Moving Beyond “Management” of the Status-Quo: How Leading Scholars Expand Educational Leadership and Promote Equity Through Political Capital

Abstract

While a significant body of research in educational management and leadership is systems and operations-focused, assessing how school leaders manage various factors and forces in order to be successful, schools and their challenges are largely sociological in nature. Applying social science perspectives to leadership is a valuable endeavor, especially related to learning how leaders promote equitable change to serve more diverse students with non-academic needs. Through interviewing 12 leading US education scholars, or “non-traditional” educational leaders, this paper surfaces tangible and actionable strategies for educational leaders to move beyond management to successfully disrupt the currently inequitable status-quo of educational outcomes. Specifically, this paper demonstrates that effective equity-oriented educational leaders leverage forms of political capital to advance their agendas. In particular, findings demonstrate that leaders (1) think “structurally” to assess and address barriers and challenges to equity, as well as (2) remain steadfast, wielding political capital, to be successful in the face of opposition. This paper calls for broader articulations of educational management and leadership in order for leaders to effectively promote needed change in the face of challenging modern contexts.

Keywords

Leadership equity sociology management

Introduction and significance

Educational leadership proliferates both as a field and as a formalized curriculum across universities, often in partnership with school districts. Most students in the field are school-based professionals aiming to improve school systems and make career advancements (Green, 2017). Their ambitions, however, run up against institutional and structural barriers, which are perhaps major limitations of the traditional educational leadership training (Gurr and Drysdale, 2020; Morrison, 2013). Furthermore, educational leadership curriculum has typically been agnostic to systemic constraints within the field of practice and is more concerned with theories and practices around managing organizations and preparing students for certification exams, though there has been a shift in favor of incorporating more humanistic perspectives (Heck and Hallinger, 2005).

As we continue to consider and make decisions around how to best advance this field, greater attention should be placed on training tomorrow's educational pioneers through certain social science foundations. These tools can provide necessary frames for interpreting and addressing the challenges that educational leaders will undoubtedly face, especially when promoting equity-oriented change.

Education—especially public education—remains fraught with multidimensional challenges (interpersonal, cultural, institutional, and structural), resulting in unpredictable outcomes that are often unfavorable for the students that educational leaders serve. Minoritized students from lower income families primarily bear these unfavorable outcomes (Howard, 2019; Noguera, 2012; Noguera and Alicea, 2020; Silva-Laya et al., 2020). Resulting disparities in outcomes have long been categorized under the umbrella of the “achievement gap” while many reasonably argue for the use of terms such as “education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006) or “opportunity gap” (Carter and Welner, 2013; Kundu, 2020) in order to more holistically understand and diagnose the root causes of these enduring pathologies and abolish them.

While an overwhelming majority of educational professionals work to make a positive difference (School of Education, 2018), those in educational leadership cleave to the field's traditional standards and operations despite their inability to address the changing needs of education as a whole. Graduate students have a palpable appetite for equitable change, suggesting they’re ready to tackle modern-day challenges, such as the teacher-shortage crisis (Castro, 2023). Unfortunately, there is a disconnect between their scholarly aspirations—from the master's level to the doctoral—and the management-oriented materials used to train them. In this paper, I discuss this disconnect and posit the importance of leaders harnessing, building, and wielding political capital as both a source and as an asset to spark change.

Specifically, this article reports on a narrative-based interview study of leading education scholars from across the United States who have demonstrated enduring commitments to equity through their body of work, research, and leadership. These narratives are prompted by my research question: How do seasoned scholars of education describe and define one or more instances of their successfully overcoming inequitable challenges in educational contexts? Using this question as a catalyst, these distinguished scholar-practitioners describe and explain unfair and unjust barriers or arbitrary factors standing in the way of equity and justice while still promoting progressive change. This perspective is underapplied in the broader context of educational leadership research due to its focus on management (Heck and Hallinger, 2005). Theorizing about how leaders access and leverage political capital, I generalize these instances into actionable strategies to adopt in educational leadership for scholars and practitioners alike.

The field of educational leadership and administration is ensnared within strict confines of research, conceptualization, and pedagogical practice, limiting scholars’ and practitioners’ abilities to champion for equity and gain political wherewithal. Any true change requires disrupting the status-quo—often through political aims. The most disruptive of viewpoints are most likely to be found in the experiences of those who are less represented in the orthodox studies of educational leadership. We should listen to those underrepresented voices and use their experiences to guide us toward the more equitable educational systems we strive for.

Background and relevant literature

The extant research in educational leadership predominantly emphasizes understanding and presenting school and district leader experience and data (Bridges, 1982; Eacott, 2015; Green, 2017; Hallinger, 2011). Often, privileging the experiences of administration comes at the expense of overlooking the voices of other educational stakeholders, including students, parents, educators, researchers, and policymakers.

Studies of effective educational leadership often assess administrators’ strategies, behaviors, and crisis responses (Baykal, 2018; Green, 2017). Such scholarship foregrounds individual school and district leaders’ ability to overcome systemic shortcomings and context-specific social and structural challenges while encouraging the ideology of individualism as key to enforcing change (Kundu, 2020; Singh, 2021). Instead, educational leaders will experience multifaceted realities and layered contextual challenges, requiring approaches that synthesize individuals’ aptitude and environmental conditions, so that future leaders may skillfully balance the personal and structural dimensions of changemaking (Miller and Miller, 2018).

