In the concluding section of this week’s blog post, David Labaree succinctly sums up some of the key factors that explain why school reform efforts in the US often fail to achieve their ambitious goals. In part one, Labaree discussed why US schools are so often asked to pursue goals — like support economic productivity, foster social mobility, and reduce inequality — that they have never been equipped to achieve. Labaree is an Emeritus Professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and one of the foremost experts on the history of education and educational reform in the US. As Labaree explains, this post was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and his book, Someone Has to Fail. Labaree added an introduction (and cartoons) and posted this on his blog on July 9, 2026.
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Roots of the Failure of School Reform to Resolve Social Problems
In closing, let me summarize the reasons for the continuing failure of school reform in the U.S.
The Tensions Among School Goals: One reason for the failure of reform to realize the social goals expressed in it is that these goals reflect the core tensions within a liberal democracy, which push both school and society in conflicting directions. One of those tensions is between the demands of democratic politics and the demands of capitalist markets. A related issue is the requirement that society be able to meet its collective needs while simultaneously guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to pursue their own interests. As we have seen, these tensions cannot be resolved one way or the other if we are going to remain a liberal democracy, so schools will inevitably fail at maximizing any of these goals. The result is going to be a muddled compromise rather than a clear cut victory in meeting particular expectations. The apparently dysfunctional outcomes of the educational system, therefore, are not necessarily the result of bad planning, deception, or political cynicism; they are an institutional expression of the contradictions in the liberal democratic mind.
The Tendency Toward Organizational Conservatism: There is also another layer of impediment that lies between social goals and their fulfillment via education, and that is the tension between education’s social goals and its organizational practices. Schools gain their origins from social goals, which they dutifully express in an institutional form, as happened with the construction of the common school system. This results in the development of school organization, curriculums, pedagogies, professional roles, and a complex set of occupational and organizational interests. At this more advanced stage, schools and educators are no longer simply the media for realizing social aspirations; they become major actors in the story. As such, they shape what happens in education in light of their own needs and interests, organizational patterns, and professional norms and practices. And this then becomes a major issue in educational reform. Such reforms are what happens after schooling is already in motion organizationally, when society seeks to assign new ideals to education or revive old ones that have fallen into disuse, thus initiating an effort to transform the institution toward the pursuit of different ends. But at that point society is no longer able simply to project its values onto the institution it created to express these values; instead it must negotiate an interaction with an ongoing enterprise. As a result, reform has to change both the values embedded in education and the formal structure itself, which may well resist. As I have shown elsewhere, three characteristics of the American school system – loose coupling, weak instructional control, and teacher autonomy – have made this system remarkably effective at blocking reforms from reaching the classroom.
Reformer Arrogance: Another problem that leads to the failure of school reform is simple arrogance. School reformers spin out an abstract vision of what school and society should be, and then they try to bring reality in line with the vision. But this abstract reformist grid doesn’t map comfortably onto the parochial and idiosyncratic ecology of the individual classroom. Trying to push too hard to make the classroom fit the grid may destroy the ecology of learning there; and adapting the grid enough to make it workable in the classroom may change the reform to the point that its original aims are lost. Reformers are loath to give up their aims in the service of making the reform acceptable to teachers, so they tend to plow ahead in search of ways to get around the obstacles. If they can’t make change in cooperation with teachers, then they will have to so in spite of them. They see a crying need to fix a problem through school reform, and they have developed a theory for how to do this, which looks just great on paper. Standing in the state capital or the university, they are far from the practical realities of the classroom, and they tend to be impatient with demands that they should respect the complexity of the settings in which they are trying to intervene.
The Marginality of School Reform to School Change: Finally, we need to remind ourselves that school reform has always been only a small part of the broader process of school change. Reform movements are deliberate efforts by groups of people to change schools in a direction they value and to resolve a social problem that concerns them. We measure the success of these movements by the degree to which the outcomes match the intentions of the reformers. But there’s another player in the school change game, and that’s the market. By this I mean the accumulated actions of educational consumers who are pursuing their own interests through the schooling of their children. From the colonial days, when the expressed purpose of schooling was to support the one true faith, consumers were pursuing literacy and numeracy for reasons that had nothing to do with religion and a lot to do with enhancing their ability to function in a market society.
That very personal and practical dimension of education was there from the beginning, even though no one wanted to talk about it, much less launch a reform movement in its name. And this individual dimension of schooling has only expanded its scope over the years, becoming larger in the late 19th century and then dominant in the 20th century, as increasingly educational credentials became the ticket of admission for the better jobs. The fact that public schools have long been creatures of politics – established, funded, and governed through the medium of a democratic process – means that they have been under unrelenting pressure to meet consumer demand for the kind of schooling that will help individuals move up, stay up, or at least not drop down in their position in the social order. This pressure is exerted through individual consumer actions, such as by attending school or not, going to this school not that one, enrolling in this program not some other program. It is also exerted by political actions, such as by supporting expansion of educational opportunity and preserving educational advantage in the midst of wide access.
These actions by consumers and voters have brought about significant changes in the school system, even though these changes have not been the aim of any of the consumers themselves. They have not been acting as reformers with a social cause but as individuals pursuing their own interests through education, so the changes they have produced in schooling by and large have been inadvertent. Yet these unintended effects of consumer action have often derailed or redirected the intended effects of school reformers. They created the comprehensive high school, dethroned social efficiency, pushed vocational education to the margins, and blocked the attack on de facto segregation. Educational consumers may well keep the current school standards movement from meeting its goals if they feel that standards, testing, and accountability are threatening educational access and educational advantage. They may also pose an impediment to the school choice movement, even though it is being carried out explicitly in their name. For consumers may feel more comfortable tinkering with the system they know than in taking the chance that blowing up this system might produce something that is less suited to serving their needs. In the American system of education, it seems, the consumer – not the reformer – has long been king.
In this week’s post, David Labaree explores why schools are so often asked to pursue goals — like support economic productivity, foster social mobility, and reduce inequality — that they have never been equipped to achieve. Labaree is an Emeritus Professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and one of the foremost experts on the history of education and educational reform in the US. As Labaree explains, this post was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and his book, Someone Has to Fail. Labaree added an introduction (and cartoons) and posted this on his blog on July 9, 2026. Labaree’s conclusion to the post will be published next week.
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This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2009 at the University of Berne. It was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and then found its way into my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail. Here is the link to the first published version.
It’s about a longstanding problem in American educational policy: We ask schools to pursue goals that are beyond their capabilities. Schools are simply not very good at a lot of things we ask them to do. They can’t promote equality, they can’t end poverty, they can’t create good jobs, they can’t drive economic growth, they can’t promote public health. Yet we expect them to do all this heavy lifting for us.
Part of the story is about why schools aren’t good at these things. Another is why we keep giving them such assignments anyway. The answer to the second, I suggest, is that we pass off on schools social problems that we are unwilling to accomplish through the political process, where the capability for success actually resides. Instead of addressing these problems directly through political action, we foist them off on schools and then blame them for continually falling short of the desired goal. Herein lies the reason why school reform has been such steady work. Read and weep.
Even if you’ve read this before, don’t miss the cartoons that I tucked into the text this time. They’re worth a post all by themselves.
Americans have a long history of pinning their hopes on education as the way to realize compelling social ideals and solve challenging social problems. We want schools to promote civic virtue, economic productivity, and social mobility; to alleviate inequalities in race, class, and gender; to improve health, reduce crime, and protect the environment. So we assign these social missions to schools, and educators gamely accept responsibility for carrying them out. When the school system inevitably falls far short of these goals, we initiate a wave of school reform to realign the institution with its social goals and ramp up its effectiveness in attaining them. The result, as one pair of scholars has put it, is that educational reform in the U.S. is “steady work.” In this lecture, I want to tell a story: What history tells us about what schools cannot do.
At its heart, this is a story grounded in paradox. On the one hand, American schooling has been an extraordinary success. It started as a small and peripheral enterprise in the 18th century and grew into a massive institution at the center of American society in the 21st, where it draws the lion’s share of the state budget and a quarter of the lives of citizens. Central to its institutional success has been its ability to embrace and embody the social goals that have been imposed upon it. Yet, in spite of continually recurring waves of school reform, education in the U.S. has been remarkably unsuccessful at implementing these goals in the classroom practices of education and at realizing these goals in the social outcomes of education.
America, I suggest, suffers from a school syndrome. We have set our school system up for failure by asking it to fix all of our most pressing social problems, which we are unwilling to address more directly through political action rather than educational gesture. Then we blame the system when it fails. Both as a society and as individuals, we vest our greatest hopes in an institution that is manifestly unsuited to realizing them. In part the system’s failure is the result of a tension between our shifting social aims for education and the system’s own organizational momentum. We created the system to solve a critical social problem in the early days of the American republic, and its success in dealing with this problem fooled us into thinking that we could redirect the system toward new problems as time passed. But the school system has a mind of its own, and trying to change its direction is like trying to do a U-turn with a battleship.
Today I will explore the failure of school reform to realize the central social goals that have driven it over the years. And at the end I explore the roots of schooling’s failure in its role as an agent of social reform.
The social missions of schooling in liberal democracies arise from the tensions that are inherent in such societies. One of these tensions is between the demands of democratic politics and the demands of capitalist markets. A related issue is the requirement that society be able to meet its collective needs while simultaneously guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to pursue their own interests. In the American setting, these tensions have played out through the politics of education in the form of a struggle among three major social goals for the educational system. One goal is democratic equality, which sees education as a mechanism for producing capable citizens. Another is social efficiency, which sees education as a mechanism for developing productive workers. A third is social mobility, which sees education as a mechanism for individuals to reinforce or enhance their social position.
