Tag Archives: leadership

In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Román Liera designs his research program to study racial equity and organizational change in higher education. Liera is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University. His current research projects focus on understanding how racism operates in doctoral student socialization, the academic job market, faculty hiring, reappointment, tenure and promotion, presidential hiring, and racial equity professional development. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. This year, the Ed Change SIG recognized Liera’s work with one of two Emerging Scholar Awards. 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?

Román Liera: I appreciate the theme and the question because the current anti-DEI attacks are not new and have provided an opportunity to reflect on what has been done in the past and a gut check that what is being done has not been enough to advance racial equity and justice. In studying racial equity and organizational change, I have had several opportunities to collaborate and partner with administrators, faculty, and staff taking action to create more equitable hiring practices. I have also been collaborating with other scholars who have been creative and innovative in theorizing racial equity and organizational change.

“We highlight how senior leaders, administrators, faculty, and staff leverage racialized expertise as hiring capital.”

In working with leaders and practitioners who are taking actions towards change, I have learned from and with change agents who are nearing retirement or beginning their higher education careers. Listening to those who have been in higher education for decades and referring to similar instances regarding attacks on DEI in the past (e.g., the Civil Rights era) has helped me affirm that my work not only matters but also makes a difference in the face of attacks on race-focused change efforts. At the same time, working with those newer to the field has helped me slow down to acknowledge that what we have been doing has not been enough to create equitable and inclusive educational organizations.

In addition to collaborating with change agents from diverse identities and career trajectories, I am theorizing and studying how we can continue to disrupt deeply rooted forms of racism in educational organizations. An area that I have been investigating is the racial inequities in the professoriate (e.g., underrepresentation of faculty of color), particularly in recruiting, hiring, and tenure and promotion practices. For example, along with Drs. Heather McCambly and Aireale Rodgers, we designed a study on faculty cluster hiring at six research one universities. A goal was to understand how administrators, faculty, and staff leaders framed and implemented cluster hiring initiatives to disrupt how whiteness informed faculty recruitment and hiring routines, practices, decisions, and evaluations. We recently published a manuscript in the Journal of Higher Education titled “Analyzing the Purposes and Mechanisms of Faculty Cluster Hiring Initiatives to Promote Racial Equity.” In the paper, which is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we highlight how senior leaders, administrators, faculty, and staff leverage racialized expertise—expertise focused on addressing racial inequities and injustices—as hiring capital.

Our participants emphasized that faculty cluster hiring initiatives aimed to broaden the expertise of faculty across departments and the university, enabling them to address critical societal issues related to equity and justice. In doing so, they were also being intentional not to trigger racist stereotypes among administrators and faculty that the cluster hiring was code for hiring underqualified faculty of color. On the contrary, the faculty cluster hiring initiatives raised the criteria because the evaluation criteria included what departments typically sought and what the cluster was focused on. Moreover, these change agents also leveraged cluster hiring lines to challenge practices that perpetuate racial inequities, such as requiring academic departments to assess their retention practices to access a cluster faculty line. Our participants reflected AERA’s theme because they relied on the past of their organizations to make decisions about creating more equitable and inclusive campuses for People of Color.

LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

RL: As we learned through the faculty cluster hiring study mentioned above, initiatives to promote racial equity must go beyond reallocating resources. That is, having systemic and deep-level change requires more than monetary support and changes to hiring criteria. Although we found that change agents were strategic and responsive to the racialized history of their campuses, they used their political capital to situate faculty cluster hiring as an initiative that promoted the status of their university’s intellectual enterprise. For example, to legitimize the cluster initiatives, they aligned them with university-level missions to address and, in many instances, lead the advancement of equity and justice. However, in many cases, they left intact how whiteness operated in departments that did not have the infrastructure and people to promote racial equity. That is, faculty with expertise in racial equity and justice, who often were faculty of color, were brought into departments that expected them to take on the load of racial equity issues in their departments, which went beyond their scholarly contributions to the field. I echo what we recommend in the paper: I sympathize with the precarity (e.g., having to work in organizations that hamper agency, especially agency to address racial equity issues) higher education faces, but also remind leaders that race-focused initiatives like faculty cluster hiring hold promise for promoting racial equity, and it is legally defensible because it is about transforming structures and cultures and not about hiring based on racial identities. As extensive research has convincingly found (Gonzales et al., 2025; Liera & Hernandez, 2021; White-Lewis, 2020), racial biases and ideologies are deeply embedded in recruitment, hiring, promotion, and tenure practices that, when left undisrupted, whiteness will continue to be the baseline for what and who we deem valuable in the academy. More so than ever, today is not the time to be neutral if we genuinely care about creating more equitable and just futures.

