The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine school improvement efforts in a large, U.S. urban high school with a predominantly minority student population. The case analysis highlights the challenging and dynamic aspects of school reform through three intersecting strands: socio-cultural, organizational, and personal dimensions of educational leadership.  

Background and European International Context

Ball (2010) warned in the 2009 European Conference on Educational Research keynote address that Europe was experiencing a shift in the governance of education that was dependent on the seductive “neo-liberal managerialism”.  In the US, the move for managing schools through the No Child Left Behind Act placed considerable accountability school leaders, especially those working in impoverished communities, forcing principals to focus on ways to produce results. As such, Explorer High School (EHS), located in the inner city of a large urban city in the southern United States region with a complicated race-based political history, provides a perspective for addressing many racial, socio-economic, and political accountability challenges.

While exploring the multidimensional structure of school leadership, a consortium of educational researchers under the auspices of the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), examine successful school leadership in a variety of international contexts. The focus on successful principals working under challenging school and community contexts (e.g., high poverty levels, high mobility rates, high adult illiteracy and unemployment rates, high crime rates, etc.) is of great interest to many stakeholders pursuing sustainable improvement agendas. Evidence across international contexts presented practices of successful school leadership including: building vision; understanding and developing people; redesigning the organization; and managing the teaching and learning process (Leithwood, Day, Sammons, Harris, & Hopkins, 2006). Importantly, the network of researchers noted that these core practices led to success when enacted in concert within specific contextual (cultural, social, and political) milieu. For example, US studies found a principal’s successful leadership reflected a strong sense of efficacy nurtured by a supportive family, a passionate and unwavering commitment to students, and a strong partnership with the community (Garza, Murakami-Ramalho, & Merchant, 2011), and principals’ ability to redesigned schools with a self-renewing capacity as well as maintaining a sense of purpose and direction, high expectations, caring, and an internalized accountability for student learning (Jacobson, Johnson, & Ylimaki’s, 2011). Klar & Brewer (2014) examined an American middle school and noted the principal engaged the rural cultural context to encourage a “family” atmosphere and regularly participating in service learning activities and charity events.

From international contexts at two Australian schools, Drysdale, Goode, & Gurr (2011) found that two principals’ leadership styles – strongly articulated personal values, personal qualities and characteristics, effective relationship building, and strategic interventions – were common denominators attributed to sustained improvement in the schools. Similarly, a Norwegian study (Moller, Vedoy, Presthus, & Skedsmo, 2011) revealed leadership dimensions consistent with those identified in the Australian context, including: strong personal values (persistence, resilience, and optimism); commitment to the philosophy of schooling; and promoting good relationships.  A comparison of these bounded case studies of the principal’s contribution to school improvement in high needs schools leads us to theorize that effective school leadership is enacted on three different scales: the personal, the organizational, and the cultural.

Research Questions

The overarching research questions are:

1. What were the practices of an urban, high school principal’s efforts for school improvement?
2. How do socio-economic factors affect the history and perception of the school?
3. What lived and educational experiences inform the principal’s school leadership and practice?

Theoretical Framework

To address the research questions, several theoretical approaches were considered including Social Justice, Culturally Responsive Leadership, CRL (Santamaria, 2013), and Organizational Theory (Mintzberg, 1984). 

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