Routledge Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity

The rapid growth of diversity within U.S. schooling and the heightened attention to the lack of equity in student achievement, school completion, and postsecondary attendance has made equity and diversity two of the principle issues in education, educational leadership, and educational leadership research. The Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity is the first research-based handbook that comprehensively addresses the broad diversity in U.S. schools by race, ethnicity, culture, language, gender, disability, sexual identity, and class. The Handbook both highly values the critically important strengths and assets that diversity brings to the United States and its schools, yet at the same time candidly critiques the destructive deficit thinking, biases, and prejudices that undermine school success for many groups of students. Well-known chapter authors explore diversity and related inequities in schools and the achievement problems these issues present to school leaders. Each chapter reviews theoretical and empirical evidence of these inequities and provides research-based recommendations for practice and for future research. Celebrating the broad diversity in U.S. schools, the Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity critiques the inequities connected to that diversity, and provides evidence-based practices to promote student success for all children. Review "Tillman and Scheurich and their diverse set of contributors to this Handbook accomplish a weighty task. In light of the cumulative pressures of high-stakes accountability and framing of growing racial, socioeconomic and linguistic diversity as problems to be solved by school leaders, these scholars call on a field grounded in traditional, narrow conceptions of leadership to rethink and reframe its conceptualizations of what it means to lead schools in a way that values diversity and difference. They establish a strong research base on which educational leaders, broadly defined, should take suggestions to heart as they seek to address legacies of exclusion, segregation, bias and discrimination. Through their bold critique of leadership as usual and recommendations for inclusive leadership practice in the future, they not only expand our knowledge of what it means to lead for social justice, but demonstrate how socially conscious research on educational leadership can work to resist the privilege imperative." ― Sonya Horsford, George Mason University, Teachers College Record About the Author Linda C. Tillman is Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. James Joseph Scheurich is Professor and the Coordinator of the Urban Education Studies program at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.