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

RL: I will draw on the AERA 2026 theme and AERA President Winn’s comments to describe the program theme. One of the questions she asked educators was to “take a long path approach by thinking and feeling beyond our individual life spans… to the impact we will have on future generations of students, educators, and education researchers” (Wallach, 2022, p. 10 as cited by Winn, 2025 paragraph 3). Admittedly, when I initially sat with this question, I had a hard time imagining the future outside my lifespan. However, I made sense of it by taking a step back and reflecting on my research approach, as well as my relationships with educational practitioners, leaders, and researchers, which helped me frame my response to the question. 

Educational change requires us to be comfortable with imagining the future beyond our lifespans. For example, in 2022, Dr. Steve Desir and I theorized about the equity-minded organization. Not long after we published our paper (Liera & Desir, 2023), Dr. Kevin McClure interviewed us about our collective work on organizational change and racial equity, as well as the equity-minded organization, for his now-published book, “The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workforce after the Great Resignation.” He asked us if there was a university or college that we would consider to be an equity-minded organization. We said no, but we have several examples of educational organizations that reflect aspects of an equity-minded organization, and we wanted to provide a framework for the possibilities of a more just and equitable future. As Dr. McClure did, based on extensive literature, original data collection, and expert interviews, Steve and I were able to theorize about a future possibility by leaning into our experiential, theoretical, and methodological differences to imagine what we want future generations to experience. 

In short, I am hopeful for the future of educational change because educators are leaning into community to imagine more equitable and just organizations for future generations (see Dr. Patricia Virella’s book Crisis as Catalyst as an example of hope and equity for the future).

References

Gonzales, L. D., Bhangal, N., Stokes, C., & Rosales, J. (2025). Faculty hiring: Exercising professional jurisdiction over epistemic matters. Journal of Higher Education, 96(1), 28–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2024.2301915.

Liera, R., & Desir, S. (2023). Taking equity-mindedness to the next level: The equity-minded organization. Frontiers in Education, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1199174. 

Liera, R., & Hernandez, T. E. (2021). Color-evasive racism in the final stage of faculty searches: Examining search committee hiring practices that jeopardize racial equity policy. The Review of Higher Education, 45(2), 181–209. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2021.0020.

McCambly, H. N., Liera, R., Rodgers, A. J., & Park, B. M. (2025). Analyzing the purposes and mechanisms of faculty cluster hiring initiatives to promote racial equity. The Journal of Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2025.2546765.

McClure, K. R. (2025). The caring university: Reimagining the higher education workplace after the great resignation. John Hopkins Press. 

Virella, P. M. (2025). Crisis as catalyst: Equity-oriented school leadership during difficult times. Harvard Ed Press. White-Lewis, D. (2020). The facade of fit in faculty search processes. Journal of Higher Education, 91(6), 833–857. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2020.1775058.

In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Stephen MacGregor draws from his experience researching knowledge mobilization as a mechanism for educational change, with an emphasis
on leadership practices within increasingly complex education systems. MacGregor is an Assistant Professor and Director of Experiential Learning at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education. His research focuses on three interrelated strands of inquiry: (1) mapping relational networks between universities and K–12 schools, (2) exploring positive leadership in nurturing professional capital and community, and (3) co-producing knowledge to bridge education theory and practice. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. This year, the Ed Change SIG recognized MacGregor’s work with one of two Emerging Scholar Awards. 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?

Stephen MacGregor: I see the call to “unforget” as an imperative to intentionally surface the institutional, policy, and community narratives that have shaped current possibilities for teaching, learning, and leadership. Much of my research and leadership has been motivated by this orientation, particularly in projects that examine how educational systems respond to and often resist new ideas, and how practitioners navigate the attendant dynamics.

