Keywords

Leadership Preparation for Social Justice in Educational Administration

Ensuring that school leaders are prepared to foster academic achievement for all students in every school is vital, yet the professional standards and curricula that guide preparation programs for aspiring school leaders have struggled to keep pace with changing demographics and the intensified need to promote and support the learning of all students. This discrepancy has not occurred due to lack of effort; indeed, leadership preparation programs and educational researchers and faculty who study preparation continue to refine coursework and content to address changes in the field as well as changing student populations. A recent evaluation of 97 principal preparation programs found that programs:

[A]lign their curriculum to national standards, actively engage in formalized partnership with districts, engage their candidates in a variety of assessment practices for formative and summative purposes, and work to offer coursework that bridges classroom assignments to field-based experiences. (Anderson et al., 2017)

However, even in spite of concerted efforts to improve curricula and ensure that future school leaders are prepared through rigorous activities and assessments, the schools into which they enter remain inequitable places for many students, particularly those from racially and linguistically diverse backgrounds, those who live in poverty, those who have disabilities, and those whose gender and sexual identities fall outside of the mainstream. Furthermore, neither the standards themselves (Galloway & Ishimaru, 2015) nor many programs (Capper, Theoharis, & Sebastian, 2006; Furman, 2012; Gooden & Dantley, 2012; McKenzie et al., 2008) explicitly attend to issues of equity in a thorough way.

The inequitable contexts and consequences of schooling gives rise to what many in the field of educational administration and leadership call social justice leadership. Theoharis (2007, p. 223) defines social justice leadership as principals who “make issues of race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and other historically and currently marginalized conditions in the United States central to their advocacy, leadership practice, and vision.” Likewise, McKenzie et al. (2008, p. 111) define social justice leadership as those principals who have three goals: raising academic achievement for all students in their schools, preparing students to live as critical citizens in society, and assigning students to inclusive, heterogeneous classrooms that provide curricular access to all students. More broadly speaking, the emerging conversation around social justice urges school leaders to interrogate the assumptions that undergird inequitable school policies and practices (Cambron-McCabe & McCarthy, 2005). While there are nuances between definitions of social justice leadership, a common understanding is that social justice brings to the fore the experiences of students and families from marginalized groups and the related inequities in educational opportunities and outcomes these groups and individuals experience. Leadership for social justice, then, inherently involves identifying these inequitable opportunities and outcomes and replacing them with more equitable ones (Furman, 2012). While there is a strong suggestion that social justice leadership is important for students and schools, however, there is not definitive agreement on what a preparation curriculum focused on social justice leadership would look like.

Now more than perhaps ever is a critical time to revisit the potential for school leadership preparation programs to develop leaders for social justice. First, schools are becoming increasingly diverse (Ortman & Guarneri, 2009); as achievement for students from these diverse backgrounds continues to lag behind their peers (Reardon & Galindo, 2009; Vanneman, Hamilton, Baldwin Anderson, & Rahman, 2009), understanding what school leaders need to know and be able for a diversifying body of students is essential. At the same time, new leadership standards uphold a focus on educational excellence while reinforcing the importance of equity. The newest standards are “designed to ensure that educational leaders are ready to meet effectively the challenges and opportunities of the job today and in the future as education, schools and society continue to transform” with a goal of “more equitable outcomes” (National Policy Board for Educational Administration [NPBEA], 2015, p. 1). As of the writing of this chapter, preparation programs are beginning to adapt their programs in light of these new standards.

As leadership programs try to attend to the dual forces of increasing diversity and changes in professional standards, there is little available research on leadership preparation for social justice to guide their practice. The research base on leadership preparation for social justice is limited; indeed, the top journals in educational research barely touch upon the topic at all (Diem & Carpenter, 2012), and what literature does exist is primarily made up of individual qualitative case studies of programs or belief statements about what programs could or should include without specific guidance on what a successful program to prepare future leaders for social justice would include (McKenzie et al., 2008). Without a deeper knowledge base regarding what curriculum is needed to prepare future leaders for equity-focused leadership and why, the development of future leaders will remain ill-equipped to respond to the needs of a growing body of young people in schools and the leaders whose goal is to serve them.

