Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Scholarly Works

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  • Publication
    American imperial exceptionalism? Texas secondary World History depictions of American empire, 1925–2016
    (Taylor & Francis, 2024-09-11) Jackson, Stephen
    This article explores the connection between American exceptionalism and empire denialism by examining high-school World History textbooks approved for use in the state of Texas from the 1920s to 2016. Scholarship suggests that the powerful ideology of American exceptionalism is deeply uneasy about the role of the United States as an imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But despite this widespread assumption, World History textbooks for the past century have routinely labelled the United States an empire, and directly compared US actions with those of European colonising powers. Some textbooks portrayed this as a unique and aberrant time in US history. But other textbook accounts over the past century have made the case that US imperialism brought about material and political benefits to colonised peoples. In other words, a common thread in World History textbooks suggests that America created an exceptional empire. American imperialism was linked to an underlying narrative of the spread of European or Western civilisation, viewed as a cornerstone of modern world history.
  • Publication
    Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education: A Practical Guide
    (University of Kansas, 2024-08-07) Twombly, Susan B.
    This book provides an overview of assessment and evaluation methods applied to higher education. Drawing on numerous ideas from a wide range of sources, the book presents evaluation as first and foremost an exercise in asking good questions about the programs offered. The book is broader in focus than traditional books on student learning outcomes assessment by focusing on other evaluation purposes, namely needs assessment and developing a logic model. Additionally, It provide many examples from various units found on any campus.
  • Publication
    British History is Their History: Britain and the British Empire in the History Curriculum of Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia 1930-1975
    (FahrenHouse, 2017) Jackson, Stephen
    This article investigates the evolving conceptions of national identity in Canada and Australia through an analysis of officially sanctioned history textbooks in Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia. From the 1930s until the 1950s, Britain and the British Empire served a pivotal role in history textbooks and curricula in both territories. Textbooks generally held that British and imperial history were crucial to the Canadian and Australian national identity. Following the Second World War, textbooks in both Ontario and Victoria began to recognize Britain’s loss of power, and how this changed Australian and Canadian participation in the British Empire/Commonwealth. But rather than advocate for a complete withdrawal from engagement with Britain, authors emphasized the continuing importance of the example of the British Empire and Commonwealth to world affairs. In fact, participation in the Commonwealth was often described as of even more importance as the Dominions could take a more prominent place in imperial affairs. By the 1960s, however, textbook authors in Ontario and Victoria began to change their narratives, de-emphasizing the importance of the British Empire to the Canadian and Australian identity. Crucially, by the late 1960s the new narratives Ontarians and Victorians constructed claimed that the British Empire and national identity were no longer significantly linked. An investigation into these narratives of history will provide a unique window into officially acceptable views on imperialism before and during the era of decolonization.
  • Publication
    Teaching How Official History Is Made: State Standards as Primary Sources
    (Oxford University Press, 2024-06) Jackson, Stephen
    This article traces the controversial rise and uses of state history standards for K-12 education and offers teachers a flexible lesson plan that encourages them to draw upon the standards in their own state to help students better understand the complexities of how local constructions of official knowledge are formulated. Jackson provides a quick history of the rise of state history standards in the American context beginning in the 1970s and 1980s; an ensemble of discussion questions about what history standards include, what they leave out, and how they balance critical thinking and content coverage; and a writing assignment that asks students to identify and revise what they see as a problematic single history standard.
  • Publication
    The Place of World History in South Dakota’s Failed 2021 Social Studies Standards Revision Process
    (World History Connected, 2023-02-02) Jackson, Stephen
    An alarming feature of public education in the United States since 2020 has been a highly coordinated and fiercely combative movement from the right seeking to root out and remove Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the schools. CRT is a legal theory developed decades ago that is only rarely a part of publicly funded curricula at the primary or secondary level. In practice, the term CRT is used in a nebulous fashion that 1 bears little resemblance to the theory it purports to oppose. This movement is a reaction to the provocative 1619 Project published by the New York Times specifically, and to movements for racial justice such as Black Lives Matter more broadly. Responding to 2 the 1619 Project in September of 2020, the Trump administration created the 1776 Commission to historically justify American exceptionalism, largely by downplaying the centrality of slavery and by highlighting the significance of American founding ideals as expressed in the late 18th century. Over the past two years dozens of state legislatures 3 have passed legislation banning CRT or the teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ in public schools. Most of the scholarly and public attention surrounding the anti-CRT movement has rightly focused on American history education. World history, the second-most 5 important history course taught in U.S. public schools, is only rarely considered within this context. Using the contentious standards revision process of 2021 in South Dakota 6 as a case study, this article will trace how the strident nationalism undergirding the anti-CRT movement can affect world history curricula.