“I aim to counteract tendencies to erase dissenting voices or inconvenient histories.”

One step I am taking is to more deliberately position historical analysis alongside contemporary policy and practice studies in my research (e.g., MacGregor & Friesen, 2025; MacGregor et al., 2022, 2024). In my recent and ongoing research into multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) and social-emotional learning implementation in Alberta schools, for example, my colleagues and I examine the present-day enactment of new initiatives as well as trace how prior reform cycles, funding shifts, and governance structures have left their imprint on current efforts. The historical grounding deepens our understanding of why certain approaches gain traction, why others fade, and what legacies of inequity persist beneath what can often be surface-level change.

Equally, my scholarship on knowledge mobilization in educational leadership has highlighted how selective memory (i.e., what is remembered, forgotten, or deemed irrelevant) shapes the evidence that informs decision-making. Through collaborative work with system leaders to design processes that make research use more transparent and inclusive, I aim to counteract tendencies to erase dissenting voices or inconvenient histories (e.g., experiences with failure and what can be learned from them). This has included creating tools and frameworks that explicitly prompt leaders to consider historical precedents and the perspectives of communities that have long envisioned and pursued their own futures for education, often outside formal institutional channels.

In my role as Director of Experiential Learning at the Werklund School of Education (University of Calgary), I am working to integrate a longer-term, historically grounded perspective into the design of learning experiences for undergraduate and graduate students. This means helping future and current practitioners see educational challenges as part of longer trajectories shaped by policy and shifting social priorities. To that end, I am building local and international partnerships that connect our students with varied educational histories and contexts (e.g., multiple international teaching placements through the Teaching Across Borders program). This work also involves embedding reflective and archival practices into experiential learning. I ask participants in our initiatives to document their experiences in ways that attend to historical influences (e.g., speaking with practitioners about prior reform efforts, exploring changes in governance or community engagement over time). My aim is for these experiences to leave participants better prepared to design and lead educational opportunities that are responsive to both the past they inherit and the future they help shape.

Looking ahead, I plan to expand my research on how system leaders and policymakers draw on history, explicitly or implicitly, when justifying decisions and setting priorities. I am especially interested in how prevailing narratives within leadership discourse and policy texts shape which forms of evidence are privileged and which innovations are recognized. Moreover, I aim to support leadership practices and research use that are historically informed and attentive to marginalized perspectives.

LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

SM: A consistent lesson from my research is that fostering better school systems for all students requires a shift from viewing change as a series of isolated initiatives to understanding it as an
iterative, relational process. Educational change is seldom straightforward; it unfolds amid fluctuating policy landscapes, evolving priorities, and the complexities of daily practice. When leaders and practitioners treat each initiative as if it exists in a vacuum and without regard for prior efforts, contextual constraints, or the cumulative impact on educators and learners, they risk repeating past missteps and missing opportunities to build on existing strengths.

From my MTSS research, another lesson is that systems must attend to implementation drivers (Fixsen et al., 2015) as the key organizational and human supports that make new practices possible in schools and thus that enable change efforts to take root and grow. These include competency drivers such as targeted professional learning and coaching; organization drivers such as supportive policies, data systems, and resource alignment; and leadership drivers that guide decision making in response to challenges. Where these drivers are deliberately cultivated in concert, educators are better positioned to adapt initiatives for their own contexts and ensure they serve the needs of their students.

Another lesson relates to the role of failure in system improvement. Too often, unsuccessful reforms are quietly set aside without deliberate reflection, resulting in the same pitfalls being encountered repeatedly. My research points to the value of structured learning from failure, which means creating processes that allow for analysis of what went wrong or failed to produce the intended outcomes, identifying underlying mechanisms, and generating insights for future action (MacGregor & Friesen, 2025). This reframing of failure as a legitimate and even necessary part of improvement strengthens adaptive capacity. It also shifts organizational culture toward openness, candour, and a willingness to iterate rather than abandon promising work prematurely.

Finally, across my work in schools, international partnerships, and higher education settings, I have seen that strong, trust-based relationships are essential for the two previous lessons to function at their best. Competency, organization, and leadership drivers all depend on the mutual respect and shared ownership that develop when schools and broader systems engage as genuine partners. Moreover, relationships provide the foundation for honest conversations that allow people to name challenges directly and work together on responses that matter.