Democratic equality represents the political side of our liberal democratic values, focusing on the role of education in building a nation, forming a republican community, and providing citizens with the wide range of capabilities required to take part in democratic decision-making. The other two goals represent the market side of liberal democracy. Social efficiency captures the perspective of employers and taxpayers, who are concerned about the role of education in producing the job skills (human capital) that are required by the modern economy and that are seen as essential for economic growth and social prosperity. From this angle the issue is for education to provide for the full range of productive skills and forms of knowledge required in the complex job structure of modern capitalism. Social mobility captures the perspective of educational consumers and prospective employees, who are concerned about the role of educational credentials in signaling to the market which individuals should get the jobs with the most power, money, and prestige.
The collectivist side of liberal democracy is expressed by a combination of democratic equality and social efficiency. Both aim at having education provide broad social benefits, with both conceiving of education as a public good. Investing in the political capital of the citizenry and the human capital of the workforce benefits everyone in society, including those families who do not have children in school. In contrast, the social mobility goal represents the individualist side of liberal democracy. From this perspective, education is a private good, which benefits only the student who receives educational services and owns the resulting diplomas. Its primary function is to provide educational consumers with privileged access to higher level jobs in the competition with other prospective employees.
So let me look at how well – or rather, how poorly – American schools have done at accomplishing these three social missions.
Democratic Equality
School systems around the world have been more effective at accomplishing their political mission than either their efficiency or mobility missions. At the formative stage in the construction of a nation state, virtually anywhere in the world, education seems to have an important role to play. The key contribution in this regard is that schooling helps form a national citizenry out of a collection of local identities. One country after another developed a system of universal education at the point when it was trying to transform itself into a modern state, populated by citizens rather than subjects, with a common culture and a shared national identity. For the U.S. in the early 19th century, the key problem during this transitional period was how to establish a modern social order based on exchange relations and democratic authority out of the remnants of a traditional social order based on patriarchal relations and feudal authority. A system of public education helps to make this transition possible primarily by bringing a disparate group of youths in the community together under one roof and exposing them to a common curriculum and a common set of social experiences. The result was to instill in students social norms that allowed them to emerge as self-regulating actors in the free market while still remaining good citizens and good Christians. Creating such cultural communities is one of the few things that schools can consistently do well.
So the evidence shows that at the formative stage, school systems in the U.S. and elsewhere have been remarkably effective in promoting citizenship and forming a new social order. This is quite an accomplishment, which more than justifies the huge investment in constructing these systems. And building on this capacity for forming community, schools have continued to play an important role as the agent for incorporating newcomers. This has been particularly important in an immigrant society like the United States, where – from the Irish and Germans in the mid-19th century to the Mexicans and South Asians in the early 21st century – schools have been the central mechanism for integrating foreigners into the American experience.
But the ability of schooling to promote democratic equality in the U.S. has had little to do with learning, it has faded over time, and it has been increasingly undermined by counter tendencies toward inequality. First, note that when schools have been effective at community building, this had little to with the content of the curriculum or the nature of classroom teaching. What was important was that schools provided a common experience for all students. What they actually learned in school was irrelevant as long as they all were exposed to the same material. It could have been anything. It was the form of schooling more than its content that helped establish and preserve the American republic.
Second, the importance of schooling in forming community has declined over time. The common school system was critically important in the formative days of the American republic; but once the country’s continued existence was no longer in doubt, the role of the system grew less critical. As a result, the more recent ways in which schools have come to promote citizenship have been more formalistic than substantive. This is now embedded in classes on American history, speeches at school assemblies, pilgrim pageants around Thanksgiving, presidential portraits on classroom walls, and playing the national anthem before football games. What had been the system’s foremost rationale for existence has now retreated into the background of a system more concerned with other issues.
Third, and most important, however, the role of schools in promoting democratic equality has declined because schools have simultaneously been aggressively promoting social inequality. One of the recurring themes of my book is that every move by American schools in the direction of equality has been countered by a strong move in the opposite direction. When we created a common school system in the early 19th century, we also created a high school system to distinguish middle class students from the rest. When we expanded access to the high school at the start of the 20th century, we also created a system for tracking students within the school and opened the gates for middle class enrollment in college. When we expanded access to college in the mid-20th century, we funneled new students into the lower tiers of the system and encouraged middle class students to pursue graduate study. The American school system is at least as much about social difference as about social equality. In fact, as the system has developed, the idea of equality has become more formalistic, focused primarily on the notion of broad access to education at a certain level, while the idea of inequality has become more substantive, embodied in starkly different educational and social trajectories.
Social Efficiency
In the current politics of education, the goal of social efficiency plays a prominent role. One of the central beliefs of contemporary economics, international development, and educational policy is that education is the key to economic development as a valuable investment in human capital. Today it is hard to find a political speech, reform document, or opinion piece about education that does not include a paean to the critical role that education plays in developing human capital and spurring economic growth – and the need to reform schools in order to fix what’s wrong with the economy.
Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have made a strong argument for the human capital vision of education in their recent book, The Race Between Education and Technology. They argue that the extraordinary expansion of the American economy in the 20th century was to a large degree the result of an equally extraordinary expansion in educational enrollments during this period. It is no coincidence, they say, that what turned out to be the American Century economically was also the Human Capital Century for the U.S.
The numbers are indeed staggering. In the United States education levels rose dramatically for most of the 20th century. For those born between 1876 and 1951, the average number of years of schooling rose a total of 6 years, which is an increase of 0.8 years per decade. This means that the average education level of the entire U.S. population rose from less than 8 years of grade school to two years of college in only 75 years. The authors estimate that the growth in education in the U.S. accounted for between 12 and 17 percent of the growth in economic productivity across the 20th century, with the average educational contribution at 13.5 percent. Put another way, they argue that increased education alone accounted for economic growth of about one-third of one percent per year from 1915-2005.
One problem with this claim, however, is that the size of the human capital effect they show is relatively small. On average they estimate that the growth in educational attainment accounted for less that 14 percent of the growth in economic productivity over the course of the 20th century. That’s not negligible but it’s also not overwhelming. This wouldn’t be a concern if education were a modest investment drawing a modest return, because every little bit helps when it comes to economic growth. But that’s clearly not the case. Education has long been the largest single expenditure of American state and local governments, which over the course of the 20th century devoured about 30 percent of their total budgets. In 1995 this came to almost $400 billion in direct payments for elementary, secondary, and higher education. In short, as costly as education is, it would seem that its economic benefits would need to be more substantial than they are in order to justify these expenses as a solid investment in the nation’s wealth instead of a large drain on this wealth.
Another problem is that it is hard to establish that in fact education was the cause and economy the effect in this story. The authors make clear that the growth in high school and college enrollments both exceeded and preceded demand for such workers from the economy. Employers were not begging high schools to produce more graduates in order to meet the needs for greater skill in the workplace; instead they were taking advantage of a situation in which large numbers of educated workers were available, and could be hired without a large wage premium, for positions that in the past had not required this level of education. So why not hire them? And once these high school graduates were on the job, the employers may have found them useful to have around (maybe they required less training), so employers began to express a preference for high school graduates in future hiring. But just because the workforce was becoming more educated didn’t mean that the presence of educated workers was the source of increases in economic productivity. It could just as easily have been the other way around.
Producing a large increase in high school graduates was enormously expensive, especially considering that the supply of these graduates was much greater than the economic demand for them. But strong economic growth provided enough of a fiscal surplus that state and local governments were able afford to do so. In short, it makes sense to think that it was economic growth that made educational growth possible. We expanded high school because we could afford to. And we wanted to do so not because we thought it would provide social benefits by improving the economy but instead because we hoped it would provide us with personal benefits. The authors point out that the growth of high school enrollments was not the result of a reform movement. Instead, the demand for high school came from educational consumers. Middle class families saw high school and college as a way to gain an edge – or keep their already existing edge – in the competition for good jobs. And working class families saw high school as a way to provide their children with the possibility of a better life than their own. The demand came from the bottom up not the top down. Administrative progressives later capitalized on the growth of the high school by trying to harness it for their own social efficiency agenda, as expressed in the 1918 Cardinal Principles report. But by then the process of high school expansion was already well under way, with little help from them.
The major accomplishment of the American school system was not necessarily that it provided education but that it provided access. The system may or may not have been effective at teaching students the kinds of skills and knowledge that would economically useful, but it was quite effective at inviting students into the schools and keeping them there for an extended period of time. Early in their book, Goldin and Katz identify what they consider to be the primary “virtues” of the American educational system as it developed before the civil war and continued into the 20th century. In effect, these virtues of the system all revolve around its broad accessibility. They include: “public provision by small, fiscally independent districts; public funding; secular control; gender neutrality; open access; and a forgiving system.”
Note that none of these virtues of the American school system speaks to learning the curriculum. Instead all have to do with the form of the system, in particular its accessibility and flexibility. I thoroughly agree. But for the human capital argument that Goldin and Katz are trying to make, these virtues of the system pose a problem. How was the system able to provide graduates with the skills needed to spur economic growth when the system’s primary claim to fame was that it invited everyone in and then was reluctant to penalize anyone for failing to learn? In effect, the system’s greatest strength was its low academic standards. If it had screened students more carefully on the way in and graded them more scrupulously on their academic achievement, high school and college enrollments and graduation rates never would have expanded so rapidly and we would all be worse off. This brings us to the third goal of education, social mobility.
