Race-Conscious Ethics in School Leadership: From Impersonal Caring to Critical Responsibility

Background/Context This research is informed by leadership theory and care ethics and how these theories intersect with race-consciousness. This study contributes to the emerging literature on race-conscious leadership ethics that supports building capacity for equity leadership. Purpose The authors explore the intersection of race-consciousness and leadership ethics, studying how leaders explain their practices for increasing equity, their leadership ethics, and their sense of responsibility and personal capacity to address racial achievement disparities. Participants The participants are 22 school leaders: 20 principals and two school district officials from 14 urban and suburban school districts in a metropolitan region in one northeastern state. Research Design This article draws from a semistructured interview study, based on Seidman's three-component interview design but combined in a single interview: history, focus, and reflection. The authors follow a constructivist, exploratory design to develop interpretations and a three-part conceptual framework. Data Collection and Analysis Semistructured interviews allowed the researchers to engage participants in deeper explanations and captured the leaders’ lived experiences through their subjective points of view. Analysis proceeded through a collaborative coding and memo-writing process among the three authors, each contributing distinct historical and racial identities and professional backgrounds. Findings Finding a broad range of perspectives about race and its significance for the experiences of children in school settings, the authors identify variations in moral perspectives that play out in differential views of caring and responsibility, especially when leaders talked about the racial and socioeconomic diversity among their students and how they address inequities in opportunities and outcomes. The authors explore four themes: (a) community-based caring, (b) tough-love/tough-luck caring, (c) color-evasive caring in “fortunate communities,” and (d) caring with minimal responsiveness. Many principals, especially White principals in schools with a small percentage of students of color, maintain a color-evasive perspective and demonstrate “impersonal caring,” with abstract and technical concern for student performance. Race-conscious principals demonstrate caring that takes on different forms, denoted by more marked elaboration of “critical responsibility” for children of color. Between these two perspectives are varied attitudes and perspectives. Conclusions/Recommendations Greater attention is needed for continuing ethical cultivation of school leaders. Across themes, there are multiple routes to developing capacity for race-conscious leadership ethics, through engaging in deeper reflection about personal history, expanding one's understanding of what it means to care across difference, critiquing one's color evasiveness, and learning from colleagues who demonstrate collective responsibility.

Crossroads: Integration and segregation in suburban school districts

As U.S. suburbs become more racially and ethnically diverse, they have the opportunity to make their schools similarly diverse. But integration is not assured, even in districts with significant demographic diversity. Iris Rotberg draws on Montgomery County Public Schools, a suburban Maryland district, to illustrate the opportunities and risks present in many other suburban districts. While large numbers of Montgomery County students attend diverse schools, segregation is a growing problem in the higher-poverty schools, and Black and Latinx students attending these schools have become more segregated in recent years. At the same time, White and Asian students attending low-poverty schools are in more diverse environments. Rotberg considers how policies related to school boundaries, housing, charter schools, and district secession have affected the integration of suburban schools.

Rage Against the Machine: The Legacy of Education Leaders’ Valiant Struggle for Social Justice in Abbeville v. South Carolina

Purpose: Abbeville v. South Carolina was a nearly three-decade long school funding lawsuit initiated by the education leaders of South Carolina's most rural and impoverished school districts that primarily educated students of color. Recently, the State Supreme Court dismissed the entire case. Guided by a multiperspective framework of social justice, one year after the dismissal, we sought to understand the perspectives and experiences of five of the original plaintiff superintendents who either initiated or engaged in the court hearings for the case. These education leaders shared unique insights on their valiant struggle against systemic inequities in order to improve the quality of their students’ education. Research method: To address our research questions, we relied on an intrinsic retrospective case study methodology that relies on face-to-face semistructured interview data collection with five of the original superintendents who were involved in the legacy case. We then supplemented the qualitative findings with quantitative descriptive data and results from our differences-in-differences analyses to support the qualitative analysis. Findings: Participants shared rich detailed experiences concerning both the struggle their districts faced that necessitated the lawsuit and the struggle they faced while fighting to ameliorate those conditions. There was a mixed reaction concerning whether participants felt the struggle was worth the effort, yet they universally felt the conditions have not improved for their districts. Some further felt that the funding gap between the rich (urban/suburban) school districts and their poor rural counterparts has actually widened. These perceptions were supported by the revenue data.

In Suburbia

This chapter explores the Advanced Placement (AP) program in suburban school districts. Even as urban centers like Fort Worth and New York typify today's livelier venues for AP expansion, the program has deep roots in the prosperous suburbs that abut them. Along with elite private schools, upscale suburban high schools were among the program's earliest adopters, and they remain natural habitats for a nationally benchmarked, high-status venture that gives strong students a head start on the college education that they are almost certainly going to get and perhaps an extra advantage in gaining admission to the universities they aspire to. Yet they are also ripe for attention as they struggle with equity and growth issues of their own. The chapter then reviews two well-known yet very different suburban districts: Dublin City Schools in Ohio and Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. Both are celebrated as education successes in their states and both boast long and impressive AP track records. Both, however, face distinctive challenges as they seek to serve today's constituents. Their stories illustrate how AP is functioning in places that know it well yet continue to evolve with it.

Toward the Resegregation of Southern Schools: African American Suburbanization and Historical Erasure inFreeman v. Pitts

This article reconstructs the story behindFreeman v. Pitts(1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of whether school officials in an Atlanta suburb were responsible for the racial segregation that had developed in the area alongside the rapid settlement of African Americans there in the late twentieth century. Thus, along with shedding new light on how the South transitioned from an era focused on desegregation to one enabling resegregation, the article makes contributions to two areas of increasing scholarly interest: the history of African American suburbanization and the history of suburban school districts. Finally, the article underscores disconcerting patterns in how the Supreme Court utilized history inFreeman.

Unwrapping the Suburban “Package Deal”

Large disparities in educational quality exist between cities and surrounding suburban school districts and are increasing between suburban districts—a trend that emerged over the past several decades and shows signs of growing. Using in-depth interviews, this study examines how children are sorted into different school districts across a metropolitan area. We find that the ideal educational arrangement for nearly all parents is to live in a neighborhood that guarantees access to neighborhood schools that meets their expectations, something we call the “package deal.” Parents look to the suburbs to achieve this ideal, but not all suburbs provide it. Metropolitan patterns of racial residential segregation, interact with families’ resources and constraints to reproduce racial inequalities in educational opportunities across suburban districts. Integrated approaches to housing and education policy are needed to address parents’ preference to couple residential and school choices and reduce growing suburban inequality.

The Growth of Local Education Transfers

We argue that previous research studying the relationship between a growing elderly population and local support for public education has overlooked a key component to public education finance: redistribution payments made by older households. A fuller accounting of these payments indicates that a growing elderly population might very well prove to be a boon to local public school students not a burden as has been previously suggested. Beginning with a national sample of suburban school districts, this article shows that a higher elderly to student ratio within a district actually increases per-student revenues, even after accounting for the downward pressure that older households place on tax rates. We then explore a specific channel through which elderly households redistribute resources to school-age children: local property taxes. Focusing on Chicago-area suburban school districts, we show that a rise in a community’s elderly to student ratio actually increases the level of per-student property tax redistribution that occurs.