For practitioners, these lessons might spark reflection on ways to anchor new initiatives in an understanding of local context and history, strengthen the drivers that support implementation, build habits of learning from setbacks, and invest in relationships as a foundation for change. For scholars, they might prompt thinking about how to design research that examines the drivers of educational change in action and supports their development, which could offer knowledge that is attentive to the realities and contexts where change is being pursued.

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

SM: I see the field of educational change continuing to wrestle with complexity while becoming more deliberate in how it integrates various forms of knowledge and expertise. There is a growing recognition that meaningful change depends on aligning policy, practice, and community engagement in ways that are contextually grounded and historically informed. I am hopeful for continued attention to strengthening the foundational conditions (e.g., coherent governance structures, stable funding streams, and collaborative professional learning) that allow promising approaches to take root and adapt over time.

I also anticipate deeper commitments to equity-informed leadership, with systems increasingly
recognizing that meaningful change cannot happen without addressing the structural inequities that shape educational experiences. Among many approaches, this could involve more substantive power sharing with communities, particularly those whose knowledge has historically been overlooked or marginalized. It could also involve embedding processes for shared decision-making and transparency into the everyday work of schools and systems.

What gives me hope is the growing body of scholarship and practice that treats relationships as the core infrastructure of educational change. I see this in system leaders who intentionally create spaces for dialogue that can bridge ideological divides, in educators who invite students and families into co-design processes, in cross-sector partnerships that build locally relevant solutions, and in research-practice networks that enable long-term collaboration across institutions and jurisdictions (e.g., Hubers, 2020; Rechsteiner et al., 2024; van den Boom Muilenburg et al., 2022). I am also encouraged by how scholars and practitioners are integrating multiple ways of knowing and thus valuing both rigorous research and the lived experience of educators, students, and communities. I am hopeful that we are moving beyond asking “what works?” by appending that question with “for whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences?”(Boaz et al., 2019).

References

Boaz, A., Davies, H., Fraser, A., & Nutley, S. (Eds.). (2019). What works now? Evidence-in- formed policy and practice. Policy Press.

Fixsen, D., Blase, K., Naoom, S., & Duda, M. (2015). Implementation drivers: Assessing best practices. National Implementation Science Network.

Hubers, M. D. (2020). Paving the way for sustainable educational change: Reconceptualizing what it means to make educational changes that last. Teaching and Teacher Education, 93.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2020.103083.

Rechsteiner, B., Kyndt, E., Compagnoni, M., Wullschleger, A., & Maag Merki, K. (2024). Bridging gaps: A systematic literature review of brokerage in educational change. Journal of Educational Change, 25(2), 305–339. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-023-09493-7.

van den Boom-Muilenburg, S. N., Poortman, C. L., Daly, A. J., Schildkamp, K., de Vries, S., Rodway, J., & van Veen, K. (2022). Key actors leading knowledge brokerage for sustainable school improvement with PLCs: Who brokers what? Teaching and Teacher Education, 110.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2021.103577.

MacGregor, S., & Friesen, S. (2025). Reframing failure: Lessons from educational leaders
facilitating multi-tiered systems of support. Journal of Professional Capital and Community. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPCC-09-2024-0168.

MacGregor, S., Friesen, S., Turner, J., Domene, J. F., McMorris, C., Allan, S., Mesner, B., &
Sumara, D. (2024). The side effects of universal school-based mental health supports: An integrative review. Review of Research in Education, 48, 28–57.

In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, David Osworth draws from his experiences in a research practice partnership and his work with improvement science as he discusses how to support leaders and center equity and justice in research and practice. Osworth is an assistant professor in the department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research focuses on race, class, and equity in educational leadership and policy. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2025 AERA theme is “Research, Remedy, and Repair: Toward Just Education Renewal.”  This theme urges scholars to consider the role that research can play in remedying educational inequality, repairing harm to communities and institutions, and contributing to a more just future in education. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?

