This study explores how educational champions--teachers who initiate unsolicited innovation--construct their entrepreneurial endeavors while interacting with principals' management styles and how that interaction influences the sustainability of teachers' initiatives. Through semistructured interviews (N = 71) and analysis anchored in grounded…

Recent studies of school discipline (Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002; see also, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, n.d.) have called for greater scrutiny over treatment of students in varying demographic contexts. Minimal research, however, has grappled with the ethics of disciplinary practices using legal data. Utilizing information…

Educational leaders are bound by legal and ethical imperatives to make certain that all children have access to an education and the opportunity to learn. To better understand how law and ethics intersect, this article adopted the cultural study perspective to analyze U.S. Supreme Court opinions for language revealing the intersection of law and…

Student speech has and continues to be a contested issue in schools. The Supreme Court ruled in "Tinker" that students do not shed their rights at the schoolhouse gate; in the "Kuhlmeier" and "Fraser" decisions, however, the Court gave school officials greater latitude in regulating student speech, especially when it bears the imprimatur of the…

This article is a reflection on the concept of justice as practiced in the public schools in the United States. Examples of justice denied or misconstrued are included. Cases, stories, and concepts invite educational leaders to reflect anew on delivering justice in education to all children. Underlying the article is the belief that understanding…

This purpose of the study was to explore moral literacy and legal reasoning through educational leadership decision making. Participants in the study were students enrolled in a law and ethics course in an educational leadership graduate program. Each student drafted a personal code of ethics at the beginning of the course. Throughout the course,…

Providing commentary on this "Journal of School Leadership's" special issue, "Constructing a Bridge Between Law and Social Justice: An Ethical Journey," has been not only a daunting task because of the complex nature of this topic but also a humbling experience because of the superior quality of these articles. At the same time, it is most…

This article reports on the changes that 15 vice principals experienced in their transition from teaching to administration. In-depth interviews were used to explore the personal change process that occurred, and data were analyzed for recurring themes to create a composite picture of this transition process. The findings illustrate that the…

The focus of this study was to explore the relationships between the authentic leadership of building principals and the trust, engagement, and intention to return of their teaching staffs. School principals (n = 28) and their teaching staffs (n = 633) were surveyed. Teacher trust and engagement were found to be significantly related to principal…

This article examines the redesign of two educational leadership programs at different institutions: a medium-sized public university and a small private university. Both were committed to principals of ethical leadership. Each program faced a state mandate to redesign. In one case, state policy focused on detailed accountability measures based on…

A number of scholars are exploring the district context in which schools are embedded. These studies suggest the importance of the district office as a support or constraint to the work of schools and offer strategies for building relations between district and site leaders. While this is an important task, what is frequently overlooked is that…

This study presents four teacher reflections from action research projects ranging from kindergarten to adult school improvements. A teacher leadership matrix guided participants to connect teaching and learning theory to best practices by exploring uncharted territory within an iterative cycle of research and action. Teachers developed the…

This study reports findings from a qualitative case study of three high schools during the 2008 presidential election. The schools appeared to promote the political ideologies of their corresponding populations, and in the two predominately ideologically homogenous schools, political intolerance often appeared to affect teachers' instruction and…

Evaluation policy typically emphasizes summative judgment, but teacher evaluation also has the potential to provide formative feedback to individual teachers and feedback to focus and strengthen organizational systems to improve teaching practice. This study focuses on feedback provided through the evaluation process, with a particular emphasis on…

Homeless adolescents, known as "unaccompanied youth," constitute a small but important portion of the overall homeless population, one that needs particular attention at school. In this article, we review existing literature to provide a background for educational leaders, researchers, and policymakers hoping to understand the phenomenon of…