Social Mobility
In liberal democracies in general, and in the United States in particular, hope springs eternal that expanding educational opportunity will increase social mobility and social equality. This has been a prime factor in the rhetoric of the American educational reform movements for desegregation, standards, and choice. But the evidence to support that hope simply doesn’t exist. The problem is this: In the way that education interacts with social mobility and social equality, both of these measures of social position are purely relative. Both are cases of what social scientists call a zero sum game: A + B = 0. If A goes up then B must go down in order to keep the sum at zero. If one person gets ahead of someone else on the social ladder, then that other person has fallen behind. And if the social differences between two people become more equal, then the increase in social advantage for one person means the decrease in social advantage for the other. Symmetry is built into both measures.
Although social equality is inherently relative, it is possible to think of social mobility in terms of absolute rather than relative position. During the 20th century in the U.S., the proportion of agricultural, manufacturing, and other blue collar workers declined while the proportion of clerical, managerial, professional, and other white collar workers rose. At the same time the proportion of people with a grade school education declined while the proportion with more advanced education rose. So large numbers of families had the experience in which parents were blue collar and their children white collar, parents had modest education and their children had more education. In absolute terms, therefore, social mobility from blue collar to white collar work during this period was substantial, as children not only moved up in job classification compared to their parents but also gained higher pay and a higher standard of living. And this social mobility was closely related to a substantial rise in education levels. This was a great success story, and it is understandable why those involved would attribute these social gains to education. For large numbers of Americans, it seemed to confirm the adage: to get a good job, get a good education. Schooling seemed to help people move up the ladder.
At the individual level, this perception was quite correct. In the 20th century, it became the norm for employers to set minimum educational qualifications for jobs, and in general the amount of education required rose as one moved up the occupational ladder. Youths overall had a strong incentive to pursue more education in order to reap social and economic rewards. Economic studies regularly demonstrate a varying but substantial return on a family’s investment in education for their children. For example, one estimate shows that males between 1914 and 2005 earned a premium in lifetime earnings for every year of college that ranged from 8 to 14 percent. That makes education a great investment for families – better than the stock market, which had an average annual return of about 8 percent during the same period.
What is true for some individuals, however, is not necessarily true for society as a whole. As I explained about social efficiency, it is not clear that increasing the number of college graduates leads to an increase in the number of higher-level jobs for these graduates to fill. To me it seems more plausible to look at the connection between education and jobs this way: The economy creates jobs, and education is the way we allocate people to those jobs. Candidates with more education qualify for better jobs. What this means is that social mobility becomes a relative thing, which depends on the number of individuals with a particular level of education at a given time and the number of positions requiring this level of education that are available at that same time. If there are more positions than candidates at that level, all of the qualified candidates get the jobs along with some who have lower qualifications; but if there are more candidates than positions, then some qualified applicants will end up in lower level positions. So the economic value of education varies according to the job market. An increase in education without a corresponding increase in higher level jobs in the economy will reduce the value of a degree in the market for educational credentials.
This poses a problem for the chances of social mobility between parents and children. After all, children are not competing with their parents for jobs; they’re competing with peers. And like themselves, their peers have a higher level of education than their parents do. In relative terms, they only have an advantage in the competition for jobs if they have gained even more education than their peers have. Educational gains relative to peers are what matter not gains relative to parents. As a result, rates of social mobility have not increased over time as educational opportunity has increased, and societies with more expansive educational systems do not have higher mobility rates.
Raymond Boudon and others have shown that the problem is that increases in access to education affect everyone, both those who are trying to get ahead and those who are already ahead. Early in the 20th century, working class parents had a grade school education and their children poured into high schools in order to get ahead; but at the same time, middle class parents had a high school education and their children were pouring into colleges. So both groups increased education and their relative position remained the same. The new high school graduates didn’t get ahead by getting more education; they were running just to stay in place. The new college graduates didn’t necessarily get ahead either, but they did manage to stay ahead.
So school reform in the U.S. has failed to increase social mobility or reduce social inequality. In fact, without abandoning our identity as a liberal democracy, there was simply no way that educational growth could have brought about these changes. School reform can only have a chance to equalize social differences if it can reduce the gap in educational attainment between middle class students and working class students. This is politically impossible in a liberal democracy, since it would mean restricting the ability of the middle class to pursue more and better education for their children. As long as both groups gain more education in parallel, then the advantages of the one over the other will not decline. And that is exactly the situation in the American school system. It’s the compromise that has emerged from the interaction between reform and market, between social planning and consumer action: we expand opportunity and preserve advantage, both at the same time. From this perspective, the defining moment in the history of American education was the construction of the tracked comprehensive high school, which was a joint creation of consumers and reformers in the progressive era. That set the pattern for everything that followed. It’s a system that is remarkably effective at allowing both access and advantage, but it’s not one that reformers tried to create. In fact, it works against the realization of central aims of reform, since it undermines social efficiency, blocks social mobility, and limits democratic equality.
These three goals, however, have gained expression in the American educational system in at least two significant ways. First, they have maintained a highly visible presence in educational rhetoric, as the politics of education continuously pushes these goals onto the schools and the schools themselves actively express their allegiance to these same goals. Second, schools have adopted the form of these goals into their structure and process. Democratic equality has persisted in the formalism of social studies classes, school assemblies, and the display of political symbols. Social efficiency has persisted in the formalism of vocational classes, career days, and standards-based testing. Social mobility has persisted in the formalism of grades, credits, and degrees, which students accumulate as they move through the school system.
Next Week: Roots of the Failure of School Reform to Resolve Social Problems: David Labaree on What Schools Can’t Do (Part 2)
In the fourth part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Daisy Salazar-Garza discusses her firsthand experience of the inequities in the public education system and the impact this has on students, families, and communities. Salazar-Garza is a Ph.D. student in the School of Educational Studies’ Urban Leadership Program at Claremont University. German is a recipient of the Student Travel Award from the Educational Change Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AREA). The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues who lead the Ed Change SIG. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Daisy Salazar-Garza: The 2026 AERA theme, “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Education Research,” calls us to draw upon our diverse knowledge and lived experiences to engage in meaningful “futuring” for education. For me, as a Chicana educator, scholar, and first-generation doctoral student, this theme feels deeply personal. It is a call that echoes the lessons my family instilled in me from an early age.
My family, especially my father, taught me about life’s harsh realities and the beauty of resilience through the power of storytelling. Around family meals, during long drives, or in quiet moments on the porch, I listened to stories of our history—stories of struggle, perseverance, and hope. These narratives shaped my understanding of who I am and filled me with a deep sense of pride. They taught me to honor the strength passed down from my ancestors and to recognize that storytelling is not only an act of remembrance but also a tool for transformation.
This foundation shapes how I approach educational research. To truly “unforget” our histories, we must center the voices and stories that have been pushed to the margins. Leveraging our collective knowledge requires valuing the lived experiences of those most impacted by educational inequities. By empowering communities with a vested interest in the future of education, we can imagine possibilities rooted in justice, equity, and collective empowerment.
As I continue to heed the 2026 AERA theme, I draw upon this legacy of storytelling and historical remembrance to inform my work. Understanding the social, economic, political, and racial contexts that have shaped communities is essential to serving them authentically—honoring both their strengths and the systemic injustice they have endured. Through remembering and honoring these histories, we can envision and build educational spaces that celebrate our roots and uplift our voices. In doing so, we can cultivate a just and hopeful future that directly confronts the inequities we must transform.
Source: Bank Street Graduate School of Education website
LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
DSG: Recently, I had the privilege of working with Dr. Osworth to co-author “Outward Portrayals of Equity: An Examination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Los Angeles County School Districts.” In 2024, we collected data from 80 public school districts to assess the current state of DEI commitments in Los Angeles County districts.
From this work, several lessons emerge for practitioners and scholars in the field of Educational Change. First, our findings highlight the need to look beyond surface-level portrayals of equity and focus on how DEI policies are enacted in districts and schools. Value statements made toward DEI without creating infrastructure through policy to support the work does not address the racialized nature of the structures within school districts (Salazar-Garza & Osworth, 2026). Second, schools as organizational systems often reproduce existing inequities. Recognizing these structural patterns is the first step toward redesigning them. Ultimately, transformative change needs to occur at the systemic level to disrupt and dismantle entrenched systems of inequality (Salazar-Garza & Osworth, 2026). Finally, pairing enforcement mechanisms, such as culturally responsive teaching, with policy can contribute to conscious efforts to alter internal patterns of organizational inequity (Salazar-Garza & Osworth, 2026).
“Value statements made toward DEI without creating infrastructure through policy to support the work do not address the racialized nature of the structures within school districts.”
Together, these insights emphasize that fostering educational change requires both reflective practice and systemic change. Equity efforts translate into improved student experiences and outcomes when we can redesign structures enacting patterns of inequity.
LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
DSG: As a scholar-practitioner, I believe the field of educational change is heading toward a deeper partnership with people who are the most affected by our current educational realities. By centering the voices of teachers, students, families, and communities, we can inspire real progress. Change comes when research and practice work go hand in hand to bridge the gap between theory and lived experience.
Given the current polycrisis world we’re navigating, where social, economic, and environmental challenges continually intersect, I find hope in collaboration within the field of education (Virella, 2025). Dr. Virella’s Crisis as Catalyst: Equity-Oriented School Leadership During Difficult Times reminds me that even in moments of uncertainty, there is great potential for transformation. As a school principal who was interviewed and whose narrative is present in this research alongside numerous other school leaders, it is a reminder that practitioners are engaging in powerful practices that are meeting the needs of our present moment. It is also a call to action that we can study practices from the field, derive key lessons, and create frameworks that empower and sustain more educators across the field.
