Decoteau J Irby

An incisive case study of changemaking in action, Stuck Improving offers a clear-eyed accounting of school-improvement practices, including data-driven instructional approaches, teacher cultural competency, and inquiry-based leadership strategies.

Irby brings readers into a large suburban high school as school leaders strive to redress racial inequities among the school’s increasingly diverse student population. Over a five-year period, he witnesses both progress and setbacks in the leaders’ attempts to provide an educational environment that is intellectually, socioemotionally, and culturally affirming.

Looking beyond this single school, Irby pinpoints the factors that are essential to the work of equity reform in education. He argues that lasting transformation relies most urgently on the cultivation of organizational conditions that render structural racism impossible to preserve. This timely work contributes both to the practical efforts of equity-minded school leaders and to a deeper understanding of what the work of racial equity improvement truly entails.

Black Participatory Research explores research partnerships that disrupt inequality, create change, and empower racially marginalized communities. Through presenting a series of co-reflections from professional and community researchers in different locations, this book explores the conflicts and tensions that emerge when professional interests, class and socio-economic statuses, age, geography, and cultural and language differences emerge alongside racial identity as central ways of seeing and being ourselves. Through the investigations of black researchers who collaborated in participatory research projects in post-Katrina New Orleans, USA; the greater Philadelphia–New Jersey-Delaware region in the northeastern USA; and Senegal, West Africa, this book offers candid reflections of how shared identity, experiences, and differences shape the nature and process of participatory research.

This article investigates how the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) redesigned its three-course instructional leadership strand to operate as a continuous three-semester learning experience that sequenced and emphasized an active learning pedagogy. This accounting elaborates the design and use of this pedagogy to support aspirant leaders in progressing through a continuum of knowers, assessors, and demonstrators of instructional leadership practice. Finally, we discuss the tensions that emerged from this approach to instructional leadership learning.

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether race-specific language use can advance organizational learning about the racialized nature of school problems. The study addressed two questions: first, is teacher use of racial language associated with how they frame school discipline problems during conversational exchanges? Second, what do patterns of associations suggest about racial language use as an asset that may influence an organization’s ability to analyze discipline problems? Design/methodology/approach. Co-occurrence analysis was used to explore patterns between racial language use and problem analysis during team conversational exchanges regarding school discipline problems. Findings. When participants used race-specific and race-proxy language, they identified more problems and drew on multiple frames to describe school discipline problems.
Research limitations/implications. This paper substantiates that race-specific language is beneficial for organizational learning.
Practical implications

The findings suggest that leading language communities may be an integral, yet overlooked lever for organizational learning and improvement. Prioritizing actions that promote race-specific conversations among school teams can reveal racism/racial conflict and subsequently increase the potential for change.
Originality/value

This paper combines organizational change and race talk research to highlight the importance of professional talk routines in organizational learning.

Purpose: This article explores the effects of sensemaking interventions on a group of educators' race-conscious problem analysis of racial discipline disparities. Research Method: I conducted this research in a predominantly White diversifying suburban high school that served roughly1,600 students. To understand how sensemaking interventions shaped teachers' racial ways of knowing, I conducted an ethnographic content analysis of 14 transcribed teacher focus group and data retreat exchanges to identify conversational patterns related to their problem framings. Findings: I found that providing diverse data types reflecting a range of racial perspectives offered cues that enabled organizational members to notice and (partially) disrupt the personal and organizational racism and race-evasive tendencies that drive the reproduction of racial inequities in school discipline. Implications for Research and Practice: Offering teachers sensemaking opportunities that prompt collective racial awareness and critical self-reflection can instigate shifts in racial ways of knowing that are critical to understanding and addressing discipline culture and climate problems in racially diversifying schools.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has been well researched and validated as an important component of youth education (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011; Elias
et. al., 1997). However, much of the literature implies a very monolithic approach to SEL interventions (Watts, Griffith, & Abdul-Adil, 1999). The current study examines a predominately African-American urban alternative school’s unique approach to reaching students’ SEL needs. Utilizing Consensual Qualitative Research (Hill, 2012), researchers interviewed 15 staff members at the school, ranging from teachers to mental health professionals to community educators, to obtain a thorough understanding of the unique approaches to SEL within urban alternative education. Implications for educators and mental health professionals working in alternative educational settings are discussed.