Dave Osworth (DO): I appreciate this year’s AERA theme. I think a common pitfall for the academy is to focus exclusively on the creation of new knowledge without thinking about how this knowledge is relevant to the everyday work of educators or can help to make schooling a more equitable space. I have at times been guilty of staying exclusively in the theoretical without thinking about the transition to the practical. AERA’s theme calls upon us to think about the ways in which our research can lead to action. 

One way that I am trying to respond to this call is by examining the ways in which research practice partnerships (RPP) may help to drive leadership capacity within a school district. For example, I have been part of an RPP between an R1 university and a large school district focused on fostering leadership capacity. RPPs are intended to be long term collaborations between researchers and practitioners involving boundary spanning through high levels of communication and the development of strong trust. With this RPP, like others, the research process is entwined with practice. Additionally, we have made sure that this partnership is very responsive to the needs of the district. As such we have found that at times it is important to be flexible and willing to explore how we might help address the additional needs of the district beyond the initial problem of practice. This flexibility has helped to support the longevity of the partnership and has resulted in new areas of work that supports the needs of the district while providing ample opportunity for university faculty to engage in scholarship.

 AERA’s theme also calls upon us to think about the historical contexts of education. It is easy to fall into a pattern of focusing on the present problem of practice without situating it historically. As a scholar, I identify with post-critical approaches (see Anders & Noblit, 2024). This means that, as I apply my scholarship to educational leadership and policy, I try to think about the specific context that has shaped a current problem of practice. In practice, this can involve infusing historiographic works into my literature reviews, using the history of education to inform the context of my current scholarship. For example, in one of my current studies, I am examining the discursive practices of state policy actors as they debate anti-LGBTQ policy in North Carolina. My co-author and I situate this within an historical framing to understand how these attacks against LGBTQ individuals aren’t necessarily “new” or “unprecedented” but are a form of retrenchment. Retrenchment refers to a process through which, after progress has been made with regards to “rights,” a countermovement brings in more oppressive policies that move that progress back (see Crenshaw, 1988). We argue that by situating work historically, we can identify patterns in which communities resisted these oppressive policies (Osworth & Edlin, in progress).

“Attacks against LGBTQ individuals aren’t necessarily ‘new’ or ‘unprecedented’ but are a form of retrenchment.”

LtC: Your work has explored the policy implications of methods of continuous improvement, such as improvement science, that have been spreading in recent years. What are some of the major lessons that practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work?

DO: Policymakers often think about improvement in terms of identifying what works in general, based upon randomized control trials (RCT), often seen as a gold standard in certain fields. This prototypical approach to research, however, may not always be possible and/or ethical in educational settings. Improvement science offers a different approach as a type of continuous improvement that aims to systematically solve complex problems of practice. The promise of improvement science lay in how it involves looking at the context of problems of practice and utilizing iterative approaches to address problems involving a feedback loop that allows interventions to be tested and adjusted (Bryk et al., 2015; Hinnant-Crawford, 2020). While traditional thoughts about improvement may assume that a “proven” intervention will be applied and if improvement does not occur it is because the intervention wasn’t done with fidelity. By contrast, improvement science recognizes the particularities of a problem within that specific context that must be considered to know how to solve it.

I have studied improvement science primarily in relation to its connection with the federal policy, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA, passed during the second Obama administration to replace No Child Left Behind, provides guidance to state education agencies about criteria are required to be included in their state accountability policies to be eligible for certain federal funding packages. In Cunningham and Osworth (2023), we classified 52 state accountability plans—this includes 50 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico— based on their presence of improvement science language. We found that many state ESSA plans included language about “continuous improvement,” but this appeared more like a buzzword. Only a few highlighted specific improvement science approaches (e.g., Hawaii or Washington), and hence the true commitment to improvement science approaches within state education agencies was unclear (Cunningham & Osworth, 2023, 2024a). 

We argue that district leaders can leverage improvement science while aligning with many states’ expectations of continuous improvement. Improvement science recognizes the need for a context-specific approach to improvement (Cunningham & Osworth, 2024b). Because not all districts within a state are the same, district leaders can use improvement science to identify and address context-specific problems while meeting the requirements of state-level ESSA plans (Cunningham & Osworth, 2024a). 

LtC: Your research has examined leadership preparation in the context of research-practice partnerships. What might practitioners and scholars take from this work to foster better school systems for all students?