What gives me hope is seeing more educators and researchers approach their work not just as inquiry, but as partnership with students, families, communities. When our research centers humanity and lived experience, educational change can lead us toward a more just and human-centered system for all students.
References
Salazar-Garza,D. and Osworth, D. (2026) Outward portrayals of equity: an examination of diversity, equity, and inclusion in Los Angeles County school districts. Leadership in Education Racial Equity and the Organization: An Educational Change Call to Action. Frontiers in Education. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1642675
Virella, P. M. (2025). Crisis as catalyst: Equity-oriented school leadership during difficult times. Harvard Education Press.
What does it take to create more sustainable school facilities? In the third part to this series, Carter Hyde and Hannah Nguyen discuss some of the new developments in facilities and facilities management that schools across the country have implemented to conserve energy, cut costs, and support students’ learning and wellbeing. The first post explored the negative impact that climate change and related disruptions have on students, and the second post focused on how schools are making busing and other aspects of school transportation more sustainable.
Environmental changes are contributing to disasters, crises, and day-to-day conditions that disrupt schooling, increase costs, and undermine students’ health and learning. Combatting these problems is profoundly complex, often requiring difficult trade-offs. Efforts to improve student health and learning environments may conflict with long-term sustainability goals and cost-effectiveness. These tradeoffs force school administrators to weigh the benefits of expensive structural upgrades against smaller, more affordable interventions. Despite the challenges, schools in the US and around the world are taking innovative steps that range from major infrastructure upgrades to homegrown, creative adjustments made by teachers in their classrooms.
A student from John McDonogh Senior High School’s first graduating class since Hurricane Katrina walks past a damaged wall on the way to commencement June 8, 2007, in New Orleans, LA, K12 Dive
Major Infrastructure Upgrades and Renewable Energy
After salaries, energy represents a critical area for both reducing costs and addressing sustainability. In the US, energy bills make up the second highest cost for school districts, amounting to roughly 8 billion dollars per year. To address these significant expenses, many institutions are moving beyond reactive budgeting and toward strategic roadmaps that help schools set sustainability goals that are aligned with national sustainability targets. Schools can use these roadmaps to help reduce the schools’ energy and water consumption, waste, and greenhouse gas emissions.
In the US, energy bills make up the second highest cost for school districts, amounting to roughly 8 billion dollars per year.
In addition to strategic budgeting, some schools are turning to high-impact technology to reduce energy costs and to promote sustainable practices. For instance, some schools are now putting in place geothermal wells because they offer a particularly sustainable way to heat and cool schools without burning fossil fuels. At the same time, some schools are turning to solar energy so that they can develop their own sources of energy. Though a costly up-front investment, solar panels can help reduce the electrification gap by providing a sustainable way to power schools that reduces costs over time and contributes to better air quality.
Countries with large with large school electrification gaps tend to have high potential for solar power generation, UNESCO via Gem Statlink
Improving HVAC Systems and the Building “Envelope”
Beyond energy sources, improvements to the school’s physical “envelope”—the walls, windows, and climate systems—can support student performance. Upgrading old HVAC systems, in particular, provides a way to cool classrooms and create better learning conditions at the some time. As one review of survey data from New York State schools showed, improving HVAC systems contributed to a 2% increase in attendance and a 3% increase in math scores over multiple years. Among other benefits, HVAC improvements can produce better air flow, which reduces the spread of disease and helps students focus. Improving air filtration through the use of air purifiers and portable air cleaners, can also help improve cognition and mitigate illness-related absences.
At the same time, air conditioning alone is not always a sustainable solution, as these systems can expel hot air outdoors and contribute to global warming. As architect Francis Kere explains, “energy-intensive air conditioning, which expels hot air outdoors, contribute to global warming, which then fuels demand for more air conditioning.” Instead, Kere recommends using passive cooling techniques, such as overhanging roofs to improve air circulation and generate cross-ventilation.
A student leaves the secondary school building built by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Francis Kere, in Kere’s home village of Gando, Burkina Faso, The Japan Times via Reuters
Schools can also make improvements in the outdoor environment to address sustainability. For instance, planting trees on asphalt playgrounds can reduce temperatures through shading, and painting roofs white, adding vegetation of false ceilings, and creating more green spaces can reduce the “heat island” effect.
Balancing Lighting and Temperature
Lighting represents another area where schools need to consider potentially conflicting benefits. In a 2020 review of 130 studies, lighting was found to be one of the environmental factors that had the biggest impact on students’ learning and wellbeing. Maximizing the amount of natural light in classrooms, in particular, has been shown to have a number of benefits including reducing eye strain, boosting mood, and improving cognition. Although artificial lighting may lead to lower motivation and eye strain, research reviews highlight that students in classrooms with more natural light showed higher productivity, engagement, and attention level. Despite these benefits, some classrooms may still suffer from poor lighting or rely too heavily on artificial sources. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that, in an effort to reduce energy consumption and costs, many schools have implemented LED lighting in classrooms.
Maximizing the amount of natural light in classrooms, in particular, has been shown to have a number of benefits, including reducing eye strain, boosting mood, and improving cognition.
In addition to finding a balance that maximizes the benefits of natural lighting with the costs, schools have to take into account the fact that both too much direct sunlight and too little light can negatively impact student engagement and impair test scores. Furthermore, schools have to take into account mitigating factors, including structural limitations that prevent some classrooms from relying on daylight, as well as the increases in classroom temperature and energy costs that come with larger windows. One way to deal with these challenges is to use temperature-treated or double-paned glass to provide light while keeping the heat out. The use of window shades may also be useful in eliminating glare.
Teachers’ Role in Sustainability
Whether or not schools have the resources for major structural changes or sustainability upgrades, teachers play a key role in striking the right balance between lighting and temperature and supporting both sustainability and an optimal learning environment. For instance, teachers have demonstrated a host of creative ways to combat heat and to improve the environment including using fans, creating window art to reduce glare, and turning off heat-generating electronics. In some cases, the simplest solutions may be the best solutions, as teachers in schools located in temperate regions with good air quality can open windows to allow for natural air flow.
Improving Facilities in “Old” Buildings
Along with so many natural disasters and rising temperatures, many communities face a long-standing demand to improve aging or inadequate school buildings. One of the most recent assessments of school infrastructure in the US shows that it would cost almost 200 billion dollars to bring all K-12 school buildings into good overall condition and the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the condition of America’s 100,000 public school buildings an overall grade of D+. Estimates suggest it would take as much as 85 billion dollars a year to make the needed improvements. On top of that, the costs of deferred maintenance continue to compound with every one million dollars worth of needed improvements deferred in one year leading to $1.08 – 1.12 million in costs the following year.
In the US, the burden and responsibility for addressing this problem falls on individual school districts and communities, but many lack the resources to pay for the significant upfront costs of building new facilities. Some districts have tried to mitigate these costs – and the sustainability problems that new construction often produces – by repurposing older buildings. For instance, struggling malls have opened the doors to charter schools as tenants to use the empty spaces. One charter school in South Carolina opened up in a former JC Penny Store. In Massachusetts, instead of building a new high school, one district opted to co-locate a school in the community’s senior center. center down the road.
Liberty STEAM Charter School in Sumter, S.C., is one of many schools that have opened up in malls across the nation, The New York Times
For more information regarding infrastructure and sustainability, see:
In the third part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Celina German discusses her experiences researching the intersection of community-based youth leadership, after-school club affinity programming, and student activism history. German is a Ph.D. student in the Learning, Literacies, and Technologies program at Arizona State University. German is a recipient of the Student Travel Award from the Educational Change Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AREA). The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues who lead the Ed Change SIG. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Celina German: While working on my 2026 AERA submission, the notion of Sankofa (also visible in the conference logo) kept guiding me through the process. The Akan symbolism of a bird looking back and the word, literally translated as “go back and get,” made me think about what one returns to as part of the process of going forward. As a former high school English teacher and co-advisor of the Black Student Union, my heart also remembers all the great work that is part of the Summer Sankofa program at Arizona State University. My educational background informs the academics I want to participate in.
Source: Arizona State University website
I carry into this work my identity as my family’s first and only birthright citizen. As I navigated the U.S. education system (PK12) as a Romanian-American, gender-question young woman, I saw the unhealthy relationship between whiteness, patriarchal logics, and academic achievement. To engage in coalition work, I deeply reflected (and continue to reflect) on what my positionality and actions say about liberation. My identity hung in the balance of being the only American in a family of naturalized and permanent residents, while at school, I was learning in real time my racialized identity and how others interpreted it. Growing up in southcentral Indiana around very few Romanians, I learned very quickly the gradation of whiteness and how multicultural spaces, like my swim team, filled with mostly first-generation American kids like me, were more accepting of me than most of my educational leaders. However, I thrived in leadership roles despite what adults expected of me.
I bring this worldview to the interviews, research partnerships, and organizing efforts to 1) acknowledge how fraught multicultural coalitions’ history has been in America, and it is with the mindset to 2) recognize that futuring for education is rooted in trust and empathy. We don’t dream with abandon with those whom we are unsure of, and I try to speak with that honesty and humility in the liberation work I engage in. It is not always well-received, and I am constantly learning how to leverage the privilege I have to ensure that those I care about are heard. However, the first step I take is recognizing that all communities have tremendous privilege.
For those reasons, the critical race feminism and transnational frameworks I operate within were part of a journey of learning about my love for critical and real U.S. history (read: Black, Indigenous, Immigrant history). Still, I would not have gotten there alone without the multitude of college professors who engaged me with what I later learned was at the core of Black studies and Ethnic studies curricula. Therefore, the research I do, which I see as a labor of love, explores the history of antiracist educational activism. To better understand the problems we face today, I look back through high school yearbooks, archives, and oral histories to understand what the youth of the past did, attempted, and did not do to transform school structures.
LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
CG: Part of my intellectual commitments towards educational change is writing alongside folks whose genius deserves to be heard and recognized, whether in the academic canon or in community outlets. The good fight is happening in the Black Student Unions (BSU), where advisors are engaging in fugitive mentorship and young people are demanding more of their school sites through an art-based YPAR inquiry (German, Smith, Berard, & Wilkerson, 2026; German, Nguyen, Joyner, & Johnson, 2026). To foster better educational systems, listening to practitioners and students for their insights into school system leadership is crucial.
In particular, young people in cultural affinity groups, such as BSU, M.E.Ch.A., or AAPISU, are extremely gifted in their critical consciousness of their leadership identities and in their understanding of the inner workings of school power dynamics. Expanding the definition of educational leaders to include student leaders of color, especially women of color, is the focus of my research. If young people are not part of that school-improvement feedback loop or act only as consultants, we are not engaging the school community that the administration aims to serve. Enacting changes because one is listening to young people in these elected roles is my vision of transformative school leadership.
“If young people are not part of that school-improvement feedback loop or act only as consultants, we are not engaging the school community that the administration aims to serve.”
Part of how I listen is understanding how young people are mentored in out-of-school or after-school programming. I aim to explore how adults co-conspire with youth to bring about educational change. Therefore, I had the opportunity to examine systemic designs for the equity director role through job descriptions. Dr. Ishmael Miller and I researched how institutional logics shape the role of equity directors. Miller’s work reflected on the lived realities of Equity Directors, either through reflexive accounts or historical inquiry (Miller, 2026a); (Miller, 2026b). His work is inspiring me as I explore leadership historically through a review of high school yearbooks illustrating BSU activism. Learning more about non-traditional educational leaders has broadened my perspective on organizational change in community partnerships and out-of-school-time youth organizations.
Lastly, I explore the limits of qualitative methods, such as interviewing, to see where dialogue about educational change can occur across differing, layered identities. Dr. Franklin-Phipps and I are using art to speculate Black educational futures (German and Franklin-Phipps, 2026). Our art inquiry is not to resolve or reach consensus, but to embrace the change needed to keep framing hope when we see sites of Black suffering (Dumas & Ross, 2016). Expanding my methods has inspired me to push the limits of positionality and reflexivity while doing coalition work in the academy.
LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
CG: I find hope for educational change in young people’s responses to adult-led decisions. Whether a student responds in rage or profound patience, that hope compels me to muster the courage I have as an adult co-conspirator to reconcile what can be mended. I see how educational change is still addressing adultism and rewiring frameworks, so youth voice is not seen as performative. The roles of youth in elected leadership, such as school boards, serve as a weathervane of progress in some districts. I think seeing young people presenting at AERA is expanding the horizons of YPAR research.
I also derive hope from all the community youth work organizers who have been in this work longer than I have. Their creativity in structures that run counter to the leadership development of young people makes me refuse to see the tunnel vision with which academia portrays it. Seeing how strong, mutually beneficial research-practice partnerships engage communities of practice is a step in the right direction for the educational change scholarship.
References
Dumas, M. J., & Ross, K. M. (2016). “Be real black for me” imagining BlackCrit in education. Urban Education, 51(4), 415–442.
German, C., & Franklin-Phipps, A. (2026). Speculating Black Educational Futures: Wit(h)nessing Interviews Through Politics of Knowing. Special Issue. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (under review).
German, C., Smith, S. L., Berard, L., & Wilkerson, R. (2026). Fugitive Mentorship and Cultivating Expansive Futures: A Collaborative Autoethnography by Black Student Union Advisors. Current Issues in Education, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.14507/cie.vol27iss1.2384
German, C., Nguyen, L., Joyner, J., Samuel, C., Johnson, A. (2026). Creatively Investing in Today’s Changemakers: Setting a YPAR Precedent for Empowered Student Leadership in Our Black Student Union. Journal of Participatory Research Methods. (under review)
Miller, I. A. (2026b). Historicizing the Equity Director Position: Black Community Advocacy by an Intergroup Relations Specialist. Journal of School Leadership, 36(1), 21–45.
Reed, E., German, C., Geraghty, P., Brown, K., & Carmichael, J. (2025). Editorial Introduction: Reflecting on Our Shared Educational Futures: A Global Need to Belong for Transformative Learning. Current Issues in Education, 26(2). https://doi.org/10.14507/cie.vol26iss2.2475.
In the first part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Dr. Paul Campbell discusses his experiences researching educational change, leadership, and policy. Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Educational Administration and Leadership at The University of Hong Kong and President-Elect of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI). His research focuses on how diverse approaches to knowledge production and research engagement shape reform, and offer new ways for understanding what it means to lead, be a leader, and exercise leadership. Dr. Campbell is a recipient of the Emerging Scholar Award. The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedotaand their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Paul Campbell: The 2026 AERA theme invites us to remember the histories that have shaped our field while imagining futures that are more inclusive, equitable, and transformative. My scholarship begins with the belief that we cannot imagine new futures without first acknowledging the epistemic closures of the past. Educational leadership and change have long been dominated by Anglo-American traditions, privileging certain ways of knowing while marginalising others. To move forward, we must confront this history directly and commit to advancing epistemic diversity.
In my recent paper with Sefika Mertkan (Campbell & Mertkan, 2025), we argue that while geographical diversification of scholarship is a foundational step, it is insufficient on its own. What is more critical is epistemic diversity; the recognition and mobilisation of multiple epistemological traditions. This requires interrogating who produces knowledge, what epistemologies are applied, how knowledge is circulated and cited, and whose voices are solicited. As we wrote, “advancing epistemic diversity is more critical than geographical diversification in liberating the educational leadership knowledge base from the Anglo-American hegemony.” Remembering this history of epistemic dominance is essential if we are to imagine futures where pluriversal perspectives thrive. Only then can new possibilities emerge for how we understand the nature and purpose of leading educational change, and only then can more just realities for learners and communities thrive.
“Advancing epistemic diversity is more critical than geographical diversification in liberating the educational leadership knowledge base from the Anglo-American hegemony.”
My work also examines how supranational discourses shape our understanding of leaders, leading, and leadership in policy, research, and practice. In ‘Leadership for Learning: A Policy Analysis of the GEM Report 2024’ (Campbell & Sum, 2026), Nicola Sum and I show how global accountability frameworks often fail to take local realities into account. By applying a leadership-for-learning lens, we highlight pathways to reimagine futures where global frameworks are translated into contextually responsive practices. This reflects a desire to bridge histories of epistemic dominance with futures of inclusive, situated knowledge.
Taken together, this body of work reflects both optimism and frustration. Optimism, because there are genuine opportunities to rethink how educational change is understood and enacted. Frustration, because leaders are often positioned within policy-saturated environments that constrain their agency, and because knowledge production practices too often reproduce dominant paradigms rather than center the voices of educators and leaders themselves. The increasingly complex realities facing school leaders, shaped by global norms and demands, local contexts, and broader socio-political realities, require us to rethink not only what leadership and change are, but also how we study and support them.
Heeding the call of the 2026 AERA theme, therefore, means committing to a dual task: remembering the exclusions and closures of the past, while actively constructing futures that are plural, inclusive, and transformative. My scholarship seeks to contribute to this by interrogating the structures that sustain epistemic hegemony, amplifying diverse voices and thinking, and reimagining leadership and the leadership of educational change as a relational, educative, and contextually grounded practice. In doing so, I hope to support a field of educational change that is globally relevant and locally meaningful; one that ultimately serves the needs of students, educators, and communities in more just, equitable, and necessarily diverse ways.
LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
PC: “I’m working on the margins in order to shake the core” was how one principal, in my study of principals’ life histories in relation to education reform, described the theme of their professional life and work. This articulation captures the complex realities of how leaders, their leadership, and change are positioned within systems, and the consequences this has for the enactment and possibilities of educational change. From this and related work, several lessons emerge for both scholars and practitioners.
Collaboration must be understood as socially and culturally situated. In ‘Leading Collaborative Educational Change: A Critical Policy Analysis of Leadership and Governance in Hong Kong Schools’ (Campbell & Kam, 2026), I show how hierarchical traditions, accountability demands, and conflict avoidance complicate the intentions and enactment of collaboration. Principals navigate tensions between policy ideals and lived realities, revealing that meaningful collaboration requires relational trust, cultural sensitivity, and reflexive leadership. This highlights the participatory dynamics of collaboration: who is involved, how power is exercised, and how goals are negotiated. Collaboration cannot, therefore, be reduced to structural arrangements or compliance mechanisms; it must be cultivated through participatory processes that respect cultural norms and empower diverse voices.
Agency is central to reimagining leadership in complex systems. In ‘“I’m Working on the Margins in Order to Shake the Core”: Educational Leadership, Agency, and the Reimagining of the Principalship’ (Campbell & Kam, 2026), principals describe how they enact agency through temporal, experiential, and relational dynamics. The agency framework articulated in this work, temporal (drawing on reform histories and aspirations), experiential (learning through practice and mentorship), and relational (building trust and mobilising communities) dynamics, offers a lens for understanding how leaders navigate, reinforce, or resist systemic constraints. For scholars, this challenges dominant conceptions of leaders’ positioning within and against system structures and constraints, and for leaders and educators in sites of practice, it underscores the need to support leaders in exercising agency within, with, and against systemic structures.
