White Principals Attempting to Lead Race-Conscious School Improvement: A Distributive Perspective

• In Event: Focusing on Social Justice as a Catalyst for Improving Diverse Schools

Abstract

This paper examines the racial politics involved when white principals aim to facilitate race conscious school improvement efforts. Using comparative case study methods we describe how two white principals discussions about race fluctuated on a contentious continuum of being race-conscious or race-neutral based on the politics of a given situation or context. Also, we integrate distributed leadership to describe how the principals attempted to distribute race conscious leadership throughout the school system. The principals we studied attempted to foster an environment where students and teachers were beginning to foreground issues of race in school improvement. Despite the principals’ awareness of systemic racism, both had limited success in engaging others in authentic race conscious school improvement efforts.

Authors

• Jason Swanson, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Anjale DeVawn Welton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign