist Bertha Bower summed up the tension between the presentation of the West and its reality. A movie director and crew are sent out from Hollywood to New Mexico to film a western. Halfway through, the director\u27s disgusted crew demands more realism. The director complains that the problem isn\u27t his but the audience\u27s: the only West he can tell is served hot and strong and reeking with the smoke of black powder. These images still plague us today in the West-in television dramas and in sometimes dangerous school yards . David Caffey has crafted a handsome and valuable book tracing the development of such images in New Mexico\u27s English-language fiction. This is a book every general library in New Mexico should own and every class on New Mexico\u27s literature should welcome. Caffey examines New Mexico\u27s history between the twin poles of enchantment and conflict, in the tradition of Southwestern literary studies by Frank Dobie, and New Mexico\u27s own T. M. Pearce, Mabel Major, and Tom Lewis. The author states his task as literary archaeology, analyzing approximately thirteen hundred novels set in New Mexico. Many of the earliest writings about New Mexico were by Anglos who had never approached the region. Timothy Flint, author of the oldest fiction set in New Mexico (Francis Berrian; or, the Mexican Patriot, 1826) never ventured west of the Mississippi Valley. Yet he set in place clichés and fixed images that persist 175 years later: The imposition of American values on an alien society; the westering hero\u27s romantic conquest of a desirable Spanish girl; the hero\u27s triumph over wild Indians and natural hazards; and the presence of such stock characters as the American hero, his Spanish rival, the delicate heroine, and the conniving priest. Over the next two hundred pages, the author traces the development of such stock characters in a natural sequence of heroes: the trapper gives way to the frontiersman; the frontiersman to the soldier and cowboy on the Plains. Caffey suggests that in this transition from outlander to cowboy, the westerner lost sovereignty and became a hired hand. Presently, when much English-language fiction concerns middle-class Anglo immigrants, The contemporary immigrant ... suffers not from spears and arrows of a hostile people, or from exposure to hazards of climate and wild animals, but from his own neuroses .... He is not looking to tame a wilderness or take on an antagonistic rival, or even necessarily to commune with nature. He would be satisfied just to get himself centered. (69) How accurate have New Mexico\u27s portrayals in fiction been? Of the early westerns, Caffey concludes, They [readers] didn\u27t mind being kidded; they just didn\u27t want to be bored. As any folklorist will tell you, the accuracy of what is told about a time and place is not so important as how such fabulous tales are spread, or how they are believed. From Beadle\u27s dime novels in the 1870s to the present, Europeans have been eager for Western fiction and American exotica; writing at the same time as Timothy Flint, Chateaubriand had monkeys swinging in the trees overlooking the Mississippi. Later, German author Karl May attributed fantastic customs to the Southwest\u27s Native Americans. In New Mexico\u27s fiction, along the trail from trapper to cowboy and rancher, one finds incidents quite as improbable as Mississippi monkeys. Though this book never challenges New Mexico\u27s most persistent stereotypes, or pauses in its narrative to examine related questions (just what is an Anglo, anyway?), Caffey has nonetheless done New Mexicans an invaluable service. And if the once mighty Anglo hero takes a horrendous beating in the literary western of the 1990\u27s, it is also true that women, Hispanic, and Native American characters have found increasingly realistic self-portraits in our fiction. The careful reader will find considerable information about the western Great Plains in this work. In the nineteenth century, the westering hero customarily left Bent\u27s Fort or St. Louis to follow the Comanchero paths-some, such as the Old Fort Smith wagon road, preceded Route 66. Early fictions, such as Prairie Rifles (1869) and The Lone Ranch (1871), discuss the Llano Estacado or the Staked Plains, a region covering the eastern third of New Mexico, north to south. The interest in this region continued in the 1940s with the novels of John L. Sinclair, and in the 1960s with Max Evans\u27s Hi-Lo Country and Frank Tolbert\u27s The Staked Plains. The Plains material continues into the 1990s in Cathryn Alpert\u27s Rocket City (1995), where a California expatriate lands in Artesia until driven crazy by a howling dust storm: His ashes would mix with hers and blow forever over the plains of New Mexico. Two principal topics seem to come up in New Mexico Plains fiction: this dusty wind, which even civilization\u27s paving cannot suppress, and the famous expeditions from the Republic of Texas that invaded New Mexico to reconquer what Texans considered their rightful portion of the state. New Mexicans resisted, and continued to hold together a land of high mountains to the north, river-watered farming in the center and the south, and those high desert Plains which slope downwards toward Texas-a land of much time and wind and little rain

An Analysis of the Organizational Patterns of North Carolina School Districts

School system organization has been described as the skeleton that outlines the structure and determines the form of a school district. (Grove, 2002). Organizational charts are the manifestations of these skeletons. Some are simple; others are more complex – more like nervous systems than skeletons. Whatever metaphor is chosen, understanding the underlying organization of the complex multiple functions of a social group such as a school district is important. Our schools are being asked to educate our children in an ever-increasingly complex and global society. Surely the organization of a school district has an impact on how students are educated and how well they achieve curricular goals. With today’s emphasis on accountability, the ability of the school district organization to help students achieve and meet testing goals is critical. But what is the best way to organize a school district? How do superintendents make the decisions needed to organize a district? This study is a necessary first step in determining this. In this study, we analyzed the organization of public school districts in the state of North Carolina. We were interested in the similarities and differences in the administrative structures driving these organizations serving children in a diverse geographical state. We addressed two questions: (1) What organizational patterns are found in public school districts in North Carolina? (2) How do organizational patterns differ in districts serving different numbers of students

Creating Virtual Cooperative Learning Experiences for Aspiring School Leaders and Practitioners with Web 2.0

In December of 2008, the authors were awarded a University of North Carolina at Charlotte funded curriculum and instructional development grant based on two innovative ideas for preparing future school leaders: (1) the creation and use of wikis to expand and deepen student learning beyond the classroom, and (2) the creation of a virtual social network to connect current educational leadership students and graduates, providing the opportunity and the means for networking between students and practitioners, practitioners with each other, and both groups with educational leadership professors around the proposition that solving problems of practice (whether in the graduate classroom or in the K-12 arena) can be significantly enhanced by sharing personal knowledge of research-based strategies and school-proven best practices

Determining School District Organization in North Carolina

The current study sought to answer the next question, “How are the organizational structures of North Carolina school districts determined?” We wanted to understand what factors influenced the organization of school district