Organisational and socio-cultural dynamics must also be foregrounded. Accountability regimes, governance arrangements, and resource allocation shape the possibilities for collaboration and agency. At the same time, socio-cultural dynamics, comprised of hierarchical traditions, community expectations, and cultural dispositions toward conflict avoidance, mediate how leadership is enacted. Leaders must constantly negotiate these forces, balancing compliance with innovation and authority with relational trust. For educators, this means recognising that leadership is enacted within layered organisational and cultural contexts. For scholars, it calls for analyses that move beyond abstract models to examine how leadership is lived and contested in specific contexts.
Innovation in processes of change must also be conceptualised as situated and contested. In ‘Conceptualizing Innovation in Education: Implications for School Leadership and Change’ (Campbell et al., 2026), our editorial team and authors identified five themes requiring consideration for the leadership of innovation: innovation as relational, leadership as enabler or constraint, tensions between policy and practice, supportive cultures, and equity. Innovation is not a neutral construct; it reflects power relations and dominant epistemologies. For policymakers and professionals in sites of practice, this means developing organisational cultures of trust and inclusion. For scholars, it requires interrogating whose knowledge is valued and how innovation intersects with equity and justice.
Together, these insights highlight that educational change is shaped by participatory dynamics, organisational structures, socio-cultural contexts, and the agency of leaders. To reach better systems for all students, we must support leaders as active agents of change who navigate this dynamic complexity and are appropriately prepared and supported to do so.
LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
PC: Despite persistent challenges, and what seems like a relentless intensification of complexity in education systems, I find hope in several directions.
First, epistemic diversity. Scholars are increasingly interrogating citational practices, editorial structures, and epistemic injustices, creating space for alternative epistemologies to shape the theoretical core of our fields. This movement holds promise for dismantling universalist narratives and cultivating pluriversal perspectives. It also signals a shift toward valuing multiple ways of knowing and being, and toward scholarship that is globally open but locally meaningful.
Second, leadership is reframed as educative, relational, and political. By moving beyond managerial and compliance-driven framings, we can reimagine school leaders as agents of justice, democratic ideals, and community empowerment. My work with school leaders in Hong Kong demonstrates that even within high-accountability systems, leaders exercise agency to sustain trust, adapt practices, and preserve professional identity. These acts of agency, often enacted “on the margins,” provide seeds of transformation that can “shake the core” of entrenched structures. They remind us that leadership is so much more than positional authority; it is a practice of agency, enacted through relationships and values.
Third, innovation as relational and inclusive. As our editorial in School Leadership & Management (Campbell, MacGregor & Sum, 2026) argued, innovation must be understood as a situated process of change rather than a discrete product. It is inherently political, reflecting epistemologies, power relations, and assumptions about whose knowledge counts. Equity and inclusion cannot be treated as add-ons; they must be central to how innovation is defined, led, and legitimised. When innovation is framed this way, it becomes a vehicle for addressing systemic inequities and fostering cultures of collaboration. This is where I see the field heading: toward a more nuanced, contextually grounded, and justice-oriented understanding of educational change.
Fourth, collective capacity. Ultimately, my hope lies in the collective capacity of scholars, policymakers, and professionals in sites of practice to remember histories of exclusion, interrogate present structures of dominance, and imagine futures of inclusivity and equity. The provocations we posed in the editorial mentioned earlier, innovation as process, leadership as dilemma space, and innovation as political, are invitations to debate, but also to act. They call for research and practice that is conceptually plural, empirically grounded, and ethically serious.
By centering agency, collaboration, and epistemic diversity, educational change can become truly transformative. The future of the field depends on our willingness to embrace complexity, to resist reductive framings, and to cultivate leadership and change that are relational, inclusive, and equity-oriented. In this, I find hope: that even amid constraints, leaders and scholars can work on the margins to shake the core and, in doing so, reimagine futures that are more just and humane.
References
Campbell, P. & Kam, Y. C. (2026). Leading Collaborative Educational Change: A Critical Policy Analysis of Leadership and Governance in Hong Kong Schools, Leadership and Policy in Schools, 1-21, https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2026.2636612
Campbell, P., Macgregor, S. & Sum, N. (2026). Editorial: Conceptualizing Innovation in Education: Implications for School Leadership and Change, School Leadership and Management, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2026.2631919
Campbell, P. & Sum, N. (2026). Leadership for Learning: A Policy Analysis of the Global Education Monitoring Report 2024 and Its Local Implications for School Leadership, Management in Education, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1177/08920206261430580
Campbell, P. & Kam, Y. C. (2026). “I’m Working on the Margins in Order to Shake the Core”: Educational Leadership, Agency, and the Reimagining of the Principalship, Journal of Educational Administration, 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1108%2FJEA-06-2025-0246
Campbell, P. & Mertkan, S. (2025). Geographical Diversification of Educational Leadership Research: Gaps in Our Understanding, Management in Education, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/08920206251407030
In the first part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Dr. David Osworth discusses his experiences researching the intersections of educational policy and leadership for equity. Osworth is an Assistant Professor of Educational and Cultural Foundations at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research focuses on anti-LGBTQ+ policy, school discipline disparity, and neoliberal educational policy.The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedotaand their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
David Osworth: My scholarship—both at AERA 2026 and beyond—critically examines oppressive structures in education through a historical lens with the express intent of supporting progressive reform that is humanizing and liberatory. I do this, for example, in my recent scholarship on the political hostility toward LGBTQ+ communities. In a critical policy analysis of anti-transgender legislation in North Carolina, I situate the present hostility toward transgender communities against the backdrop of the histories of LGBTQ+ communities within the United States over the 20th century (Osworth & Edlin, 2025). This focus on history not only allows us to understand the current political moment as form of retrenchment (see McQuillan et al., 2022) but also provides a road map to highlight resistance movements that have found purchase in the struggle for equity and how to learn from those strategies to inform present-day policies and politics.
Source: University of North Carolina at Greensboro website
While this is a throughline of my scholarship, it is exemplified by the work I am presenting at this year’s annual conference. Continuing my work surrounding LGBTQ+ issues in education, I am presenting from a larger study on LGBTQ+ educational leaders. This study examines the experiences of 23 LGBTQ+ educational leaders from across the United States as they navigate the current political climate. In this paper, I specifically examine how support—or a lack of support—plays a role in how LGBTQ+ leaders navigate their work. The findings of this paper are set against the history of LGBTQ+ educators in the United States. This paper concludes by outlining how leaders envision the future for other LGBTQ+ leaders and how schools can be made more supportive spaces for LGBTQ+ communities.
Another presentation at this year’s annual conference also engages with history to interrogate the present state of charter schools in New Jersey. Building from previous work that conceptualizes charter schools as a form of racialized enclosure that continues the neoliberal disinvest in public goods (Osworth & Tanner, 2025), my coauthors and I present a spatial analysis of charter schools using census data. We find that charter schools in New Jersey are almost exclusively located in geographies that are urban, lower-income, and predominantly serve non-white families. We situate this finding within the work of Marxist and racial capitalism scholars. We underscore that this exploitative pattern of charter proliferation in the state is directly ties to the history of federal redlining and opportunity hoarding of affluent, white communities (Cashin, 2021; Rothstein, 2017).
LtC:What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
DO: My work aims to take a critical and interdisciplinary approach to educational research. I think that this is a major takeaway for the field as well as a commitment of the Educational Change SIG. In my recent work on school takeover in a rural school district, I interviewed Parents to better understand how they experienced the State’s intervention (Osworth, 2025, 2024). In this study, parents’ experiences illuminated counter-narratives about the takeover and complicated the State’s narrative about its progress. I think that these studies encapsulate a major takeaway from my scholarship as a whole. If we want to implement and enact change that meets the needs of the communities our schools serve, those communities must be included in the process. Too often, changes in our educational system relegate parents and communities to the periphery in the planning process while simultaneously relying on them to help implement the latest reforms. The findings from my scholarship point toward this reality. While the state education agency may say it includes parent feedback, parents’ experiences point in the opposite direction and demonstrate that trust and goodwill were destroyed in the process.
“Too often, changes in our educational system relegate parents and communities to the periphery in the planning process…”
Scholars and practitioners in educational change should therefore look toward centering community and family knowledge in the process of planning for change—not simply relegating them to be a tool to leverage in the journey for change. This moves from a more transactional view toward a more community-engaged and dialogic approach (see Freire, 1970/2018). My scholarship draws on the work of critical philosophers and thinkers, and I believe that those engaged in educational change need to prioritize the use of these theories, as bell hooks (1994) called for, making theory the cornerstone of liberatory practice.
LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
DO: More than ever, the field of educational change must remain firmly grounded in a commitment to equity. Current resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts disproportionately affects individuals from non-dominant identity groups, including—but not limited to—those marginalized by ability, socioeconomic status, gender, language, race, and sexuality. This contemporary moment of retrenchment (see Crenshaw, 1988) poses significant obstacles to efforts aimed at fostering socially just learning environments for all students. I view both my own scholarly work and the broader field as continuing to advance a justice-centered agenda—one that prioritizes the well-being of children and works toward realizing the democratic ideals upon which public education is founded.
At the same time, I am energized by the possibilities for engaging in theoretically robust scholarship within educational change. Concerns are often raised about a perceived disconnect between theory and practice, or about theory-driven research that lacks practical applicability. Yet I see the field at an especially promising juncture for meaningful praxis. Critical theoretical frameworks that offer important analytical tools for addressing today’s equity challenges also explicitly call for action. What is particularly compelling is the opportunity to pursue intellectually rigorous work that simultaneously informs how we act upon research insights. As educators and scholars continue to confront the complex, “wicked” problems facing education, it will be essential to do so through collaborative, community-engaged approaches that integrate theory and practice in purposeful ways. As we respond to the current political moment, I hope to see the field of educational change to keep these commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion as political pressure continues to mount for us to abandon these lines of inquiry and practice.
