Leadership for Educational Equity

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Dissertations in LEEP

Our program is a professional program whose mission it is to prepare experienced practitioners to make good decisions at the senior level in districts and like organizations. Decisions at that level can affect large numbers of people and have far-reaching consequences. Our program’s success is measured by the degree to which we help our students make decisions that are informed, reflective and adequate to the situation. Good decision making rests on strong problem solving skills.

While decisions are made, and best experienced and observed in real life, leadership preparation programs based at the university are well positioned to strengthen problem solving skills. Solving problems requires the ability to recognize the boundaries of a problem, dig below the mere symptoms, gather information, imagine and design remedies, assess needed resources, and model and evaluate impacts and effects. Thus, problem solving is an intellectual undertaking of high complexity. The daily flow of administrative work rarely allows practitioners to think deeply about this complexity. The dissertation, by contrast, demands of students to grasp the various dimensions of the process and write about it cogently.

In the contexts of schools and districts, decision makers need to guard against four tendencies that impact the quality of their decisions:

1. Education is an ideological enterprise. Often decisions are made based on preferences rather than evidence. At the same time, data-drivenness can preempt rational reasoning about values and desired outcomes.
2. Districts and schools are turbulent environments. Policies shift abruptly, personnel turns over rapidly, programs come and go, with the result that decisions tend to be haphazard and contradictory, instead of being strategic and carefully prioritized.
3. Relationships of means and ends are uncertain. This disposes educational decision makers to underestimate the human and financial resources it takes to "fix" a problem; and at the same time to overestimate what effects particular remedies can accomplish. Paradoxically, as schools and districts become increasingly unstable, societal structures of inequity and disempowerment become ever more entrenched and less amenable to amelioration.

The result is that frequently problems are insufficiently conceptualized and remedies "don’t work out."  Problem perceptions shift, new preferences overshadow old ones, new priorities upstage earlier commitments, implementation processes are abandoned mid-stream, and tangible or measurable effects become elusive  It is when students systematically study a problem’s symptoms, causes, remedies and their implementation in real-life contexts that they become aware of the challenging conditions for good decision-making. To reflect skillfully on these challenges helps build general decision-making competence that goes beyond specific situations and problems. It is therefore a cornerstone of the program. The dissertation project is students’ prime opportunity to develop and refine this competence. The quality of the dissertation in this program is therefore not judged by its contribution to generalizable or theoretical knowledge, but by its situated practical relevance for problems encountered in the context of districts or like organizations.

Just as we have many questions, only some of which are researchable, we are faced with many problems, only some of which are actionable. For the most part, educational leadership in the urban context is severely constrained by inequitable conditions, maintained by decisions made elsewhere and not subject to easy solutions at the local level. Leadership at this level is largely about making the best out of rather adverse circumstances. Dissertations in our program are about helping districts (or like organizations) by examining a problem for which a remedy is urgently sought that can be locally implemented. Ideally the selected problem is 'located' at the district level; if located at the organizational level of the school, it should have implications for district action. Dissertation topics should be the result of a consultation process between students, their employers, and university faculty. Upon completion of the dissertation, students enroll in a "capstone course" that exposes them to decision making at the district cabinet level. They use this field experience to shape their dissertation into a deliverable that is apt to influence district decision maker.

Given their professional standing, our students ought to be involved in such problem solving activities or change projects when they come into the program. The dissertation gives them a chance to look at a problem in-depth, study the actions of others who either enact problems or implement remedies; or study their own actions as leaders in design and implementation.

The types of dissertation projects student pursue follow along the basic problem-solving model: framing actionable problems, understanding the problem; designing or adopting remedies; implementing designs; evaluating impact and effect; feeding learning experiences back to the organization. Students concentrate on one or several of these steps, depending on their own sphere of influence and the natural flow of problem solving activities or change projects they are engaged in (more details below). Research questions, literature reviews, study designs, methods, dissertation templates and deliverables may differ according to these steps. Some students may want to concentrate on ‘objective’ data and  follow the format of a more scholarly dissertation. Others may want to study change projects in which they are personally engaged as participants or more distant observers. Such dissertations would have a stronger focus on action research designs and center on researchers as reflective practitioners. 