Until very recently, the curricula of many leadership preparation programs have been guided by standards developed by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC), called the Standards for School Leaders , that focus broadly on visionary leadership, instructional improvement, effective management, inclusive practice, ethical leadership, and sociopolitical leadership (Galloway & Ishimaru, 2015). The Consortium was made up of states and other key stakeholders interested in American school leadership; its twofold goal was to create standards to reshape school administration and to point attention to the academic, policy, and practice domains related to in light of this move (Murphy, 2005). The ISLLC standards were designed to support the preparation and professional development of educational leaders, yet they were not universally embraced. Further, the standards did not explicitly address issues of race, class, ethnicity, ability, gender, sexuality, or other marginalized identities (Galloway & Ishimaru, 2015) and the assessment of whether students were able to meet the standards did not give individuals the opportunity to demonstrate a commitment to social justice (Cambron-McCabe & McCarthy, 2005).

The new set of standards, the Professional Standards for Educational Leadership (PSEL) , were developed for several reasons. First, the ISLLC standards, published, initially in 1996 and updated in 2008, were a product of their time and reflected what was known both about leadership, schools, and students. Now, however, both the college and career conditions into which we hope students will enter as well as the very students themselves continue to change. Additionally, with growing accountability pressures on students and schools, a more direct focus on achievement is necessary (NPBEA, 2015). Second, developing research on educational leadership has demonstrated the vital role that school leaders play in creating conditions for teachers and students to succeed. The new standards attend to these shifts in knowledge about leadership and the work and roles of school leaders in an attempt to be more reflective of the current requirements for success in the career of school leader.

Even as the research is clear on what high-quality leadership preparation should look like (Anderson et al., 2017; Davis & Darling-Hammond, 2012), and the research on social leadership as a practice grows increasingly robust (Bogotch, 2000; Dantley, 2002; Gewirtz, 1998), surprisingly few studies actually detail the specifics of what preparation for social justice leadership should look like in (Furman, 2012). The introduction of new standards provides an opening to reconsider how leaders are prepared, yet Galloway and Ishimaru (2015, p. 375) note that social justice tends to be perceived as a value rather than as a specific goal for aspiring and acting school leaders; by positioning it as such, the standards that guide preparation and practice separate “issues of ‘equity’ from core issues of ‘learning’ in ways that maintain rather than challenge the status quo.”

In this chapter, we seek to describe the current state of leadership preparation for social justice at the beginning of the introduction of new professional standards. The perspective offered is an inside-out one; one author is a professor in educational administration at a large urban research university, and the other is a local high-ranking district official in the area’s largest urban public school system. The ideas in this chapter emerge from a shared dedication to ensuring that all children are provided with not only an equitable but an excellent education and that future leaders are prepared to work with teachers, communities, families, and students to make such an excellent education possible.

It is helpful to visualize the relationship of the literature that frames this chapter’s essential argument. The lighter circles are where the majority of the research on social justice leadership and leadership preparation exist. The shaded darker area is the overlap that we title leadership preparation for social justice and which we argue needs empirical development (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Relationship of existing literature to chapter argument

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Social Justice Leadership

The United States of America is becoming more and more diverse. The percentages of racially and linguistically diverse students in classrooms outnumber the percentages of White students (Ortman & Guarneri, 2009). In a 10-year period from Fall 2003 to Fall 2013, the percentage of students enrolled in schools who were White decreased from 59% to 50% and is expected to continue to decline (National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], 2016). In 2015, the nation’s immigrant population, legal and illegal, was 13.2%, which represents the highest percentage in 94 years (Camarota & Zeigler, 2015). The nation’s Black population consistently maintains the highest poverty rates. In 2015, Black students had the highest poverty rate at 24% compared to White students who had the lowest poverty rate at 9% (United States Census Bureau, 2016). It is important to note that race, poverty, language, disability, and gender are not the only indicators of diversity. The sexual orientation of a student also plays a role in diversity issues. The LGBT students who are an emerging group in the schools who experience violence and are often ostracized must not be forgotten (Kosciw, Greytak, Bartkiewicz, Boesen, & Palmer, 2012).

Significant achievement gaps exist for students from many of these diverse populations. According to the NCES (2016), the 2014 graduation rate for public high schools was at an all-time high, but after disaggregating the data, it is clear there are still significant achievement gaps between subgroups. Per the NCES (2016), the adjusted cohort graduation rate (ACGR) for high schools for 2013–2014 was 82%. This percentage is an all-time high. Asian/Pacific Islander students had the highest ACGR at 89%, followed by White at 87%, Hispanic at 76%, Black at 73%, and American Indian/Alaska Native at 70% (NCES, 2016).

