Constructing LGBT-Inclusive Public Educational Policy: Implications for a Post-Obergefell Context

• In Event: Educational Leadership After Obergefell v. Hodges

Abstract

In Obergefell v. Hodges, the US Supreme Court majority decision relied in part on a 14th Amendment equal protection argument to acknowledge a fundamental constitutional right for gay couples to participate in the social institution of marriage. Within this context, it is fairly easy to project a future moment in which public school leaders will be scrambling to meet newly clarified legal obligations regarding equal and non-discriminatory access to public schools. Regardless of how and when recognition of this constitutional responsibility unfolds, public school leaders already face an ethical imperative to address what is currently known about limitations to educational and employment equity and access for queer persons. Such a process involves developing both protective policies aimed at establishing a minimally safe environment and inclusive policies that create an authentically equitable environment. (Koschoreck & Slattery, 2010; Author, 2013).
Within a lack of coherent leadership from principal preparation programs (Author, 2015) and many legislative assemblies, this inquiry focuses on locating meaningful leadership practices at the school district level that might serve as guidance for both principal preparation programs and educational leaders. It focuses on the publically contested process through which one school district in Texas successfully enacted a concrete queer inclusive policy by becoming the state’s first school district to adopt domestic partnership benefits, inclusive of same sex couples. This case study understands the social reality of schooling as created through discursive processes, such as educational policy, and performativity - the continued bodily and structural repetition of those discursive arrangements via enactment by social institutions (Butler, 1990). It focuses on performativity of the body politic, with attention to how emergent transgressive discourses of queer equity within the district’s employment policy were taken up, enacted, and contested in the public sphere of a state with high opposition to LGBT equitable educational policy (St. Pierre, 2000).
The study is framed through a queer theoretical lens in order to make visible and problematize the socio-political constructions that frequently render the design of queer inclusive educational policy for K-12 schools a Sisyphean task (Author, 2015; Lugg, 2006; Lugg & Murphy, 2014; Robinson & Espelage, 2011; Sedgwick, 1990). Data sources are a sample of 74 state level print media articles from 2006-2014 reporting on the state-wide struggle over the 2012 adoption of domestic partnership benefits by this district. Findings address: 1) patterned public representation of queer inclusive educational policy as hetero-exclusive, 2) re-stratification of heteronormative social organization through disciplinary mechanisms such as fiscal sanction, 3) socially transformative leadership through systematic engagement across multiple and intersecting differences, 4) building district social justice capacity through structural efforts in professional development, hiring, and community engagement, and 5) demonstrated codes of knowing and not knowing within the field of educational leadership regarding queer inclusion. Implications inform equitable educational policy development via an intersectionality framework (Author, 2015; Capper, Theoharis & Sebastian, 2006) and challenge observed silences. Findings are relevant and urgent for educational leadership researchers and school administrators in the rapidly shifting policy context of a post-Obergefell legal and moral climate.

Authors

• Michael Patrick O'Malley, Texas State University

• Tanya Alyson Long, Texas State University