References
Cashin, S. (2021). White space, Black hood: Opportunity hoarding and segregation in the age of inequality. Beacon Press.
Crenshaw, K. (1988). Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law. Harvard Law Review, 101(7), 1331-1387.
hooks, b. (1993). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury.
McQuillan, M. T., Eckes, S., Lewis, M. (2022). A solution in search of a problem: Justice demands more for trans student-athletes to fulfill the promise of Title IX. Marquette Sports Law Review, 33(1), 195-228.
Osworth, D. (2025). “Prepare yourself for the change”: Counternarratives of parents experiencing state takeover. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2025.2601552
Osworth, D. & Edlin, M. (2025). The Political Construction of Anti-Transgender Policy: A Critical Policy Analysis of North Carolina State Legislators’ Discursive Formations. Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, 2(2). 1-11. https://doi.org/10.60808/ren9-ak07
Osworth, D. & Tanner, M.N. (2025). From public good to private gain: Charter schools and the racialized enclosure of public education. The Urban Review, 57(4), 833-854. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-025-00744-w
Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing Company.
How can we build accountability systems that strengthen professional responsibility, social participation, and equity?That is one of the critical questions that Luis Felipe de la Vega and Claudia Carrasco-Aguilar discuss in this interview about their new edited book Contesting Educational Accountability Research: Cross-National Dialogues on Quality and Equity (Springer 2026). The book includes comparative research on the implementation and effects of accountability systems in countries like Brazil, Chile, Italy, Honduras, South Africa, Spain and Sweden. Chapter 1 — “Performative Accountability: A Close Examination of a Dominant Model”– is available open access. De la Vega is a researcher at Bernardo O’Higgins University in Santiago, Chile and Carrasco-Aguilar is a researcher at the University of Malaga in Spain. AI was used to assist in the translation of this interview from Spanish into English.
Luis Felipe de la Vega & Claudia Carrasco-Aguilar: We have been analyzing accountability mechanisms in education for several years. Our analysis of the research findings has revealed a significant consensus regarding the implementation and outcomes of the “market-based,” “performance-based,” or “high-stakes” model. While these models have moderate or minor positive effects on improvement processes, they also have negative effects at the system, institutional, and stakeholder levels. Despite this consensus, the adoption of this type of accountability as a strategy for improving systems has continued to spread worldwide.
We investigated how and why some countries incorporated components of this mechanism into their institutional design to understand this phenomenon. We also identified alternative strategies that aim to recognize other ways of conceiving or using accountability. These strategies may be effective and beneficial for educational communities and/or have fewer negative implications for their stakeholders. In short, while accountability can allow for greater transparency and collective, citizen-led monitoring of educational processes, it also places significant pressure on schools, as if continuous improvement were solely the responsibility of schools and their teachers. Globally, educational accountability appears intertwined with market models, where families and communities demand that schools act as service providers and assume the role of customers rather than as true collective learning communities. We find ourselves in a globally polarized era, where the common good and shared responsibilities are overshadowed by a focus on individual gain.
“[W]hile accountability can allow for greater transparency and collective, citizen-led monitoring of educational processes, it also places significant pressure on schools, as if continuous improvement were solely the responsibility of schools and their teachers.”
In a context marked by discourses promoting competitiveness and mistrust at every level, it is important to reinforce the idea that positive improvement processes in education occur more naturally through collaboration and a deep, shared sense of purpose. The data support the need to develop accountability mechanisms grounded in education that align with societal expectations of educational systems.
IEN: What are some of the key similarities and differences in the accountability approaches used by the countries you and your colleagues have written about?
LFV & CCA: The book has helped confirm a significant trend toward incorporating performative accountability mechanisms in different parts of the world. Two decades ago, literature analyzing this strategy focused predominantly on the U.S. context and always took a critical tone. Over the years, however, we have observed growing interest in other regions, such as Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Furthermore, some countries that have long upheld an ethos of trust, such as Sweden, have also begun to incorporate these mechanisms. In general, significant similarities can be observed in these cases. Beyond distinctions in prioritized data, strategies, or associated consequences, there is a trend toward homogenizing an approach that aims to improve educational outcomes through accountability mechanisms. This strategy is often accompanied by a market-driven education system that confuses the public by blurring the lines between empowerment and clientelism. Educational standardization, high-stakes assessments, and the idea that students’ learning outcomes depend solely on the quality of teaching in schools seem to be creating a high-pressure system that is spreading worldwide. In many of the cases presented in this book, we see that educational accountability dissociates schools from their social context. It holds educational leaders and teachers responsible for students’ academic outcomes and obscures the role of social inequalities and injustices.
Nevertheless, the book includes South Africa as an example of how accountability strategies based on different principles, such as culturally responsive assessment, can successfully promote relevant educational goals. Additionally, the debate on performative accountability has been accompanied by alternative proposals demonstrating various accountability approaches. However, these have not clearly established themselves or moved beyond being good practices or promising experiences. It is interesting to consider why this is the case. The book puts forward some hypotheses on this matter.
IEN: What else did you learn while producing this book that you didn’t know before?
LFV & CCA: We learned many things, but one of the most important was that the discussion about performative accountability isn’t just about its use as a technical tool. Rather, it reflects a broader discussion about accountability in education and its ethical, political, and educational implications. Accountability systems reflect not only how education systems conceive of their own improvement but also their priorities for day-to-day operations.
“Accountability systems reflect not only how education systems conceive of their own improvement but also their priorities for day-to-day operations.”
So, two things happen. First, many researchers in education quickly reached a consensus that performative accountability is educationally counterproductive because it clashes with pedagogical logic and sensibilities. It makes it difficult for stakeholders to address the challenges communities identify as essential and fosters a competitive logic. This leads to mistrust and a lack of collaboration within the system. Second, despite this consensus, it has not been possible to build a sufficiently robust foundation to generate alternatives capable of competing with performative logic. In this regard, despite notable and interesting case studies, there is significant criticism of those who have promoted these proposals.
Another key insight is the importance of comparative research. This book introduces vastly different settings and contexts from various continents. The significant socio-geographical diversity involved makes this phenomenon particularly striking. Here, we observe the rise of market-driven education and its influences as they are culturally adapted. Clearly, researching educational accountability in Europe is not the same as doing so in the Global South. This book details both the differences and similarities between the two. Thus, we have learned about the power of local contexts in translating educational policies designed at the global level and how the performativity of these policies can be observed in these translations despite the influence of supranational bodies. In simple terms, performative accountability reshapes and transforms subjectivities, identities, and cultural realities that may appear similar at first glance but possess highly complex differences when analyzed in greater detail. These differences enable movements of opposition and resistance and may help us understand possible alternatives to these forms of accountability in the future, moving toward a more social form of accountability.
Luis Felipe de la Vega Rodríguez
Claudia Lorena Carrasco Aguilar
IEN: What are some of the key implications for policy and practice?
LFV & CCA: From a systemic perspective, the discussion on accountability should address its meaning and contribution to comprehensive educational improvement. Although the discussion of which test is best or what a certain score implies may be relevant, it does not address how each actor or institution can contribute to helping the education system and students achieve our envisioned goals.
Having strong accountability mechanisms does not mean having harsh ones. Alternative proposals can be equally rigorous in analyzing the extent to which we fulfill our responsibilities to achieve those goals. If educational processes have eliminated violence as a form of correction over many years, then educational principles that promote collective and institutional learning should be established as the foundation for improvement processes. This implies that we must consider other types of accountability relationships, including greater opportunities for peer collaboration among individuals and institutions and creating spaces for dialogue across levels of the education system. These spaces should not be solely marked by the possibility of sanctions but rather reflect a commitment to jointly seeking solutions to educationally relevant problems.
A fair accountability system holds everyone accountable, not just schools. However, the consequences should promote collective learning rather than punishment. Ultimately, what happens in a classroom is the result not only of a teacher’s actions, but also of their school, district, state, and other collaborating institutions. If we all have responsibilities, we should all take ownership of them. In that case, a system based solely on punishment loses meaning, making collaboration more logical.
“A fair accountability system holds everyone accountable, not just schools. However, the consequences should promote collective learning rather than punishment.”
IEN: What else have you learned about accountability since writing that book?
LFV & CCA: As authors, we have learned that educational accountability is much more ambiguous and contentious than is typically assumed in public policy discourse. Our comparative studies and theoretical review show that accountability does not have a single form but rather takes on multiple configurations that answer different questions: What should be accounted for? To whom? For what purposes, and through what mechanisms? When these questions are answered from a technical or administrative perspective, accountability tends to be reduced to measurement, control, and sanctions. However, when answered from an educational perspective, accountability can become an instrument of reflection, improvement, and shared responsibility.
Another important finding is that the global dominance of the performance-based model has had deeper consequences than previously thought in terms of not only outcomes, but also school culture and teaching practice. In many contexts, systems based on standardized tests, rankings, and incentives have reinforced competitive dynamics, narrowed the curriculum, and shifted the focus from educational processes to indicators. Assessment and accountability are not inherently negative; rather, design matters, and certain formats can undermine what they seek to improve, especially in contexts of inequality.
We have also learned that the effects of accountability are not universal but depend heavily on context. The chapters in the book demonstrate that the same policies can generate different results based on the education system’s history, level of institutional trust, regulation of teaching work, and social structure. This calls into question the idea that certain models can be considered transferable without adaptation. It compels us to view educational accountability as a context-specific framework designed according to each system’s actual capabilities and the goals pursued.