The growing diversity in the classroom and the subsequent gaps in achievement between various groups of students have exposed the inadequacies of teacher and leadership preparation programs to support improved student achievement in all subgroups (Obiakor & Algozzine, 2016). The concentration in diversity is highest in low-income, ethnically diverse, urban school systems wherein many districts must implement school reform models to raise student test scores and decrease achievement gaps (Esposito, Davis, & Swain, 2012). Considering the national attention given to student achievement and the need to “turn around” persistently struggling and struggling schools that are challenged by underachievement and poverty (Diem & Carpenter, 2012), high-quality leadership in low-income, ethnically diverse schools is fundamental (Leithwood, Harris, & Hopkins, 2008).

Why Examine Social Justice Leadership?

School leadership is an educational priority globally. Literature from the past four decades has underscored the crucial role of school leadership (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004; Leithwood & Riehl, 2003). Reform efforts place school leadership as the vanguard of leading school improvement efforts to increase student learning. Policymakers pursue educational reform strategies to improve student outcomes. These reform efforts include rigorous learning standards, scientifically based instructional tools and methodology, and greater accountability for the academic achievement of subgroups (Grissmer, Flanagan, Kawata, & Williamson, 2000; Heck, 1992).

At an address former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave at the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, Duncan (2009) stated:

I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, the classroom is the place to start. Great teaching is about so much more than education; it is a daily fight for social justice.

Accountability and related high-stakes testing were meant to improve educational outcomes for all students. High-stakes testing was designed to help educators evaluate testing data and close the achievement gap between minority and nonminority and low-income and non-low-income students (Raudenbush, 2004). Decades after the inception of NCLB, however, achievement gaps remain significant. McKenzie and Scheurich (2004) point out that even though NCLB mandated required schools to close the achievement gap, most schools have been successful with White middle-class students but not with students of color and especially those who live in poverty. Cambron-McCabe and McCarthy (2005) note, however, that simply disaggregating the scores by race and class is not enough to guarantee a high-quality education for poor and minority children. Rather, research indicates that leaders must commit to raising student achievement, improve school structures, recenter and enhance staff capacity, and strengthen the school culture and community (Theoharis, 2007). The literature also indicates the social justice leader is often faced with challenges that impede progress. Theoharis (2007) defines these challenges as coming from within the school and immediate community, such as staff attitudes and low teacher expectations, and from the district and beyond, including bureaucratic structures, a lack of resources, and, as will discussed later, inadequate leader preparation. Similarly, McKenzie and Scheurich (2004) identify what they term equity traps, such as deficit views about what students can do, ignoring race, avoiding the gaze (defined by the authors as avoiding the gaze or surveillance of parents), and paralogical beliefs and behaviors that rationalize teachers’ beliefs by blaming students. These challenges can create stress and feelings of isolation, and school leaders must develop coping mechanisms in response to the pressures of being a socially just leader (Sleeter, 2012).

What the Research Says About Social Justice Leadership

The literature yields abundant and significant analysis of leadership in education. While the research describes and reveals research on different forms of educational leadership styles such as “distributive,” “transformational,” “instructional,” “servant,” and “situational” leadership, studies on social justice leadership primarily focus on issues pertaining to the needs of marginalized groups of people and those who have been positive change agents for the educational community and for society. The literature also outlines the struggle educational leaders face when supporting students through social justice leadership.

Much of the literature on social justice focuses on the work of teachers. For example, Esposito, Davis, and Swain (2012) conducted a phenomenological study, on seven social justice educators in urban schools. Through the interviews, the teachers described the trouble they had in trying to get materials and resources to teach the children. Their desire to be social justice educators and leaders leads to financial and mental stress. The teachers continued their work because of the passion they had for the children. They also noticed academic gains and emotional benefits. But the social justice work often left them feeling overwhelmed.

Dover (2013) conducted a study on 24 educators who self-identified as educators for social justice. During the interviews, the educators discussed the lack of support they experienced in their fight to get materials and resources for their students. They were often fearful of admonishment from peers or their administrative staff who did not align with social justice work. Some teachers in the study reported that they were at risk for dismissal for expressing their concerns about inequity. Dover (2013) found that educators for social justice who worked in these conditions would eventually become too fearful to question institutional limitations to equality for students, however, encouraged them to continue the fight and find healthy support systems and coping mechanisms.