  • Publication
    Introduction to the Forum: Standards and World History
    (World History Connected, 2023-02-02) Jackson, Stephen
    World historians largely reject Eurocentric approaches to history by embracing a global approach to course content focusing on connections and exchanges across time and space. But this can lead to a multitude of organizational frameworks and an even greater diversity of content selection. There is no consensus vision amongst world historians for what content, organization, scope, sequence, or interpretive framework is optimal for a world history education. The vibrancy of the field of world history is therefore in tension with the bureaucratic process of K-12 education in the United States, in which every state produces mandated guidelines known as standards that legally enforce a particular vision for world history education. This forum explores the conceptual, political, and practical questions that arise from the production of state standards. Despite the headline-grabbing attention that controversies over standards can easily generate, we should perhaps start by exploring the extent to which these documents directly affect the teaching of world history. At a recent panel in the Midwest History Association conference on the subject of Difficult Histories, I asked veteran world history teachers Tom Barker and Eileen Orzoff-Baranyk about the effect state standards had on their day-to-day teaching styles. They both replied that, though they 1 of course drew upon state standards, their teaching was much more informed by their own expertise and background on the subject. Indeed, they suggested that unless there was a statewide standardized test or a district common assessment on the subject, standards documents are difficult to enforce. This accords well with research from educators, which indicate that teachers can be resistant to sweeping changes in how they do their work.
  • Publication
    The Hillsdale Effect: South Dakota’s Troubling New Social Studies Standards
    (National Council for the Social Studies, 2023-11) Jackson, Stephen
    South Dakota’s teachers will face difficult challenges of implementation, pedagogy, and content when their state’s new, politically influenced, social studies standards go into effect in 2024.
  • Publication
    Religious Education and the Anglo-World: The Impact of Empire, Britishness, and Decolonisation in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand
    (Brill, 2020) Jackson, Stephen
    Focusing on Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, “Religious Education and the Anglo-World” historiographically examines the relationship between empire and religious education. In each case the analysis centres on the foundational moments of publicly funded education in the mid- to late-nineteenth centuries when policy makers created largely Protestant systems of religious education, and frequently denied Roman Catholics funding for private education. Secondly, the period from 1880 to 1960 during which campaigns to strengthen religious education emerged in each context. Finally, the era of decolonisation from the 1960s through the 1980s when publicly funded religious education was challenged by the loss of Britishness as a central ideal, and Roman Catholics found unprecedented success in achieving state aid in many cases. By bringing these disparate national literatures into conversation with one another, the essay calls for a greater transnational approach to the study of religious education in the Anglo-World.
  • Publication
    Rethinking the time spent at school: Could flexibility improve engagement and performance for students and teachers?
    (Springer, 2023-05-03) Watterston, Jim; Zhao, Yong
    Is it possible to reduce the time students spend in classrooms and schools? Would such a reduction be better for learning and retaining teachers? How should learning be more flexibly enacted in the post-pandemic era? This article discusses the possibilities of rethinking school participation and calls for schools to reconsider the necessity and costs/benefits of forcing students and teachers to be physically present in schools for the traditional 5 days a week.
  • Publication
    Does school SES matter less for high-performing students than for their lower-performing peers? A quantile regression analysis of PISA 2018 Australia
    (Springer Open, 2022-11-11) Perry, Laura B.; Saatcioglu, Argun; Mickelson, Roslyn Arlin
    Background While the relationship between school socioeconomic composition and student academic outcomes is well established, knowledge about differential effects is not extensive. In particular, little is known whether the relationship differs for students with varying levels of academic performance. We examined whether the school socioeconomic composition effect on academic achievement is stronger or weaker for high-performing students than for average- and low-performing students. Australia is a theoretically interesting case study as it has high levels of school socioeconomic segregation compared to other economically developed countries. Methods We conducted quantile regression analysis using data from the Australia PISA 2018 sample (N = 14,273 15-year-old students). We examined the effect of school socioeconomic status (school SES) on student performance in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy. Results We found that the school socioeconomic composition effect is substantial and is similar for all students, regardless of their level of academic performance. The findings also show that school SES is a stronger predictor than student SES for all student performance quintiles, and the size of the school SES effect relative to the size of student SES effect is larger in lower performance quintiles. Conclusions These results indicate no differential effect of school SES on reading, mathematical or scientific literacy for students of varying levels of academic performance. The relationship is similarly strong and positive for high-performing students as it is for their lower performing peers. As school SES is a strong predictor for all students regardless of their level of academic performance, we argue that equity of educational outcomes can be best achieved by policies and structures that promote socioeconomically mixed rather than segregated schools. We also call for more research that seeks to identify and understand possible differential effects of school socioeconomic composition on a range of academic and non-cognitive student outcomes.
  • Publication
    Tofu Is Not Cheese: Rethinking Education Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
    (SAGE Publications, 2020-06-29) Zhao, Yong
    The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the closure of millions of schools around the world. As a result, teachers and education leaders must find new ways to provide education to over one billion students. This is a crisis, but within which is the opportunity to rethink education. In this article, I discuss productive ways to take advantage of the opportunity brought about by the disastrous crisis. Tofu is not cheese. We should not expect it to smell or taste like cheese nor should we need to pretend it is or make it taste and smell like cheese. The message this commentary is trying to convey is that we should accept the fact that schools are closed and we do not need to pretend we can make online education the same as face-to-face (f2f) schools. Instead, we should make the best out of the new situation. Online education cannot replace all functions schools play in our society, but it can do a lot more than being a lesser version of f2f schooling.
  • Publication
    The changes we need: Education post COVID-19
    (Springer, 2021-02-18) Zhao, Yong; Watterston, Jim
    The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both unprecendented disruptions and massive changes to education. However, as schools return, these changes may disappear. Moreover, not all of the changes are necessarily the changes we want in education. In this paper, we argue that the pandemic has created a unique opportunity for educational changes that have been proposed before COVID-19 but were never fully realized. We identify three big changes that education should make post COVID: curriculum that is developmental, personalized, and evolving; pedagogy that is student-centered, inquiry-based, authentic, and purposeful; and delivery of instruction that capitalizes on the strengths of both synchronous and asynchronous learning.
  • Publication
    Categorization by Organizations: Manipulation of Disability Categories in a Racially Desegregated School District
    (University of Chicago Press, 2019-07) Saatcioglu, Argun; Skrtic, Thomas M.
    The authors propose and test the concept of categorical manipulation, a process in which subordinate group demands for greater access to high-status categories are met with reversals in the hierarchy of existing categories. The analysis addresses a school district’s response to pressure from a racial desegregation movement to improve black access to a high-status majority-white disability category. The district complied, but it also allowed whites to migrate to a low-status majority-black category, from which blacks then were excluded. This category was enhanced with benefits desirable to whites. The original categorical hierarchy was restored during resegregation 20 years later. In categorical manipulation, subordinate groups gain greater access to high-status categories, but these categories suffer in value as dominant groups reaffiliate with previously low-status categories, which may be revised for improvements. This is different from more familiar forms of resistance to change such as symbolic compliance, ritualization, and tokenism.
  • Publication
    Economic Disparities: SPARK Ohio and Narrowing the Kindergarten Readiness Gap
    (Hindawi, 2018-09-10) Kenne, Deric R.; Fischbein, Rebecca; DeLuca, Thomas A.; Bryant, Jennifer A.; Laurene, Kimberly; Mulvany, Jessica L.; Leahy, Peter; Banks, Diane M.
    The present study investigated the extent to which children of various economic backgrounds were prepared for kindergarten literacy activities, as measured by the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment-Literacy (KRA-L). The study also assessed the extent to which children’s economic disadvantagement status moderates the relationship between KRA-L scores and the level of participation in SPARK Ohio, an early education intervention focused on increasing parental engagement and advocacy. KRA-L scores for children entering kindergarten in fall 2012 were analyzed for 548 SPARK Ohio participants and 1594 comparison children. Both SPARK Ohio and comparison children identified as economically disadvantaged scored significantly lower on the KRA-L, compared to children not classified as economically disadvantaged. Economic disadvantage status may moderate the influence of participating in SPARK Ohio; children identified as economically disadvantaged scored significantly higher on the KRA-L when they participated in SPARK Ohio, compared to those that did not participate in SPARK Ohio.