“[T]he same policies can generate different results based on the education system’s history, level of institutional trust, regulation of teaching work, and social structure. This calls into question the idea that certain models can be considered transferable without adaptation.”
Based on this information, the most relevant open-ended question for us is how to build forms of accountability that strengthen professional responsibility, social participation, and a commitment to equity, rather than being limited to external control. Reviewed evidence suggests the most promising approaches combine evaluation and collaboration, incorporate community voices, and view accountability as part of education’s public mission, not just an obligation to report. Thus, the future challenge is not to set accountability aside but to shift it from a culture of surveillance to a culture of shared responsibility oriented toward educational improvement.
We believe this requires significant effort from academic and political perspectives, which is why partnerships are needed to drive progress. As academics, we must ask ourselves why our robust evidence is not sufficiently impacting decision-making and consider how we can improve.
What if the most important part of education is learning how to live with uncertainty? That’s the question that Goutham Yegappan pursues in the 8th season of his Re-Educated Podcast. In the latest episode, he discusses these issues with IEN Editor Thomas Hatch, who highlights the multi-layered problems that make it so difficult to improve schools on a large-scale.For previous interviews, see “Thomas Hatch on The Education We Need and the Future We Can’t Predict” Getting Smart podcast(2021); “What Type of Education Do We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict?” The Getting Unstuck Podcast (2021); Mapping New York City’s ‘School Improvement Industry’CPRE’s Research Minutes Podcast.
02:10 – Thomas Hatch’s Path into Education Research
06:45 – Understanding the History of Education Reform
12:30 – Why Promising Reforms Often Fail & The Complexity of Systemic Change
“The challenges in education are so profound and are so multi-layered and so intricate that it’s very difficult to pinpoint one thing that we can do… There’s no one thing that’s going to do it. We have to work on all of these things at once.” (12:08 – 13:27)”
18:40 – The Architecture of Education Systems
24:55 – The Challenge of Scaling Innovation
31:10 – Policy, Practice, and the Classroom Reality
37:20 – Accountability and Its Unintended Consequences
43:35 – Improvement Science and Systemic Change
“Incremental and transformational change can go together. And if I as a leader come in and I recognize… if I work with my peers, the generation that comes after me… then we can build a multi-generational effort that is incremental but leads to the kind of transformational change we want.” (46:43 – 47:46)
49:15 – Rethinking School Reform for the Future
“Humility and courage have to go together. Because if you as a leader know that you don’t have the answer, then you actually need a lot more courage than the leader that thinks they know.”(51:54)
55:10 – Lessons for Educators and Policymakers
58:30 – Closing Reflections
“What if the purpose of schooling wasn’t just focused on the education of an individual child or to enable them to go to college… but it was to make sure that all members of our community are healthy and able to live and to contribute to society?” (1:00:16 – 1:00:42)
This week IEN is highlighting Lead the Change’s post featuring this years presenters in their Educational Change SIG sessions. This year’s 10 sessions highlight different contexts, perspectives, and methodological approaches to educational change. The issue features a small slice of the symposia and paper presenters. This post includes presenters from the session titled: “Foundations for Lasting Equity and Transformation: Policy, Organizations, and Professional Practice.” These interviews are part of the Lead the Change series produced by Series Co-EditorsJackie Pedota & Soobin Choi and colleagues from AERA’s Educational Change Special Interest Group. The full interviews can be found on the LtC website.
Faculty Cluster Hiring as a Catalyst for Racial Equity in Academic Departments — Román Liera (RL) Montclair State University, Rosa M. Acevedo (RM) University of Pittsburgh, Baili Park (BP) University of Pittsburgh, Aireale J. Rodgers (AR) University of Wisconsin – Madison, Heather McCambly (HM) University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Román Liera
Dr. Heather McCambly
Dr. Aireale J. Rodgers
Baili Park, M.A.
Dr Rosa Maria Acevedo
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work to inform policy and practice?
RL, RM, BP, AR & HM: In an increasingly hostile sociopolitical climate that actively defunds and undermines racial equity efforts, university-based faculty cluster hiring (FCH), designed to recruit faculty cohorts around shared research themes to advance interdisciplinarity and diversity, has not been immune to anti-DEI backlash. Drawing on the modes of reproduction framework (Anderson & Colyvas, 2021), our analysis examines how whiteness is animated and potentially disrupted at the department level within FCH implementation. By tracing inequitable outcomes to their sources, whether exclusionary criteria, departmental values, or individual racial schemas, we illuminate the specific sites where racialized mechanisms operate.
Our work suggests that the field of Educational Change must recognize that sustainable, equity-focused transformation requires more than rhetorical commitment or effective hiring practices. Institutional change agents must attend to the institutional routines that reproduce whiteness even within well-intentioned initiatives. Practically, this means embedding equity-minded evaluation criteria into formal policies, creating accountability structures, and designing post-hire support rather than relying on faculty of color’s precarious labor (McCambly et al., 2025). Our findings underscore that equity innovations are vulnerable to co-optation without sustained investment in the structural conditions that enable their flourishing. Lasting change requires dismantling the modes of reproduction that animate whiteness, not merely diversifying within them.
Middle Leaders and the Illusion of Reform: Unpacking Faux Comprehension and Pseudo-Understanding in Curriculum Change — Chun Sing Maxwell Ho (CH) The Education University of Hong Kong, Chiu Kit Lucas Liu (CL) The Education University of Hong Kong
Lucas Chiu-kit Liu
Dr Chun Sing Maxwell Ho
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work to inform policy and practice?
CH & CL: Meaningful educational change depends not only on policies, timelines, and accountability routines, but on the quiet, caring work middle leaders do with educators—checking understanding, building trust, and creating safe spaces to question and refine practice.
When care is replaced by tight control and a chase for ‘efficiency,’ schools risk ‘faux comprehension’ among teachers, in which they appear aligned yet quietly prioritize their own aims (which is not necessarily problematic). When care gives way to hands-off optimism, schools drift into ‘pseudo-understanding,’ a sincere but flawed enactment sustained by vague goals and overconfidence.
To move beyond surface-level claims of success, reform should adopt a dual learner-centered stance: student-centered (clear non-negotiables anchored in educational purpose) and teacher-centered (bounded autonomy, structured sensemaking cycles, and timely support and feedback). Attending to both learners surfaces misunderstandings early, aligns pedagogy with purpose, and yields an impact visible in students’ work and in teachers’ growth. Drawing on Sengupta-Irving et al. (2023), we suggest situating the present in the context of the past as we struggle toward an imagined future. Our comrades in Black studies teach us that we find hope in deep study and struggle (Harney & Moten, 2013; Hartman, 2019; Kelley, 2018). Thus in the context of our symposium, we invite attendees to think with us about the particularities of present DEI and/or antiracist change efforts across higher education in the context of their historical emergence, while remaining them attuned to what the future of these change efforts must become to build a just system of higher education. Practicing how to design change efforts that stand the test of time demands explicit attention to multiple timescales, and we offer that as an important takeaway through our symposium.
The Role of Absorptive Capacity for ICT-knowledge management in schools: Does collaboration matter? — Sandra Fischer-Schöneborn (SF) IU International University of Applied Sciences, Marcus Pietsch (MP) Leuphana University – Lueneburg, Chris Brown (CB) University of Southampton, Burak Aydin (BA) Ege University, Stephen W. MacGregor (SM) University of Calgary
Dr Sandra Fischer-Schöneborn
Chris Brown
Dr Stephen MacGregor
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work to inform policy and practice?
SF, MP, CB, BA & SM: This study examined the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) -knowledge absorptive capacity (ACAP) for technology integration (TI) in schools. The aim was to contribute to the international debate on ACAP as a critical factor for organizational learning in schools and for the implementation of innovations in schools by integrating external knowledge generated in networks.
Findings indicate (among others) that ICT ACAP has a positive effect on TI in schools and serves as a mediator in the relationship between external knowledge and TI. Additionally, the impact of ICT-ACAP on TI is contingent upon the presence and efficacy of knowledge-sharing mechanisms within the school, as well as the extent to which schools engage in collaborative efforts with competitors (known as coopetition).
These results have implications for policymakers and educational leaders, who could prioritize building ACAP and fostering collaborative networks, such as research-practice partnerships or professional learning networks, to create more adaptable and innovative school environments.
Leading Educational Change by Learning from Failure in Networks – Stephen W. MacGregor (SM) University of Calgary, Marcus Pietsch (MP) Leuphana University – Lueneburg, Sharon Friesen (SF) University of Calgary.
Dr. Stephen MacGregor
Dr. Sharon Friesen
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change and the audience at AERA can learn from your work to inform policy and practice?
SM, SF, & MP: In our study of leaders implementing multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) for student mental health through a cross-sector network (MacGregor & Friesen, 2025), a consistent pattern was that most setbacks were not caused by “bad actors” but by process and capacity problems: fragmented implementation, weak data infrastructure, uneven rollout, and too much work for the available people and services, especially in rural communities.
First, treat implementation as facilitation, not compliance. Leaders need time, authority, and routines to align the innovation, the people affected, and the local context, and to surface small failures early before they harden into routine. Second, build the infrastructure, including shared measures and data-aggregation pathways that enable schools to learn from patterns rather than anecdotes and to reduce duplication and drift. Third, protect purposeful risk.
We saw little evidence of exploratory testing in MTSS, which signals a field squeezed by short funding cycles and public accountability. Create “safe-to-try” zones inside MTSS work: small pilots with explicit learning aims and rapid feedback. Networks can host this work by normalizing candid failure talk and turning it into collective problem-solving.
International Education News 