Papers by Jason Salisbury
Social Justice Leadership in Educational Market Contexts
Proceedings of the 2021 AERA Annual Meeting
Getting out the Way: Creating Space for Youth of Color to Engage in Transformative Leadership
Proceedings of the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting
The Politics of Student Voice: The Power and Potential of Students as Policy Actors
Educational Policy, 2021
Historically and contemporarily students have been critical to bringing issues of justice in educ... more Historically and contemporarily students have been critical to bringing issues of justice in education policy to the fore. Yet, there have been limited formal spaces that elevate student voice scholarship in educational policy. In response, this Politics of Education Association (PEA) Yearbook Issue of Educational Policy aims to serve as a platform for opening up new areas for investigation, especially connections between theory to practice specific to student voice in educational policy and the politics of education. This collection of feature articles and research briefs offer diverse examples of how students are influencing change in education policy and practice, while also presenting the political realities and tensions that emerge when students participate in policy leadership activities.
Teachers College Record, 2017
Background: Across the recent research on school leadership, leadership for learning has emerged ... more Background: Across the recent research on school leadership, leadership for learning has emerged as a strong framework for integrating current theories, such as instructional, transformational, and distributed leadership as well as effective human resource practices, instructional evaluation, and resource allocation. Yet, questions remain as to how, and to what extent teachers and leaders practice the skills and tasks that are known to be associated with effective school leadership, and to what extent do teachers and leaders agree that these practices are taking place in their school. Purpose of the Study: We examine these issues through applying a congruency-typology model to the validation sample of the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL), (117 schools across the US, including 3,367 teachers and their school leaders) to examine the extent to which there may be significantly different subgroups of teacher and leader responders to the survey, how these subgrou...
Leadership Actions that Create Equitable Learning Opportunities for Students of Color: Impacting the Success of Freshmen of Color in Urban High Schools
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2017
BackgroundAcross the recent research on school leadership, leadership for learning has emerged as... more BackgroundAcross the recent research on school leadership, leadership for learning has emerged as a strong framework for integrating current theories, such as instructional, transformational, and distributed leadership as well as effective human resource practices, instructional evaluation, and resource allocation. Yet, questions remain as to how, and to what extent, teachers and leaders practice the skills and tasks that are known to be associated with effective school leadership, and to what extent do teachers and leaders agree that these practices are taking place in their school.Purpose of the StudyWe examine these issues through applying a congruency-typology model to the validation sample of the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL), (117 schools across the United States, including 3,367 teachers and their school leaders) to examine the extent to which there may be significantly different subgroups of teacher and leader responders to the survey, how these ...
“School’s a Lie”: Toward Critical Race Intersectional Pedagogy for Youth Intellectual Activism in Policy Partnerships
Educational Policy, 2021
Equity-oriented school improvement driven by neoliberal policies focuses attention on a narrow ra... more Equity-oriented school improvement driven by neoliberal policies focuses attention on a narrow range of inequities. Such policies fail to achieve substantive transformations that address educational constraints experienced by multiply-marginalized youth of color. We engage a critical race and intersectional feminist examination of our pedagogy in a youth voice initiative designed to facilitate multiply-marginalized youth of color participation in district policy partnership. Our analysis presents practices that were consequential for supporting youth intellectual activism in policy conversations. We propose a model for critical race intersectional pedagogy that relates these practices and underlying ideological principles to supporting expansive transformative policy partnerships.
Creating diverging opportunities in spite of equity work: educational opportunity and whiteness as property
Whiteness and Education, 2021
ABSTRACT This qualitative study of an urban high school draws on critical race theory’s tenet of ... more ABSTRACT This qualitative study of an urban high school draws on critical race theory’s tenet of whiteness as property and the notion that educational opportunity is a race-conscious construct to interrogate the impacts of school improvement work intended to increase educational opportunities for students of colour. Educational opportunity is defined as students having access to culturally relevant pedagogy, highly qualified teachers, rigorous curricula, and appropriate resources (fiscal, technological, texts, learning spaces, etc.). Findings demonstrate that the school’s equity-minded work actually increased educational opportunities for white students while limiting opportunities for students colour. The inequities in educational opportunity along racial lines was the result of leadership’s inability to decouple educational opportunity as an expectation of whiteness and resist the bullying forces of whiteness. Implications demonstrate how schools can decouple connections between educational opportunities and whiteness and how researchers can critically investigate equity-minded school improvement.
Anti-racist Activist Leadership
Strengthening Anti-Racist Educational Leaders, 2022
Relinquishing power: creating space for youth of color leaders
Journal of Educational Administration, 2021
PurposeThe purpose of this manuscript is to demonstrate how school and district leaders supported... more PurposeThe purpose of this manuscript is to demonstrate how school and district leaders supported the youth of color leadership initiatives at the district and school levels in ways to advance youth agencies and transformative change. The specific research question guiding this study was What actions do formalized leaders engage in to share leadership opportunities with the youth of color that protect student agencies and control?Design/methodology/approachA multi-site qualitative case study design was used, drawing on the understanding of shared leadership and student voice as analytical lenses.FindingsLeaders across both sites supported the youth of color leadership in three ways: (1) being open to new and different sources of knowledge related to persistent issues of inequity in their schools; (2) initiating spaces for the youth of color to engage in leadership and (3) buffering student leaders from outside pressures.Research limitations/implicationsThis research demonstrates the...
“It’ll make my brother’s education better than mine. We need that.”: Youth of Color Activating Their Community Cultural Wealth for Transformative Change
Leadership and Policy in Schools, 2020
This research presents a counterstory to traditional views of leadership by demonstrating how two... more This research presents a counterstory to traditional views of leadership by demonstrating how two groups of youth of color were able to draw on their community cultural wealth to engage in transfor...