This paper shares findings from a critical reflection on a collaborative participatory research initiative called “The Improving Schools Project." The first author’s reflections explored the interaction of race, space, and positionality within the context of a cross-racial participatory research project. She considered how the racial identity of organizations and individuals nested within organizations impacted patterns of engagement and participation in this project. Through engaging in critical reflexive work facilitated by co-inquirers, she developed a clearer understanding of how the racialization of organizations played a critical role in mediating participants’ engagement in terms of control, collaboration, and commitment. Organizational histories and legacies grounded in (mis)treatment and relationships with communities of color shaped and were shaped by the racial identities of individuals representing these organizations. Multi-layered critical reflexivity allowed for the examination of unintended impacts on participatory processes and practices in cross-racial participatory projects.

Throughout this article, I argue that within the mainstream field of urban education, “the urban” is floating face down, lifeless, and devoid of significant meaning. “City” and “urban” function as taken-for-granted variables that stand in the rightful place of rich explanations, based in theory and evidence, of the city and its intersection with cultural transformations, pedagogies, movements, and knowledge(s) that comprise educational processes. To resurrect the urban concept, I present an overview of urban perspectives in two categories: old school (passive spatial theories) and new school (instrumental spatial theories). I highlight four recent urban education publications that reflect an emerging scholarly cypher on what I refer to as the urban education question. I then outline four spatial dimensions of hip hop and use these as a springboard for arguing that hip-hop pedagogues are uniquely positioned to be resurrectors of the urban concept. I conclude by exploring what such a theoretical pivot entails.

Getting in trouble at school is often a student's first point of entry into the school-to-prison pipeline. What trouble entails is shaped by underlying and complex notions of justice that operate in a given school setting. These notions of justice shape the range of responses social actors use to address students who break school rules. These include, as is the case in society at large, establishing strategies to stop rule violations or repeat offenses, punishing wrongdoers for their offenses, removing offenders from the community, teaching wrongdoers a lesson, and helping offenders to help themselves (Daly, 2001). In this article, I argue that improving school discipline is a matter of balancing and managing complex, differentiated, systems of trouble. To advance this understanding, I use a social constructionist perspective to theorize school discipline systems as nets of social control that, if too expansive and overly punitive, can be counterproductive to the educational mission of schools.

Purpose: In this article, I explore White racial purity desire as an underexamined ideology that might help us understand the compulsion of disciplinary violence against Black boys in U.S. public schools. By pointing to the dearth of research on sexual desire as a site of racial conflict and through revisiting Civil Rights–era fears about interracial intimacy between Black men and White women, I encourage readers to consider if and to what extent fears about sexual desires remain in the fabric of our school and social lives. Proposed Conceptual Argument: I argue that in schools, White-supremacist patriarchy reproduces normative Whiteness through the continual surveillance, punishment, distancing, and removal of primarily heteronormative Black male bodies, locating its justification in protecting the bodily safety and academic achievement of heteronormative White girls. I suggest that in predominantly White desegregated schools, disciplining heteronormative Black boys represents a new policy-based campaign of institutionalized violence and intimidation that reflects a subtle, but nonetheless pernicious, White male segregationist agenda. Implications: Considering fear/desire of interracial intimacy as a lens, alongside economic and political explanations of resistance to desegregation, provides a more complete analytical framework to comprehend racial conflict and segregationism in contemporary school settings. Our collective failure to acknowledge and interrogate the ways schools produce Whiteness by seeking to protect White girls from Black boys ensures Black boys’ bodies and minds will continue to be unfairly subjected to the violence of harsh and disproportionate disciplinary measures.

