This article expands a more inclusive parental engagement framework by broadening notions of educational leadership using an example of organizing actions of Latina parent leaders amid a hostile anti-immigrant climate within an urban elementary school. Researchers draw on Yosso’s community cultural wealth framework to analyze how a Latinx parent group and parent leaders activated and nurtured community cultural wealth. The findings describe the ways in which the Latinx parent group fostered community cultural wealth and, in doing so, cultivated parental educational leadership. The authors discuss how the Latinx parent leaders then negotiated tensions that emerged between the Latinx parent group and school officials when a new parent organization was established at the school. We use this study to both disrupt traditional notions of educational leadership and discuss the implications it has for principal preparation programs.

This study examines a “critical case” of one school district’s efforts to develop and implement a standards-based curriculum. The study was conducted from two competing perspectives that have dominated organizational analysis in education: the rational and the institutional. The findings demonstrate that the district took an expressly rationalistic approach by using standards and a corresponding criterion-referenced test to focus teachers’ instruction on common sets of outcomes. However, the findings suggest that, lacking a clear instructional philosophy, the district also took an institutional approach, in part. Its approach to development and implementation of the standards-based curriculum resulted in district standards that fell below state standards, a narrowing of curriculum and instructional strategies, and professional development and instructional supervision that lacked an instructional focus.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the meaning of teacher leadership from teachers’ perspectives. The authors examine teachers’ practice of and talk about legitimate sources of power and influence in the context of an urban high school reform. Design: This is an interpretive study of teacher leadership situated in one small high school within a large urban high school (comprised of six small school communities) in a Midwestern city. The school was engaged in a technology-driven, project-based reform requiring team teaching and high levels of teacher involvement in curricular, pedagogical, and other organizational decision making. Researchers conducted monthly observations and two to three in depth-interviews with each participant and collected and analyzed relevant documents during the 2007-08 school year. Participants included all seven teachers in the focus school, the small school administrator, and a district-level administrator. Findings: Data revealed a cultural logic that afforded some teachers more authority than others. Three of the seven teachers were repeatedly identified as being the leaders (despite other teachers actively influencing organizational activities). Analysis of teachers’ talk about teacher leadership and related interactions revealed patterns falling into three categories: organizationally legitimized roles, institutionally legitimized content area expertise, and gendered leadership roles. Significance: Because leadership is a cultural construct itself, this study brings to the foreground the meaning(s) of teacher leadership from teachers’ perspectives and how these meanings reward or eclipse actual leadership practices. This is especially salient for researchers and leaders interested in the role of teacher leadership in nurturing democratic school communities.

A problematic trend in the nature of work in educational settings has been the declining emphasis on a professional orientation to work and a growing emphasis on more technocratic approaches. This international trend has led to increased attention on skills and competencies and lessened attention to values, beliefs, motivations, energy, and identities. This article, based on a case study of a high school leader in a reform setting, identifies the professional identities negotiated by the leader with various constituencies and how these identities are used to build trust and gain political capital in order to achieve reform.