Purpose: This study examines school climate and student achievement trends under an ambitious school leadership residency program in an urban school district. The 2-year leadership residencies were intensive, combining at least 370 hours of professional development with on-the-job training, in which aspiring school principals held either…

Purpose: Collaborative workgroups can be particularly fruitful sites for teachers to learn and improve. Prior research has illustrated how teachers' engagement in collaboration differs across school contexts. However, this research offers little guidance for leaders hoping to encourage collaborative learning among teachers in their school.…

Purpose: Building upon the positive findings from culturally sustaining pedagogical studies, this paper explores how culturally sustaining approaches might operate on an organizational level. Examined in the context of dual language bilingual education (DLBE), this paper proposes a conceptually and empirically-guided culturally and linguistically…

Purpose: While studies of collective leadership tend to focus on administrators and teachers, schools have other staff present that contribute to leadership in ways that affect the students. We focus on school resource officers (SROs), which have become increasingly common in suburban, predominately White schools and elementary schools because,…

Purpose: School leadership is fundamental in efforts to successfully implement school reform and improve student and teacher learning. Although there is an abundant amount of research on school leaders' formal training, assessment, and practice, little is known about their informal professional learning. In other words, how do school leaders learn…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to provide insight to the multiple ways that school leaders resist, avoid, or block LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, queer, and questioning) professional development for their staff and, thus, resist the conversations around school responsibility to these students and families. Research…

Purpose: This article investigates how school leaders make sense of social justice and democracy in their practice in two settings, a high-stakes testing and accountability context, the San Francisco Bay Area, California, and a low-stakes testing and accountability context, Norway. It demonstrates how leaders view relationships among education,…

Purpose: Research finds that the attitudes of principals and teachers create an atmosphere for learning, often referred to as school climate, that influences school effectiveness. Other research shows that atmospheres of trust, shared vision, and openness create positive school climate conditions. Little is known, however, about how these climates…

This article reports findings of a collaborative research project examining and seeking to improve the schooling experiences of a small but growing population of Latina/o students in a small-town secondary school over a 4-year period. The school was studied through ethnographic methods and surveys in 2005 and 2008. Initial findings were shared…

Purpose: Working from the driving research question--"is the explicit consideration of race present in the ISLLC and ELCC standards?"--this article explores the implications of a school leadership landscape reliant on a collection of color-blind leadership standards to guide the preparation and practice of school leaders. In doing so, we…

The concept of "organizational climate" is described briefly in this article; the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (the most well-known conceptualization and measure of elementary school climate) is evaluated; and the successful refinement and empirical testing of a revised, more parsimonious questionnaire, are discussed.…

Outlines the development and use of the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (OCDQ-RS) developed for use in secondary schools by Rutgers University. It is a 34-item climate instrument that measures two aspects of principal leadership and five aspects of school interaction. Includes 4 tables. (MD)

Although researchers and reformers consider school climate an important aspect of effective schools, the concept is difficult to measure. This paper uses a health metaphor to conceptualize and measure school climate. It examines relationships between school health and student achievement in a sample of New Jersey middle schools. Organizational…

The theory-driven Organizational Health Inventory was compared to the empirically derived Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire in predicting student achievement and teachers' commitment to the school. After controlling for the socioeconomic status of the sampled 58 schools, only academic emphasis contributed significantly to student…

Examines the managerial systems and organizational climates of alternative and traditional public high schools. Three of the four administrative variables show a distinct difference between the two types of schools. (Author/IRT)