DO: Future school leaders need strong foundational preparation to develop confidence to be change agents to make schooling better for all children. In the RPP mentioned above, researchers at an R1 university collaborated with a large school district to intentionally design a leadership preparation program for a district-specific M.Ed. cohort at the university. As part of that RPP, in Osworth et al. (2023), I studied this leadership preparation effort using a powerful learning experiences (PLE) framework (see Cunningham et al., 2019; VanGronigen et al., 2019; Young et al., 2021). The PLE framework provides 10 characteristics that help to drive adult learning in leadership preparation programs. In this interview-based study, we found that the partnership specifically brought to the forefront certain PLEs—including providing authentic learning, building confidence, engaging in critical reflection, and sense making (Osworth et al., 2023). These results suggest that long-term and trusting partnerships like this may provide intentional access to practical experiences and supportive spaces that help to develop strong aspiring leaders. 

“Future school leaders need strong foundational preparation to make schooling better for all children.”

I think that one of the most salient takeaways is that a collaborative partnership like this can strengthen graduate programs’ relevance and fit to the specific needs of districts. Through our partnership, the M.Ed. program underwent a redesign in response to district feedback, involving revamped coursework that included changes to required readings and key assessments (Osworth et al., under review). While leadership curriculum stayed relevant to national standards, the cohort could make real-time connections to their district context collectively, drawing on similar frames of reference and allowing for greater confidence in how the course content related to the practice of school leadership. Furthermore, because the partnership is characterized by a high level of communication, faculty could incorporate district-specific examples using district data (Osworth et al., under review). 

Leadership matters in the context of student success and wellbeing (Grissom et al., 2021), and such partnerships provide opportunities for leaders to be prepared in a way that meets the needs of students. However, it is important to note that, to be effective, partnerships like this are time-intensive and require resources to be committed by both partnered organizations. For instance, attention to the needs of both organizations requires attention to multiple voices, which often involves a high level of planning and a time commitment by liaisons from both organizations (Osworth et al., under review).

LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes? 

DO: The current policy landscape is quite hostile towards educators engaging in meaningful change, especially regarding work surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In the current times, many educators are understandably worried about anti-DEI policies and their repercussions. These policies are often under the guise of attacking the teaching of critical race theory, that ultimately make it difficult to engage in DEI work. The law school at the University of California, Los Angeles has a center that is tracking these current policies (CRT Forward, 2025). While many of these policies are challenging for states to enforce, they often include threats to funding as recourse (Martínez et al., 2023). Whether real or imagined, such policies create a sense of surveillance, which can control individuals’ behavior and becomes coercive in nature (Foucault, 1995). 

To support educators committed to educational change, I think that scholars in the field of Educational Change need to be strategic in how we engage in work that centers equity. We need to continue to leverage tools from “controversial” theories (e.g., critical race theory, culturally responsive pedagogy, historical materialism, or humanizing pedagogies), but rethink about how we package them. We can help educators continue to center equity and justice without using the buzzwords so that they can navigate the current political landscape which has attacked allegedly controversial topics in school (CRT Forward, 2025). 

By avoiding triggering buzz words, however, the goal is not to give into, but guard against, the chilling effect that can come from such policies. There are individuals who would like to opt out of the work of meaningful educational change, who will find it easy to cite these policies as the reason to do so. We should ensure that educators continue to engage with data that shows the persistence of racial disparity in our public schools to be at the crux of the change that is needed in education. 

LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future? 

DO: I think the field of Educational Change, now more than ever, needs to double down on efforts to center equity at the heart of our work. Equity poses what social scientists have called “wicked problems,” describing societal problems that tend to be both complex and heavily contested (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Rittel and Webber (1973) argue that traditional science tends to be insufficient to figure out how to solve wicked problems. Such problems, rather, require a commitment from the field to engage with and shape the debates around them.

I am excited about the potential for collaborative and community-engaged work to tackle “wicked” problems in education. The backlash against DEI has become a key wicked problem that requires sustained engagement. The backlash targets all non-dominant identity groups; this includes ability, class, gender, language, race, and sexuality (to name a few). This period of retrenchment, as described above, can make it challenging to support all students in creating a more socially just schooling environment. I see a major purpose of my work, and the work of the field, to be to serve as resistance this retrenchment and continue to advance a justice-oriented agenda that serves our children and fulfills the democratic promise of our schools.

