Urban School Reform and the Strange Attractor of Low-Risk Relationships

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, school leaders in a newly decentralized school system reached out to external organizations for partnerships—a job that had previously resided in the central office. The necessity of these contacts and the quantity of newly independent schools make a unique context for studying how school leaders think and act in relation to external partnerships. Iterative interviews with 10 New Orleans public school principals reveal a range of external partnerships that can be classified into a three part taxonomy consisting of charitable relationships, technical support relationships, and feedback relationships. A discussion of low-risk relationships and the importance of utilizing feedback relationships concludes the paper

EDAD 6860

The Principalship course serves as one of the culminating courses that reinforces and expands theories, skills and practices for effective leaders. The aim of the course is to provide candidates with relevant examples and simulations of a leader’s role in various levels of administrative practice. The coursework will be delivered through a combination of lecture and demonstrations, professional standards identification, group presentations, case studies, and field based experiences

Turbulence, perturbance, and educational change

While scholarship on educational change has long accepted that disruptions to the status quo are an essential part of the change process, disruption has never been more central to planned change than it is in the current political context in the USA, where legislation has mandated school closure, reconstitution, and turnaround as required remedies for schools failing to produce annual student achievement gains required by government. We are also unfortunately hampered by the imprecise language that surrounds complexity- based theories of educational change. Words such as perturbance, turbulence, and disruption all have gained currency lately, but meanings are unclear and overlapping. This essay seeks to lend some clarity to the debate by defining turbulence as the perception of forces in an organizational environment with the potential to disrupt current modes of operation. This is distinguished from perturbance which is defined as the social process of actors coming together to adjust organizational practice to fit with the changing environmental context. The case is argued that sensible reformers ought to be fostering perturbance while minimizing the harmful consequences of excessive turbulence

EDAD 6860

The Principalship course serves as one of the culminating courses that reinforces and expands theories, skills and practices for effective leaders. The aim of the course is to provide candidates with relevant examples and simulations of a leader’s role in various levels of administrative practice. The coursework will be delivered through a combination of lecture and demonstrations, professional standards identification, group presentations, case studies, and field based experiences

EDAD 6930

The purpose of this course is to explain conceptual frameworks, theories, models, and research methods related to the analysis of leadership and leader behavior in educational administration. In pursuing this purpose, students will fulfill the following objectives: (a) gain an understanding of leadership research as a scholarly field, (b) develop a more sophisticated understanding of educational leadership, (c) explore some of the key leadership issues in American elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education, and (d) learn about some of the salient issues to consider in conceptualizing and conducting leadership research

Urban school reform and the strange attractor of low-risk relationships

Abstract In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, school leaders in a newly decentralized school system reached out to external organizations for partnerships-a job that had previously resided in the central office. The necessity of these contacts and the quantity of newly independent schools make a unique context for studying how school leaders think and act in relation to external partnerships. Iterative interviews with 10 New Orleans public school principals reveal a range of external partnerships that can be classified into a three part taxonomy consisting of charitable relationships, technical support relationships, and feedback relationships. A discussion of low-risk relationships and the importance of utilizing feedback relationships concludes the paper

Urban School Reform and the Strange Attractor of Low-Risk Relationships

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, school leaders in a newly decentralized school system reached out to external organizations for partnerships—a job that had previously resided in the central office. The necessity of these contacts and the quantity of newly independent schools make a unique context for studying how school leaders think and act in relation to external partnerships. Iterative interviews with 10 New Orleans public school principals reveal a range of external partnerships that can be classified into a three part taxonomy consisting of charitable relationships, technical support relationships, and feedback relationships. A discussion of low-risk relationships and the importance of utilizing feedback relationships concludes the paper