scholarly journals A case study of school district administrators' perceptions of teacher leadership in one northwest Missouri school district||A case study of school district administrators' perceptions of teacher leadership in one northwest Missouri school district

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Smith
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
Teacher Leadership ◽  
District Administrators ◽  
School District Administrators ◽  
Missouri School District

Planning and Implementation of a Small-Scale 1-to-1 Pilot Program for Using E-Readers in Elementary School Classrooms

2013 ◽  
pp. 12-31
Author(s):  
Margaret L. Rice ◽  
Deborah Camp ◽  
Karen Darroch ◽  
Ashley FitzGerald
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Pilot Program ◽  
Inappropriate Use ◽  
District Administrators ◽  
School District Administrators ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Conducting Research ◽  
5Th Grade

A P-12 school district implemented a pilot program providing e-readers to 45 students in a 4th and a 5th grade class. The school district administrators’ goal was to determine whether it would be feasible for the district to provide technological devices to individual district students for use at school and home, beginning with a small pilot. If the pilot proved successful, the devices would be provided to additional students throughout the district. The first step was the selection of the devices. After conducting research, the Nook from Barnes & Noble was selected. Issues to be addressed included inappropriate use of Nooks by students and parents, teachers’ and students’ learning the nuances of the devices, dropped network connections, students’ forgetting to bring Nooks to school, and unrealistic parent expectations for teacher use. This chapter informs readers of successes, problems, and lessons learned from the planning and implementation of the pilot program.

scholarly journals Understanding the Organizational Implementation Context of Schools: A Qualitative Study of School District Administrators, Principals, and Teachers

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Locke ◽  
Kristine Lee ◽  
Clayton R. Cook ◽  
Lindsay Frederick ◽  
Cheryl Vázquez-Colón ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
District Administrators ◽  
School District Administrators ◽  
Implementation Context

A Counternarrative Autoethnography Exploring School Districts’ Role in Reproducing Racism: Willful Blindness to Racial Inequities

2015 ◽  
Vol 117 (8) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad A. Khalifa ◽  
Felecia Briscoe
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
District Level ◽  
Achievement Gaps ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Administrative Practices ◽  
District Administrators ◽  
Phone Calls ◽  
School District Administrators

Background Racialized suspension gaps are logically and empirically associated with racial achievement gaps and both gaps indicate the endurance of racism in American education. In recent U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Office of Civil Rights data, it was revealed that nationally, Black boys are four times more likely to be suspended than White boys. In some geographic areas and for certain offenses, some intersections of race, class, and gender are dozens of times more likely to be suspended for than others. Although most educational leaders and district-level official express disapproval of racism in schools, racialized gaps in achievement and discipline stubbornly persist. Purpose/Objective The purpose of this study was to examine how school district-level administrators react to investigations and indications of racism in their school districts. It is relevant because in many school districts that have disciplinary and achievement gaps, the administrators ostensibly and publically express a hope to reduce or eliminate the racist trends. Yet, one administration after another, they seem unable to disrupt the racially oppressive discipline and achievement gaps. In this study, we examined administrators’ responses to our requests about their districts’ racialized disaggregated disciplinary data, and their responses to our sharing of our findings with them. We use counternarrative autoethnography to describe that school district administrators play a significant role in maintaining practices that reproduce racial oppression in schools. Setting This study was conducted in large urban school districts in Texas. The profiled districts were predominantly Latino; however one district was over 90% Latino and the other just slightly more than half with sizable White and Black student populations in some schools and areas. Participants As this is an autoethnography, we are the primary participants of this study; we interrogate our experiences with school district administrators in our investigations of racial disciplinary gaps. Research Design Our autoethnography is counternarrative, as it counters bureaucratic narratives of impartiality, colorblindness, and objectivity espoused by school districts. In addition to our own self-interviews, we base our counternarrative on the examination of 11 phone calls and 35 email exchanges with district administration, and on field-notes taken during seven site visits. These collective experiences and data sources informed our counternarratives, and led to our findings. Our research encompasses three phases. The initial phase was our attempt to obtain disciplinary data from various school districts in Texas. Only two school districts made the data accessible to us, despite being legally obligated to do so. For the second phase of our study we calculated risk ratios from those two school districts to determine how many more times African Americans and Latinos are suspended than Whites in all of the schools of TXD1 and TXD2. The third phase was the district administrators’ reactions to our presentation of our findings in regards to their district schools with the most egregious disciplinary gaps. Based on the administrative responses to them, we thought that it was important to highlight our experiences through a counternarrative autoethnography. Conclusions From our qualitative data analysis we theorize three bureaucratic administrative responses contributed to the maintenance of racism in school—(1) the administrators discursive avoidance of issues of racial marginalization; (2) the tendency of bureaucratic systems to protect their own interests and ways of operating, even those ways of operating that are racist; and (3), the (perhaps inadvertent) protection of leadership practices that have resulted in such racial marginalization. These responses were enacted through four technical–rational/bureaucratic administrative practices: subversive, defensive, ambiguous, and negligent.

scholarly journals A mixed-methods study: Districts’ implementation of language classification policies and the implications for male, Hispanic, and low-income middle school students

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela Reyes ◽  
Thurston Domina
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
School District ◽  
Low Income ◽  
English Language ◽  
School Students ◽  
Ell Students ◽  
District Administrators ◽  
School District Administrators ◽  
Unified School District ◽  
Language Classification

California state policy requires English language learners (ELL) to pass the California English Language Development Test and the California Standards Test in English Language Arts to be Reclassified Fluent English Proficient (RFEP). However, most districts make it more difficult for ELL students to reclassify by setting reclassification requirements that are more stringent than the state-mandated requirement. In this paper, we examine the reclassification process for two California school districts. In Manzanita Unified School District, administrators describe a system that explicitly provides a role for parents and teachers to influence reassignment decisions. In Granada Unified School District, administrators describe a system that is exclusively test-driven. Nevertheless, these two approaches yield similar reclassification outcomes. In both districts, male, Hispanic, and low-income ELL students are less likely to take or pass the required assessments. Even among students who do pass the assessments male, Hispanic, and low-income students are still less likely to be reclassified. We draw upon the notion of tight- and loose-coupling in educational organizations to make sense of this disconnect between ELL reclassification policies and reclassification outcomes in these two districts. We recommend administrators and teachers work together to establish but also implement their district’sobjec language classification policies.

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