Types of Dissertation Projects for LEEP Students

	Type 1 Understanding the problem	Type 2 Design or adoption of remedy	Type 3 Implementation of  remedy	Type 4 Evaluation of remedy
What to study?	Symptoms and causes of an actionable problem	Defining desired outcomes; modeling behavior changes Adequacy or fit of the remedy to the problem Process of designing or adopting a remedy	Process of implementation; Action planning and workability of  action plan Ongoing control, monitoring, support given local motivation and capacity	Formative or summative evaluation of impact or effect
Central research questions	What dispositions, behaviors, org. structures, resource flows etc. describe the problem/ explain the problem’s recurrence? How is the problem indicated at the school/ district levels?  What factors cause the problem/ reproduce the problem?	What features of the created design or adopted program will attenuate the problem? How will the design do that? What premises and assumptions about  problem causes and modes of operation are made by designers and decision makers? What assumptions about stakeholders and implementation are made? What alternatives are available; why were they rejected? What criteria for impact or success are chosen/ suitable? Did leaders have an adequate understanding of the problem? Did leaders have an adequate theory of how the remedy might work? Why do design or adoption processes break down?	How does the adopted/ designed remedy play out in the context of schools and the district? What factors facilitate or hamper implementation? What adjustments in the implementation process/ in the adopted design are made to facilitate implementation? What negotiations took place? What role did leaders play? What factors were overlooked in the original model? Was the action/ implementation plan realistic under local conditions of motivation and capacity? What leadership skills or personal characteristics were required to get the project implemented? Did the process turn out according to expectations? Why (not)?	What are suitable evaluation criteria? What evidence do we have for procedural impact? What evidence do we have for educational effects?  What explains the outcomes?
Professional knowledge base	Descriptive narratives; Theories and models that explain the identified problem	Professional experiences and literature on adopted program or similar interventions; Literature on design and implementation of ed. interventions, scaling up Lit. on leadership	Professional experiences and literature on implementation in schools and districts; organizational development Lit. on leadership	Literature on design and program implementation evaluation
The study: data, methods, research designs	Recognizing patterns in data; Comparing cases; Observing behaviors Use of archival/ administrative data that indicate the problem at the district level Surveys, observations of behaviors that show how the problem is produced in schools	Tracing the design or adoption process Reasoning a theory of action Modeling effects On-going (participant) observation of decision making processes	Tracing implementation process Examining link between design and context of  motivation and capacity Tracing administrative steering capacities, information flows, control mechanisms, support Professional sources Observing processes; interviewing, surveying  implementers; Reflecting on interventions in implementation	Formative, summative evaluation designs Quantitative and/or qualitative data on educational outcomes and implementation processes
Deliverable to district	Presentation of evidence that demonstrates the main patterns of the problem	Presentation of key features of remedy; theory of action; modeling of effects; evaluation criteria; key junctures in the decision making process	Presentation of factors that helped or hindered implementation at  the levels of administration, instruction, community, etc. Suggestions for redesign,  administrative processes, motivation and capacity building	Presentation of evidence demonstrating impact and educational effect Suggestions for improvement  of design and organizational processes

 

 

The four columns are suggestive of four distinct types of studies, but various aspects of the problem-solving sequence can be highlighted or combined, depending on the research and action interests of students. Students are not bound by the above template. In consultation with their advisors, they are free to chose a study design that serves their unique purposes. 

Examples

Student XX works in a district that has encountered a recent surge in referrals and suspensions at the middle school level. It happens so that she is also a middle school principal at a school that encounters this problem as well.

Type 1

People in the district, including principal XX, do not quite understand what is causing this recent surge. The student decides to focus her dissertation on school level and district level data that indicate the problem and capture processes that may produce the problem. Since the problem has arisen across many schools in the district, she would look for district level explanations, but could use her school as a base. She might ask: do the disciplinary actions occur more frequently in certain regions, during specific times, for specific populations, etc.; have there been changes in district discipline policies; community relations; teacher capacity; school leadership and so on.

Type 2

People in this district, including principal XX, believe they know "what the problem is."  As increasingly teachers turn over and move out of middle school, some schools are almost entirely staffed with novices. Hiring novices has coincided with the recent upsurge of discipline problems. This is the premise based on which the district and the principal have embarked to search for a remedy. Student XX is involved, as a participant or observer or both, in finding a suitable design that helps bolster first and second year teachers’ classroom management skills. She might ask: What design features must my remedy have in order to work, given the district context and the skill levels of the teachers? Are there programs on the market that have these design elements? Are they  working? How can I tell?  Alternatively, can we take already developed programs and adapt them to our local conditions? Or do we have to design from scratch?  What alternative approaches could we take, based on what evidence?  Once a design is chosen, is it to be piloted in a design experiment (a study concentration on its own) or rolled out in many schools contemporaneously?  What are the implications of this? And so on.

Type 3

After careful analysis of the problem and careful design of the remedy or adoption of a program,  the district and the principal are ready to implement the program/ design. Alternatively, problem understanding and adoption of design have been curtailed and the district has adopted an "assertive discipline program" as a sort of quick fix. Student XX walks into this situation. Either approach has consequences for implementation.

As the student observes how schools respond to the program, she might ask: How do schools (principals, the novice teachers, etc.), make sense of the design/program? In light of the program, what motivations, capacitates, resources are available/ needed for teachers to improve their classroom management skills?  What supports are needed from central office/ the consultant?  What unintended consequences are produced as a result of implementation efforts? What are the characteristics of teachers or schools that implement the program well as opposed to those that falter? Are the original premises (understanding of the problem, adequacy of the design given local conditions) validated by implementation experiences?  

Type 4

The assertive discipline program (or another locally designed program) are being implemented and the district wants to know whether it is having any impact on teacher practices and disciplinary actions.  Perhaps starting from her own school and then branching out into other schools in the district that implemented the program/design, Student XX might ask: What evidence, some of it collected at my school, some of it collected district-wide, can tell me to what degree the program influenced teacher practice or student behavior?  How can I tease out of this data that it was actually the program and not some other circumstance that caused indicated behavioral changes? What program elements or features seem to have the most/ least impact, and so on.

Hybrids

Students may elect to design a dissertation study that is a hybrid of the four types. In all likelihood, they center on one type and borrow questions, design principles, and methods from neighboring types. For example, one could design an implementation study with strong formative evaluation features. Or one could combine a study of problem understanding with remedy design or adoption. Or a study could interweave the process of designing remedies and their implementation.