Distributed Leadership in the New Latino Diaspora: Building Capacity to Support Newcomers

• In Event: 26.071 - Building Capacity: What Is Needed to Support Districts With Emerging English Learner Student Enrollments?

Abstract

Objectives. Over the last 20 years, demographic changes have led to a rapid increase in public school enrollment of Spanish-speaking Latino students across the country, with the fastest proportional growth in new immigrant destinations constituting a “New Latino Diaspora” (Hamann, 2003; Marrow, 2005; Wortham, Murillo, & Hamann, 2002). As immigrants navigate a new setting, schools serve as key organizations, providing the first point of contact for acculturation (Portes & Macleod, 1996). Based on findings from a statewide study of Wisconsin, this paper considers the role of school leadership in those schools, particularly as it relates to capacity-building efforts in the context of low-incidence, recent immigration.
Schools in the New Latino Diaspora face significant challenges in capacity to support newcomers. Several scholars have identified significant barriers associated with these low-incidence and often remote locales, including a lack of access to bilingual resources, best practices, and instructional expertise (Capps et al., 2005; Lowenhaupt & Reeves, under review; Zehler et al., 2008). Although some of this work has identified system-wide implications of this demographic trend (e.g. Jones-Correa, 2008), there is a need for a greater understanding of school leadership, not just in the context of the New Latino Diaspora, but in immigrant education more generally.
Perspectives/Framework. This paper contributes a leadership perspective to education in the New Latino Diaspora. School leaders play a crucial role in adapting to demographic change, both in terms of implementing new services and in the design of organizational supports which facilitate organizational growth (Cohen et al., 2003; Elmore & Burney, 1998; Evans, 2007). Increasingly, school leadership has been conceptualized as distributed across administrators, educators, and practices to support the ongoing development of capacity (Spillane & Coldren, 2011; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2001). In the case of immigrant education, this is particularly relevant given the range of educators at both the district and school level involved.
Methods/Data Sources. In this paper, I apply this theory of distributed leadership to an analysis of 250 teacher and administrator surveys from schools serving the New Latino Diaspora in Wisconsin. The paper presents a descriptive statistical analysis, as well as textual analysis of survey comments.
Results/Conclusions. In addition to focusing on the capacity of school principals and their efforts to develop capacity, the paper also considers the role of other educators in the distribution of leadership to support immigrant students. The paper is organized around the following key findings: 1) In the context of demographic change, principals are unprepared for the change; 2) principals do not generally see their role or practices changing due to this shift, although they see demographic change impacting the work of teachers in their schools; 3) in these contexts, leadership around issues of ELLs is often distributed to the ELL teacher who serves not only to provide direct service, but also serves as instructional coaches for teachers working in integrated classrooms.
Significance. The paper ends with implications for theory and practice, considering the ways in which school principals and ELL teachers might lead together to support demographic change.

Author

• Rebecca Jane Lowenhaupt, Boston College