Cultivating Racial Diversity or Reproducing Whiteness? A QuantCrit Analysis of School Districts' Early Principal Hiring Practices

• In Event: Increasing the Diversity of the School Leadership Workforce and Supporting Equitable Education Systems

Abstract

This paper builds on previously collected data on how districts’ hire principals to illuminate the extent to which patterns in district’ early principal hiring practices (EPHPs) hold the potential to suppress, reproduce, or build equity and diversity in the principalship. Using QuantCrit as our framework, we found that districts’ EPHPs predominantly fail to disrupt longstanding patterns of inequity and exclusion and instead perpetuate the reproduction of whiteness in the principal pipeline. We illustrate ways district leaders can hold a mirror up to their actions and inactions that reproduce or disrupt systems perpetuating inequities in EPHPs.

Authors

• Amy L. Reynolds, University of Virginia

• Lolita A. Tabron, University of Denver