Agarwal (2011) found that preservice teachers often enter the teaching field with strong social justice intentions, however, find it challenging to integrate their desire to meet the vast needs of their children because of accountability demands. High-stakes testing and prescribed curriculum may influence the novice teachers who are committed to social justice to make choices between what they believe is relevant and impactful, versus what they must teach as prescribed by administrators or district staff. Agarwal (2011) found that there are many complications surrounding teaching for social justice, and social just leaders must be tenacious in their fight to support all students to reach their full potential.

It is evident that teachers face many barriers to teaching for social justice and that school principals and even district leaders play an important role in creating the conditions in which they can succeed. At the same time, however, principals themselves struggle to enact social justice leadership. Kose (2009) designed an in-depth qualitative multi-case study intended to evaluate how three school principals influenced their professional learning environment and turned their schools into transformative learning organizations. The study found that when the school principal incorporated social justice professional development as an intricate component of the professional development schedule, teachers learned to work collaboratively on social justice behaviors and ideas. Teachers in this study did not feel disconnected or alone.

Garza (2008) conducted an autoethnography that explains some of the challenges he was confronted with in his efforts to maintain his commitment to social justice. After assuming a superintendency for a small rural school district in Texas, he collected data in the form of a journal. His lived experiences that were codified in his journal were the sole source of the inquiry, which provides an analysis of his daily experiences for the first year of his first-time superintendency. Garza recorded many political and social barriers in his quest to be a leader for social justice. Garza’s findings illustrate how he survived the first year of his superintendency due to the fact that he did not compromise his philosophy of social justice. Although there were many oppressive political structures in his community, Garza’s social justice philosophy helped him to stay grounded in doing what was right for the children.

According to the research, it is vital that educational leaders ask students about their lived experiences. Among other things, the social justice principals must hear from the marginalized students to gauge their effectiveness. Angelides, Antoniou, and Charalambous (2010) provided conditions for success in the development of inclusive and socially just education conditions through four case studies of schools in Cyprus. The leadership is these schools support inclusion and are not static. The leaders in these schools operated with social justice in mind and created learning environments by listening to the voices of the children. The children were given ample and frequent opportunities to express what they felt supported their learning as well as what they saw as barriers. The school community listened and made adjustments in the learning environment as a result of the feedback given to them from the children.

Khalifa (2013) conducted a 2-year ethnographic study that examined the interactions of an urban alternative school principal, students, staff, and community members of the school. The principal taught the at-risk students and their parents to advocate for the students’ educational goals. The students and their parents were described as passive, but the principal taught them how to be self-advocates for their social justice. The research findings indicate the importance of teaching marginalized people techniques to be their own advocates. According to the research, there are many ways principals of social justice can include stakeholders in the process so they can be social justice leaders for themselves. Angelides (2012) and Khalifa (2013) findings support marginalized groups of people should be included in the social justice process. Their studies indicate that strong relationships between students and teachers, open-door policies, and having school leadership that becomes a part of the surrounding community can help marginalized groups of people develop self-advocacy skills and allows them to participate in the social justice process on their own behalf.

Mansfield (2014) found that listening to students and what they had to say about their experiences is vital to understanding a student’s view of their experiences in a transformative learning space. The information the students share informs leadership practice and research questions. Mansfield conducted an ethnography and used participant observation, photography, a student survey, and focus group interviews to uncover the feelings of the female students in a single-sex high school. Mansfield (2014) contends that transformative spaces for students cannot be developed without hearing the student voice. Student outcomes, academic and emotional, improve when their thoughts and needs are taken into consideration.

A principal’s commitment to social justice is fundamental when perusing an inclusive environment that maintains high academic standards and strong supports for all students. Salisbury (2006) hypothesized that although administrators and schools may differ in their definitions and stages of progression toward fully inclusive and socially just programming, similarities could be found in administrative qualities that are conducive to promoting these practices. These include committing to social justice, nurturing the staff’s attitude and core beliefs to embrace diversity, using language that supports the inclusion philosophy and soliciting support from parents and community. Salisbury notes that the principal is a key to developing inclusive and socially just schooling, so all children are successful.

Leadership Preparation

Research over the last several decades has highlighted the features of high-quality leadership preparation programs. Successful, or indeed exemplary programs, share certain features. Jacobson, McCarthy, and Pounder (2015) found these shared features to include a sufficient number of faculty members delivering instruction, program duration, and partnerships with districts. Additional research indicates that exemplary leadership preparation programs have five traits:

  1. 1.

    A theory of action centered on instructional leadership, facilitated through the integration of problem-based experiences and research-based knowledge (balance of theory and practice)

  2. 2.

    Highly selective, often with district supported candidate nominations

  3. 3.

    Either full- or part-time mentored internships at school or district office sites outside of candidates’ places of employment

  4. 4.

    Cohort-based models

  5. 5.

    Candidate competence assessed via multiple measures, including structured portfolios and aligned to best practices in adult learning (Davis & Darling-Hammond, 2012)

Anderson et al. (2017, p. 1) analyzed 97 preparation programs and found that they align their curriculum and assessment designs to national standards, actively engage in partnerships with districts, engage their candidates in a variety of assessment practices for formative and summative purposes, and work to offer coursework that bridges classroom assignments to field-based experiences.

Yet still, critiques of educational leadership preparation programs abound. Perhaps the most frequently raised concern regards the rigor of such programs. Hess and Kelly (2007) reviewed 54 programs and found that only a handful addressed the issue of accountability in the context of school management or school improvement and that most paid little attention to thinking about leadership outside the field of educational leadership itself. Crow and Whiteman (2016) reviewed the literature on leadership preparation and found that programs vary widely and that research on effective programs remains largely descriptive and reliant on case studies.

At the same time, a growing body of research suggests that traditional preparation programs give only minimal consideration to social justice concerns (Brown, 2004; Cambron-McCabe & McCarthy, 2005; Marshall, 2004). The features of excellent preparation listed above, for example, do not directly attend to issues of social justice, although perhaps such issues are deemed implicit within them. The literature on social justice leadership as a practice does not always inform administrator preparation for social justice (Capper et al., 2006), frequently having only an implications section for preparation at the end. Few programs assess their students’ cultural competence (Barakat, Reames, & Kensler, 2018) and frequently issues of diversity are only taken up in a special course during the program (Hawley & James, 2010). There is a deepening call from the field to support school leaders as they attempt to create equitable schools for their students (Cambron-McCabe & McCarthy, 2005; Furman, 2012) and to tighten the connection between what researchers note is a focus on the capacities of social justice leadership, such as critical consciousness, and the actual skills required to do such work (Furman, 2012), or what Trujillo and Cooper (2014, p. 143) say are “rich descriptions of what it looks like when leadership preparation programs enact a social justice framework.”

Le adership Preparation for Social Justice

Even in spite of calls to focus more on social justice leadership, the research that specifically attends to leadership preparation for social justice remains limited (Capper et al., 2006; Furman, 2012). Diem and Carpenter (2012) reviewed the literature from the top journals in educational research and found surprisingly little coverage of the topic. The literature does not address the details of what a program centered around social justice would look like (McKenzie et al., 2008) and is primarily small qualitative case studies that focus on specific individual programs or a set of theoretical frameworks without an action plan to prepare leaders for the work (Furman, 2012).

Diem and Carpenter’s review of the literature on social justice leadership preparation focused on research between the years 2006 and 2011. The authors conducted a Boolean search of the five to journals read by educational leadership professors (Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, American Educational Research Journal, Educational Administration Quarterly, and Educational Researcher) using the following operators:

  1. (a)

    Education leadership and race

  2. (b)

    Education leadership and race and color-blind

  3. (c)

    Education leadership and race and difference

  4. (d)

    Education leadership and race and meritocracy

  5. (e)

    Education leadership and critical reflection and silences

  6. (f)

    Leadership preparation and race

  7. (g)

    Leadership preparation and race and color-blind

  8. (h)

    Leadership preparation and race and difference

  9. (i)

    Leadership preparation and race and meritocracy

  10. (j)

    Leadership preparation and critical reflection and silences

This search showed that these journals “failed to adequately address racially-oriented social justice themes” (Diem & Carpenter, 2012, p. 100). The areas with the most articles were education leadership and race (20 articles, 11 in Educational Administration Quarterly), leadership preparation and race (45 articles, 30 in Educational Administration Quarterly), and leadership preparation and race and difference (37 articles, 28 in Educational Administration Quarterly).