  • Publication
    STRUCTURING DIVERSITY: CHIEF DIVERSITY OFFICES AS STRUCTURAL RESPONSES TO A CULTURAL ISSUE
    (Informing Science Institute, 2019-09-09) Parker, Eugene T.
    Aim/Purpose Higher education has faced increasing perceptions, mainly by students, of unwelcoming campus racial and diversity climates. As a result, during the past decade, there has been a peak in the inaugurations of chief diversity officers. Yet, little is known about how these offices are established. Background This study explores and describes the emergence of the chief diversity office at two research-intensive universities. Methodology This study utilizes a qualitative case study to answer the research questions. Contribution The study provides new knowledge about the impetuses that prompt the formation of chief diversity officers. Further, the findings inform the higher education community about the establishment of chief diversity offices at two universities that might help institutions inaugurate new offices. Findings Findings illustrated that the formation of the chief diversity office at these research universities represented structural responses to cultural issues on campus. Recommendations for Practitioners A recommendation for practitioners is to consider a thorough assessment of the campus climate as a means to prompt the formation of a chief diversity office. The structural attributes of the realized unit should be directly associated with the specific context of the respective campus. Recommendation for Researchers Recommendations for researchers are to empirically address social identity when examining chief diversity officers and to further investigate job and work attitudes, such as organizational commitment or burnout, in these leaders. Impact on Society Present day colleges and universities are the most diverse in history. Considering changing demographics, it is important to understand how institutions are structurally responding to diversity on campus. Future Research Future research might investigate the nuanced ways in which institutions of higher education are inaugurating new offices and appointing new diversity leaders. Considering the distinct aspects of diversity, scholars might explore the salient skills or relevant background experiences that colleges and universities are seeking in these new leaders.
  • Publication
    A Holistic Approach to Estimating the Influence of Good Practices on Student Outcomes at Liberal Arts and non-Liberal Arts Institutions
    (Informing Science Institute, 2016) An, Brian P.; Parker, Eugene T.; Trolian, Teniell L.; Weeden, Dustin D.
    Many higher education administrators and researchers have considered certain “good practices” of institutions as an instrumental way to improve student outcomes. Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) seven principles of good practice has been particularly salient in defining these practices. Often, prior studies only select some of the seven principles for their analysis. Even studies that consider several principles of good practice on student outcomes typically examine the net effect of each principle instead of assessing how these principles holistically influence student out-comes. Using structural equation modeling, we test a basic conceptual framework where we in-vestigate the contribution of the seven principles on a global measure of good practices (GP), as well as the influence of GP on a multitude of student outcomes. We further test whether liberal arts colleges promote an institutional ethos of good practices as compared to non-liberal arts col-leges. Overall, the majority (but not all) of the principles affect GP. Moreover, we find partial evidence that liberal arts colleges foster an institutional ethos of good practices. Although a commitment to foster good practices may create a supportive environment that influences student outcomes, this commitment may lead to unintended consequences for those with little exposure to these good practices.
  • Publication
    Do Fraternities and Sororities Inhibit Intercultural Competence?
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015-01) Martin, Georgianna L.; Parker, Eugene T.; Pascarella, Ernest T.; Blechschmidt, Sally
    This study explored the impact of fraternity and sorority affiliation on students’ development of intercultural competence over four years of college at 11 institutions. Prior research admonishes fraternities and sororities for being largely heterogeneous organizations that detract from institutional efforts to create a culturally competent student body. In the present study, fraternity and sorority members did not differ from their unaffiliated peers on their development of intercultural competence during college. Implications for higher education and student affairs practice and intercultural competence among fraternity/sorority communities is discussed.
  • Publication
    How Much Difference is too Much Difference? Perceptions of Gay Men and Lesbians in Intercollegiate Athletics
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001-09-01) Wolf-Wendel, Lisa E.; Toma, J. Douglas; Morphew, Christopher C.
    No abstract is available for this item.
  • Publication
    New Scholarship on Academic Women: Beyond "Women's Ways"
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999-01-01) Twombly, Susan B.
    No abstract is available for this item.
  • Publication
    There's No "I" in "Team": Lessons from Athletics on Community Building
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001-01-01) Wolf-Wendel, Lisa E.; Toma, J. Douglas; Morphew, Christopher C.
    No abstract is available for this item.