I’m also excited for the opportunities in Educational Change to engage in theoretically rich work that is also relevant to practice. An often-expressed concern is that theory and practice don’t align or that theory-heavy research cannot be applied practically. In contrast, I think many critical theories offer valuable analytic insights for navigating the current moment. Indeed, educational change is entering an exciting moment to engage in praxis— to reflect upon action to connect theory to practice. What excites me most is the opportunity to engage in praxis through conducting research that is theoretically deep and involves critical reflection on how we engage in action related to that theory.

References

Anders, A. D. & Noblit, G.W. (2024). Postcritical ethnography. In A.D. Anders & G.W. Noblit (Eds.) Evolutions in critical and postcritical ethnography: Crafting approaches (pp. 1-20). Springer.

Bryk, A.S. (2020). Improvement in action: Advancing quality in America’s schools. Harvard Education Press. 

Bryk, A.S., Gomez, L., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P.G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press. 

Crenshaw, K. (1988). Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law. Harvard Law Review, 101(7), 1331-1387.

CRT Forward. (2025). CRT Forward. Retrieved from https://crtforward.law.ucla.edu/ 

Cunningham, K.M.W., VanGonigen, B.A., Tucker, P.D. & Young, M.D. (2019). Using powerful learning experiences to prepared school leaders. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 14(1), 74-97.  https://doi.org/10.1177/1942775118819672 

Cunningham, K.M.W. & Osworth, D. (2023). A proposed typology of states’ improvement science focus in their state ESSA plans. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 31(37), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.31.7262

Cunningham, K.M.W. & Osworth, D. (2024a). Improvement science and the Every Student Succeeds Act: An analysis of the consolidated state plans. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 23(4), 955-972. https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2023.2264924

Cunningham, K.M.W. & Osworth, D. (2024b). Policy considerations for continuous improvement. In Anderson, E., Cunningham, K. M. W. & Eddy-Spicer, D. H. Leading continuous improvement in schools: Enacting leadership standards to advance educational quality and equity. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003389279-13

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books. 

Grissom, J.A., Egalite, A.J. & Lindsay, C.A. (2021). How principals affect students and schools: A systematic synthesis of two decades of research. [White Paper] The Wallace Foundation, New York. 

Hinnant-Crawford, B. (2020). Improvement science in education: A Primer. Myers Education Press. 

Martínez, D.G., Osworth, D., Knight, D. & Vasquez Heilig, J. (2023). Southern hospitality: Democracy and school finance policy praxis in racist America. Peabody Journal of Education, 98(5), 482-499.

Osworth, D. & Cunningham, K.M.W. (2022). Improvement science and the Every Student Succeeds Act: An analysis of state guidance documents. Planning and Changing, 51(1/2), 3-19. 

Osworth, D., Cunningham, K.M.W, Hardie, S., Moyi, P., Osborne Smith, N. & Gaskins, M. (2023). Leadership preparation in progress: Evidence from a district-university partnership. Journal of Educational Administration, 61(6), 682-697. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-01-2023-0009

Osworth, D., Cunningham, K.M.W., Hardie, S., Moyi, P., Osborne Smith, N. & Gaskins, M. (Under Review). Boundary spanning, partnerships, and educational leadership: How a district-university partnership fostered organizational learning.

Osworth, D. & Edlin, M. (In Progress). The political construction of “don’t say gay”: A critical discourse analysis of North Carolina state legislators.

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VanGronigen, B.A., Cunningham, K.M.W., & Young, M.D. (2019). How exemplary educational leadership preparation programs hone the interpersonal-intrapersonal (i2) skills of future leaders. Journal of Transformative Leadership and Policy Studies, 7(2), 1-11.  https://doi.org/10.36851/jtlps.v7i2.503 

Young, M.D., Cunningham, K.M.W., VanGronigen, B.A., & O’Doherty, A. (2021). Transformational leadership preparation in a post-COVID world: U.S. perspectives. eJournal of Educational Policy, 21(1), 1-15.