In preparing for this chapter, we conducted an unscientific follow-up to Diem and Carpenter’s review. The dates were set from January 2012 to October 2018 to reflect publications after Diem and Carpenter’s search. For the three areas listed above, education leadership and race had only six articles in the five journals, all in Educational Administration Quarterly. Leadership preparation and race had four articles in the five journals, all in Educational Administration Quarterly. Finally, leadership preparation and race and difference had one article in the five journals, also in Educational Administration Quarterly. It should also be noted that several of these articles appeared in multiple searches; in total, there were six articles across these three searches.

This revised, albeit not rigorous, search proved surprisingly contradictory. Whereas research continues to indicate that the field is calling for more information about social justice leadership preparation, and the new standards, which were developed within these new date parameters, shine a light on the importance of equity and social justice for school leaders, there appears to be fewer published articles in the most-read journals in the field that address at least these particular aspects of social justice leadership. Furthermore, the scope of journals in which the research appears is narrower, down to one journal, albeit a highly influential one. These findings suggest an echo chamber in which few new voices are being added and the conversations are limited to one venue.

How can we, as a field, move this work forward? A review of the existing frameworks for leadership preparation for social justice provides an entry point. As noted throughout this chapter, a small selection of articles over the last 15 years have posited frameworks for what a preparation program founded upon and focused on social justice might look like. Across these frameworks, there are several shared features. These include theoretical perspectives, pedagogy, practices, content, and desired end goals.

Theoretical Perspectives

Many, if not most, of the frameworks come from a critical perspective. Gooden and Dantley (2012, p. 242) suggest programs must have a critical theoretical grounding, which they argue:

[U]usurps the comfort of confidence in the status quo, and discomfits the desire or the penchant to remain silent and detached from the arduous work of unmasking the ways our PK-12 institutions propagate the marginalizing of students of poverty and students of color.

Critical consciousness is also an essential element. Capper et al. (2006, p. 213) argue that programs which attend to critical consciousness equip students to “possess a deep understanding of power relations and social construction including white privilege, heterosexism, poverty, misogyny, and ethnocentrism.” Similarly, McKenzie et al. (2008, p. 122) define critical consciousness as “a continuous developmental journey that must be experienced across coursework and modeled by faculty.” Furman (2012) interweaves developing a critical consciousness across multiple dimensions, as do Diem and Carpenter (2012), who suggest that critical self-reflection is necessary as is working collaboratively with colleagues as critical co-investigators to question alone and together the inequities that exist and individuals’ and groups’ roles in remediating them.

Pedagogy

Not all of the frameworks directly address issues of pedagogy. Undergirding many of the frameworks is the concept of praxis. In Brown’s (2004) framework, the earliest of the frameworks reviewed for this chapter, she identifies three pedagogical strategies of critical reflection, rational discourse, and policy praxis. Praxis is an essential component of Furman’s framework as well; she defines praxis as both reflection and action. Gooden and Dantley (2012) suggest that social justice leadership preparation programs must have a pragmatic edge that supports praxis; by this they mean that students in programs must not only critically reflect on injustice and marginalization but also offer solutions or strategies to address them. McKenzie et al. (2008) address pedagogy more concretely, indicating that teaching and learning discussions in classes must prepare leaders become more involved with teachers and students than simply instructional supervision.

Practices

By practices, we mean to say the experiences students must have in their coursework to facilitate their development as social justice leaders. Across the frameworks, there is relatively little discussion of these experiences, other than praxis, which we categorized on its own, and other forms of reflection and self-analysis such as autoethnography (Brown, 2004; Furman, 2012). McKenzie et al. (2008) write that social justice leaders must implement systems and structures in their schools that promote equity, but there is no discussion of how this might look in the program itself; rather, this work is categorized into knowledge and content. Surprisingly, little about students’ internship or field experiences is discussed; instead, the focus is on what instructors can do in courses.

Content

In later frameworks, the content of what should be in leadership courses for social justice leadership preparation is described. Diem and Carpenter (2012) say that programs must examine five key concepts: color-blind ideology, misconceptions about human difference, merit-based achievement, critical self-reflection, and interrogation of race-related silences in the classroom. Likewise, Gooden and Dantley (2012) argue that five key components should be a prophetic voice, self-reflection serving as the motivation for transformative action, a grounding in critical theoretical construction, a pragmatic edge that supports praxis, and the inclusion of race language. Across the frameworks, there is little connection to the leadership standards, which tend to be influential in the content of preparation programs.