This article highlights a research project that involved formerly incarcerated adults who were school noncompleters. The project engaged the participants in a series of activities to explore their experiences and gain insights into approaches to dropout prevention they believed would help students at risk to complete high school. This article focuses on the research participants’ perspectives on strategies for addressing the problem that included a community mobilization approach, a family wraparound approach, a cultural and psychological awareness education approach, and an intensive recruitment approach to offering support to at-risk students.

School leaders are under constant pressure to ensure that schools are safe and to demonstrate that student safety and discipline are priorities. In many districts, schools rely on local law enforcement, school police, or security personnel to assist with promoting and maintaining safe schools. To encourage school leaders to think critically about the role of law enforcement and security personnel in schools, we present a school-level case where a principal is arrested for intervening to stop the arrest of a student. The case is appropriate for school- and district-level leadership courses that examine social, political, and cultural contexts that shape decision making.

Education scholars and practitioners have much to learn about engagement and motivation of Black males by directing their inquiries to more organic sites of hip-hop cultural production outside of schools. One such site is the hip-hop’s informal labor economy where Black males engage in earning money through hip-hop cultural production. Labor practices include a myriad of activities such as beat making, promoting shows, teaching dance classes, managing studios and recording sessions, artist development, visual art, and other modes of hip-hop cultural production. Through exploring the decision-making process of Black males that opt to participate in informal labor in lieu of formal labor, we examine what it is that compels their engagement and motivation efforts in hip-hop production. We find that participating in hip-hop cultural production gives Black males: (1) the autonomy to control their own image and maintain their individuality and (2) a sense of worth and belonging to something positive. From these findings, we discuss the need for schools to model themselves after such fields where Black males demonstrate high levels of engagement, motivation, and mastery.

This study presents findings from an ethnographic content analysis of 15 chronological district-wide annual codes of student conduct from a large urban US school district. I frame policy creation and modification processes as reflections of societal shifts in perceptions of student behaviors. I looked to the policy documents to explore the possibility that school organizations have, over time, shifted toward school discipline frameworks that get students into deeper trouble today than in years past. The analysis yielded policy changes that, over time, make severe punishment increasingly likely. I refer to the change phenomena as net-deepening of school discipline. I address the pitfalls that net-deepening policy changes pose, with an emphasis on the potential for net-deepening to undermine the effectiveness of proactive and restorative forms of school discipline. The article offers to educators, policy-makers, and researchers conceptual and analytical considerations for developing proactive restorative discipline policies that meet the educational needs of all students.

In this essay, we describe our experiences working with a rebellious primary stakeholder, Sylvia1, as evaluators of a district-wide safe schools program. Given the breadth of the program and its multiple target constituencies, we were confronted with the challenges of managing a large number of stakeholders, or those individuals and groups that could affect or be affected by the program's success or failure (Freeman, 1984). We describe the circumstances that gave rise to Sylvia's emergence as a rebel stakeholder and discuss the implications of her “rebellion” to the well-being of the program. We introduce the term “rebel stakeholder” to describe someone like Sylvia – ambitious, talented and well-meaning – who, despite their best intentions, can have a significant role in undermining the process of evaluation and have the potential to put programs at risk.We describe our role in working with Sylvia and other key district stakeholders to help get the program off the ground and the evaluation underway. We describe how Sylvia's invaluable involvement early on later proved to be detrimental to the long-term viability of the program. We describe the circumstances that resulted in Sylvia being barred from participating in any aspect of the program. Our reflections are informed by our review of transcripts and notes from interviews and meetings with key district stakeholders and notes from our meetings as an evaluation team. The events described herein occurred during the first 12 months of our work with the school district.

This report is the first in a series designed to keep key stakeholders updated about our ongoing efforts related to the “Shaping a Cooperative Vision for Boys and Men of Color” research project. In it, we provide an introduction to dignity as a relevant concept for BMOC work. Throughout, we recommend that BMOC policy makers, researchers, practitioners, and advocates integrate dignity as a guiding principle and an indicator of success into their BMOC work. We conclude by describing what these integration processes entail and propose immediate next steps for moving the project beyond concept exploration toward integration and development.