International Journal of Leadership in Education, 2020
This research examines social justice leaders' community activism in response to three local and ... more This research examines social justice leaders' community activism in response to three local and national political contexts. Grounded in literature that advances ecological models of school leadership, we analyzed how seven urban school leaders conceptualized community activism as linked to school outcomes, and how leaders conducted activism work. Findings demonstrate that various political contexts at local and national levels catalyzed and motivated participants' community activism, but participants' primary purpose for activism was to promote student equity within their school buildings. This reflects ecological models in which schools and communities are conceptualized as interconnected with a reciprocal relationship of impact. Our examination of motivations related to political contexts provides insights into how these contexts impact schools and school leaders. This piece also contributes to the growing body of literature around socially-just leadership, particularly to the limited subset of literature on leaders' out-of-school justice work. Finally, among other implications and directions for future research, we conclude that community activism should form a crucial component of socially-just school leadership and taken up in the research as such.
Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 2020
This article investigates how the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) redesigned its three-co... more This article investigates how the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) redesigned its three-course instructional leadership strand to operate as a continuous three-semester learning experience that sequenced and emphasized an active learning pedagogy. This accounting elaborates the design and use of this pedagogy to support aspirant leaders in progressing through a continuum of knowers, assessors, and demonstrators of instructional leadership practice. Finally, we discuss the tensions that emerged from this approach to instructional leadership learning.
“They Didn’t Even Talk About Oppression”: School Leadership Protecting the Whiteness of Leadership through Resistance Practices to a Youth Voice Initiative
Journal of Education Human Resources, 2020
In this article, we deepen understandings of leadership resistance to youth voice initiatives (YV... more In this article, we deepen understandings of leadership resistance to youth voice initiatives (YVIs) by interrogating the resistant actions of a group of white district leaders who initiated a student voice program to support transformative district improvement. We engaged a fusion collaborative autoethnographic research design rooted in critical race methodology to analyze our experiences of district resistance to a youth voice initiative. Our analytical narrative reveals how district leaders’ web of resistant practices obscured their goals, allowing them to exploit a group of students of color, district teacher, and university partners to promote their public image of being leaders committed to justice and equity. The specific resistant practices that leaders engaged in included (a) maintaining a lack of transparency around their goals for the initiative; (b) controlling the agenda of all interactions with youth and facilitators; (c) positioning course instructors in contradictory...
American Journal of Education, 2020
This qualitative case study employing a critical race theory methodology uses Derrick Bell's conc... more This qualitative case study employing a critical race theory methodology uses Derrick Bell's conceptualization of racial fortuity to examine the ways leaders at Carver High School responded to accountability pressures related to supporting students of color. Findings highlight how school leaders' espoused racially just improvement initiatives and definitions of success were actually instantiations of racial fortuity where students of color were forced to involuntarily sacrifice their educational opportunities while leaders were positioned as the primary beneficiaries of this equity-minded work. The implications highlight the need for leaders to bring communities and students of color into school improvement efforts intended to advance racially just educational opportunities for youth of color. There have been sizable shifts in how K-12 schools across the United States are evaluated by policy makers and governmental agencies and, as a result, how they are viewed by the general public over the last 20 years. Much of this shift is due to heightened accountability, which has increased the public availability of data on school performance and driven conversations of racialized achievement gaps to the forefront. Although all schools face these pressures, high schools operating in urban spaces that serve predominately students of color have most acutely been exposed (Diamond 2012; Heilig and Darling-Hammond 2008). Much of this scrutiny is grounded in the well-documented accountability and achievement gap-related statistics for urban high schools regularly splashed across news stories. At the same time, there has been little public debate on what success and learning mean for students-it is graduation and performance on accountability assessments (Apple 2004; Darling-Hammond 2007)-and more importantly whether the current accountability regime leads to equitable and
Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 2019
This introduction to the special issue "Improving Schools by Strategically Connecting Equity Lead... more This introduction to the special issue "Improving Schools by Strategically Connecting Equity Leadership and Organizational Improvement Perspectives" establishes the need for and presents an overview of the issue's empirical research accounts of how anti-racist and social justice-oriented school leaders established organizational structures and enacted collaborative routines to sustain equity, social justice, and anti-racist reforms to benefit students prone to educational under-performance.
Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 2019
This qualitative case study demonstrates how anti-racist instructional leaders at Oakwood High Sc... more This qualitative case study demonstrates how anti-racist instructional leaders at Oakwood High School were able to leverage organizational improvement tools to support sustained school-wide teacher usage of culturally relevant practices. Findings demonstrate how leaders developed a web of organizational structures, routines, and artifacts that nurtured the deprivitization of teacher practice and collective teacher growth in their adoption of culturally relevant practices. Furthermore, Findings demonstrate the structures, routines, and artifacts were successful because they: (a) focused on race and racism; (b) recognized that teaching is a social practice; and (c) responded to teacher and organizational needs. This research highlights the need for educational researchers and leadership preparation programs to think about how the fields of organizational improvement and anti-racist leadership overlap and can support one another.
Journal of School Leadership, 2019
This qualitative multiple case study assesses two locally designed instructional artifacts create... more This qualitative multiple case study assesses two locally designed instructional artifacts created to support teacher enactment of culturally relevant educational (CRE) practices. Attention is paid to artifact’s ability to support collective teacher use of CRE and the ways that artifacts acted as proxies for instructional leadership. Findings demonstrate that for artifacts to be successful tools in leading building-wide instructional change, they need to nurture teacher collaboration on supporting youth of color and position professional practice as needing to change. Finally, I analyze the differences between the two instructional artifacts to demonstrate how one was more successful at shifting collective practice. 
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Papers by Jason Salisbury