Chapter 1: Stories For Educational Leadership Programs: Research at its Best

Unfortunately, attempts to revise preparatory experiences for educational leaders and seriously consider the above issues rarely encourage prospective school administrators to deconstruct and/or understand race and racism (Henze, Katz, Norte, Sather, & Walker, 2002; Lopez, 2003). At best, the word multicultural and/or diversity may be affixed to one of the required graduate courses in an educational leadership program’s course of study. Research indicates, however, that such efforts barely require critical examination of how schools reproduce the race-, social class-, genderhierarchies (see Jay, 2003). For educational leaders charged to lead urban schools, not understanding these concepts and how they intersect with social class, ethnicity, language, agency, and equity can cause even the best intentioned leaders to fail at fulfilling any social justice agenda. Race, social class, and gender, among other sociocultural features, shape the unique social, political, and historical context of urban schools causing America’s schools to persist as an apartheid system (Kozol, 2005). How educational leadership programs can prepare urban administrators to disrupt this system requires a more complex analysis than typically espoused. While some researchers have highlighted the importance of critical race analyses to administrators’ practices and policies¹ we, like others (e.g., Lopez, 2003; Stovall, 2004), argue that for urban school improvement, efforts must include leadership preparation programs encouraging administrators to critique and create stories about race, racism, marginalization, exploitation, and urban communities.