Desired End Goals

Finally, the leadership frameworks share a few desired end goals in common. By this, we mean the capacities that future leaders need to be successful social justice leaders. Brown (2004) suggests these capacities include awareness and acknowledgement of social justice. Reflecting back, critical consciousness is a desired end goal in many of the frameworks (it is also a theoretical and pedagogical strategy, as described above). A challenge to leadership preparation for social justice comes in the form of traditional assessments for candidates. Cambron-McCabe and McCarthy (2005) point out that the pencil-and-paper tests typically used for program completion and state credentialing do not give students a genuine opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to social justice. Recent research also shows that while leadership preparation programs positively correlate with cultural competence, cultural beliefs and motivation, and cultural knowledge – key elements of social justice leadership, it could be argued – there is not a significant relationship between program completion and students’ cultural skills (Barakat et al., 2018). Thus, a critique of leadership preparation for social justice remains that while dispositions are developed, there is little knowledge about how these dispositions turn into actions that successful social justice leaders take in their future placements.

Tensions in the Research

This brief review of the literature on leadership preparation for social justice has many positive aspects. Notably, it is evident that scholars in the field and practitioners in universities and PK-12 schools are increasingly focusing their efforts on developing educators for social justice. There is movement toward better understanding what a successful preparation program on social justice would like. We know that students must learn to reflect critically as well as act critically – the very notion of praxis at its best. Students need time to develop their social justice identities in a safe and welcoming place with faculty who are equally dedicated.

At the same time, it is increasingly clear that leadership preparation programs need to more concretely attend to the skills that program completers must have in order to become successful social justice leaders in the field. Evidence suggests that students leave with the knowledge and dispositions to question the status quo, critically self-reflect, and identify barriers for student achievement, but do not always have the skills or experiences necessary to actually do the work in practice. The research on social justice leaders presents discrete cases of individuals who exemplify social justice leadership, yet the literature nearly always ends with implications for preparation and a call to connect social justice leadership with leadership preparation.

Even as a small body of research on how to close this gap exists, the extant research on leadership preparation for social justice holds within it several tensions that warrant analysis. These tensions include candidate selection, faculty readiness, connection to standards, and program support in the field. Development of preparation programs oriented toward social justice must resolve these tensions before progress can be made.

Candidate Selection

As described above, one of the challenges of leadership preparation for social justice starts at the very beginning with candidate selection. McKenzie et al. (2008) argue that only students who already have a propensity for social justice leadership should be considered for admission. Undoubtedly, bringing in students predisposed to social justice thinking and action would strengthen programs, develop unity, and mean that faculty could begin the work of preparation for social justice at a more rapid pace. It must also be noted, though, that not all educators have a social justice orientation. If true equitable education is to become a reality in all schools, however, there remains the difficult challenge of initial development of social justice identity in all future leaders. Herein lies perhaps the largest challenge for preparation: how can leadership preparation programs, which typically are not long and have myriad skills and dispositions to develop in addition to social justice, do the heavy lifting of instilling a social justice propensity in students who do not already possess one? Limiting admission to those students who are initially social justice oriented potentially leaves social justice as an optional value, one that a leader can choose to have or not to have, rather than as a necessary skill (Galloway & Ishimaru, 2015). It also ensures that not every student will have access to a leader skilled in eliminating inequity and injustice.

Faculty Readiness

A second tension rests within the very people who admit students into preparation programs and teach the courses where social justice development should occur. While Cambron-McCabe and McCarthy (2005) note that faculty need to model the kinds of schools graduates need to create in their own university classrooms, Brown (2004) raises the critical point that most faculty in preparation programs have not been prepared to do the work of supporting social justice even if they are already oriented toward social justice. There is no discussion in the research about how to prepare faculty for the difficult work of equipping future administrators for social justice leadership. Much as McKenzie et al. (2008) argues that developing critical consciousness is a continuous journey for students, so to must it be for program faculty. More research is needed on where faculty might develop their own social justice orientation. Additionally, as with student selection, it must also be noted that having only some faculty with a social justice orientation in a program may limit social justice conversation to particular courses or dilute the overall message that programs send regarding the importance of equitable schooling. This silence on faculty readiness must be addressed to ensure that program faculty know how to provide the classroom pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment that are needed for social justice leadership.

Connection to Standards

A third tension in the preparation frameworks lies in how programs with a social justice orientation connect their work to the larger conversation about leadership preparation standards. In a surprising way, the two bodies of literature – high-quality leadership preparation and leadership preparation for social justice – do not really “speak” to one another. As described above, the research regarding leadership preparation focuses more on instructional leadership as well as the more technical aspects of programs such as cohort-based models, district connections, and internships. The literature does not address dispositions per se, and does not address in any meaningful way candidates’ orientations toward social justice. The standards that guide the curricula of preparation programs also do not address social justice; Galloway and Ishimaru (2015) highlight the earlier ISLLC standards’ limited mention of race, class, and other marginalized identities in schools. At the same time, the literature that provides frameworks for leadership preparation for social justice does not describe these more technical aspects. This gap means that it remains unclear how programs should embed these essential elements or what a social justice program would look like.

Program Support in the Field

Finally, the literature on leadership preparation for social justice is relatively silent on how program graduates can be supported in the field once they exit from their programs. McKenzie et al. (2008, p. 122) raise a vital point: “A short period of graduate studies alone is inadequate to prepare and support school leaders.” This last tension wraps in the previous three. Not all leaders (or teachers) are social justice oriented, so program graduates may find it difficult to network with colleagues about social justice issues when they are in their jobs. Program faculty are not necessarily prepared to support social justice leadership themselves, and may not know how to support leaders in the field as they try to make schools more equitable for students. Lastly, program curricula for social justice provide little guidance on postgraduate support for social justice leadership. Added together, these concerns mean that new social justice leaders may feel unsupported as they engage in the difficult work of social justice leadership. Indeed, as Theoharis (2007) points out, inadequate leadership preparation is a barrier for social justice leaders as they seek to do their work. More research is needed on the types of supports new social justice leaders need as they begin their work as school leaders.

Conclusion

As our title suggests, this chapter reviews the scholarship on social justice leaders, leadership preparation, and specifically leadership preparation for social justice to understand where the field is now and where perhaps the field should go in the future. As stated at the beginning, the time is ripe for such questioning. Schools are becoming increasingly diverse, and more knowledge is needed regarding how to prepare future school leaders for the work of making experiences and outcomes more equitable for all students. At the same time, the professional standards which guide both leadership practice and leadership preparation have taken the important turn toward equity. However, the research on preparation still needs to catch up to this shift; the literature on leadership preparation for social justice, and in particular what high-quality social justice leadership preparation actually looks like as opposed to what it could look like, remains scant. There is some important emerging research on this topic, but this research tends to be single case studies of individual programs.

Given these conditions, where can the field of educational administration go from here? First, it is clear that generally speaking, more research is needed on leadership preparation for social justice. Not just any research is needed, though. Specifically, more large-scale research is needed that tries to understand program impact (what is the relationship between students who graduate from programs oriented toward social justice and the achievement and outcomes of the schools and students they serve?). Second, more research is also needed regarding the frameworks for programs. The current research is the perfect starting point for programs to consider, but until these frameworks are “tested,” our understanding of them is limited. Qualitative research that describes programs’ experiences of enacting the frameworks would serve the field well. Third, research that goes beyond individual case studies would benefit the field. Such research might examine multiple programs to look for shared features that contribute to graduates’ success in the field. Fourth, more critical research is needed. The case studies about successful social justice leadership preparation programs tend to be written by the very faculty who serve in the programs. While their perspective is essential to understanding what makes these programs work as well as the challenges they face, the research would benefit from reviews by critical friends. Such research might include curriculum reviews of programs enacting social justice leadership preparation or interviews or surveys of participating students. Finally, research on leadership preparation for social justice needs to move out of the small number of journals in which it is published and into the larger conversation about social justice. The review of the literature presented earlier by Diem and Carpenter only looked at the top five journals. There is research in other educational administration journals as well. Even so, expanding the types of journals in which research in this area is published would amplify the message that social justice leadership and its concurrent preparation are vital to ensuring a healthy democracy, equitable outcomes for all students, and improved schools for all.

Until all students receive an excellent education, the work of social justice leaders remains critical to schools and communities. As we describe in this chapter, more knowledge about how to prepare such leaders is crucial to move this work forward. While there is a small body of work on leadership preparation for social justice, it is evident that more is needed to understand what kinds of experiences in and beyond preparation programs school leaders need to begin the work of raising and supporting achievement for all students.