Some advanced research does explore how administrators address modern challenges (Castro, 2023), but scholarship that includes comparable insights from students, parents, teachers, community leaders, and scholars of education from interdisciplinary fields is rare (Rodela and Bertrand, 2018). Some scholarship boldly ventures into necessary comparative and international realms, including Paul Miller and Miller's (2018) The Nature of School Leadership: Global Practice Perspectives, which provides a comprehensive review of valuable tenets of school leadership across 16 countries and cross-contextually relevant examples of successful changemaking despite strict regulatory and structural constraints. However, this work also primarily centers around traditional administrators. While administrators are hugely important to the educational ecosystem, their positions often involve compliance to and with higher governmental authorities, policies, and political structures (La Salle and Johnson, 2018). The excision of other stakeholders leaves gaps in knowledge and perspective that reduce our ability to diagnose emerging problems (Anyon, 2005; Lac and Cumings Mansfield, 2018; Mitra, 2005, 2018), address long-standing ones, and create tailored solutions in US public education. This study begins to fill one void by delving into the leadership experiences of interdisciplinary scholars of education who have demonstrated enduring commitments to promoting equity and implications for practice from their experiences.

Instruction in educational leadership programs concentrates on training and developing school-based practitioners, such as principals and superintendents, toward practical aims, including passing state licensure exams and meeting local hiring and promotion demands (Eacott, 2015; Green, 2017). Thus, graduate programs in educational leadership review the traditional duties of authority in educational spaces, such as managing complex systems and distributing critical yet limited resources (Capper and Young, 2014; Connolly et al., 2019; Williams, 2018). By focusing on existing and predominant systems and operations- and management-oriented strategies, however, most research ignores how socioeconomic inequities affect the experiences and performance of both students and staff (Kundu, 2020; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Noguera and Alicea, 2020). Given the field's desire to equitably serve constituents, educational leaders cannot continue to solely use managerial and administrative techniques to diagnose problems and devise solutions. They must also be trained in certain analytical frames and advocacy in order to be successful in the face of broad, impeding social and political forces.

Schools are inherently sociological, as are the problems they face

Typical educational leadership perceives schools and districts as organizations to be managed rather than as ecosystems of socioeconomic, sociopolitical, and cultural forces acting on behalf of people (Durkheim, 1956). Finding routes to equity in education involves pinpointing where professionals and students in this sociological ecosystem are not being adequately served (Rebore, 2003).

Educational leadership that seeks equitable outcomes, in this essay, means leadership that pursues fairer educational systems by recognizing and acknowledging structural, political, and non-academic obstacles to student achievement and implementing solutions to remove or diminish them. Schools reflect and reproduce the privileges, structures, and power dynamics of their communities (Lewis and Diamond, 2015; Noguera and Alicea, 2020). Working for equity across race and class lines requires challenging the priorities of traditional administrative arrangements and historical norms (Howard, 2019; Ladson-Billings, 2006). In Shattering Inequalities: Real World Wisdom for School and District Leaders, La Salle and Johnson (2018) contend that reducing inequalities through leadership is a moral imperative. Educational leaders must diagnose the roots of the routine challenges they experience, leveraging resources from data management and analysis to stakeholder motivation in order to create sustainable, more equitable systems (La Salle and Johnson, 2018).

However, progressive-minded changes can meet with violent resistance (ideological, but sometimes even physical) from groups benefiting from the status-quo (Bella, 2023; Givens, 2021; Green, 2017), making progress harder to achieve and existing norms harder to challenge. It has been 60 years since James Coleman et al.'s (1966) federally commissioned research on the state of US schools and we continue to see the same outcomes Coleman and his colleagues documented: schools are more significantly influenced by their outside environments than they are able to influence these external contexts (Downey and Condron, 2016). The income and education levels of parents have greater impact on a student's academic progress and later socioeconomic outcomes than the school the child attends (Noguera and Alicea, 2020). A legacy of scholars demonstrate that schools still perpetuate intergenerational inequality—what some call the “social reproduction theory” of education (Bowles and Gintis, 2002; Lewis and Diamond, 2015), a subject typical educational leadership does not address (Minckler, 2014; Van De Valk, 2008).

The blunt reality is that most schools are not meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse student body (Desmond, 2023; Reardon, 2018). For the first time, the majority of students in public schools now come from lower income families (Walker, 2015) who are more likely to receive substandard education and resources (Howard, 2019; Noguera and Alicea, 2020). Brown v. Board of Education is 70 years behind us and yet schools are more segregated than before the landmark decision (Frankenberg, 2024).

Meanwhile, educational leaders grapple with serving the 55 million students across US public schools, as well as the three million public educators experiencing burnout and hopelessness due to teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, and scarce resources (DeMatthews et al., 2021; Jones, 2023; Steiner and Woo, 2021). Unrealistic demands and dwindling autonomy are some reasons for why teachers leave the field entirely (Jones, 2023). The current state of the US school system is unsustainable, and leaders must learn how to productively disrupt the status-quo if they want to bring much-needed change to the struggling field of education.

Theoretical framing: Arriving at (non-dominant) political capital

I did not apply a grounded theory research methodology and design but found inspiration in the grounded theory tradition. As I consider the theoretical implications of my findings, I may be interested in building a theory to assess how non-traditional leaders promote equitable change. Until then, this exploratory project provided me a base of knowledge and some direction.

Similar to grounded theorists, I did not strictly adhere to any pre-existing theories or preconceived ideas during my analysis. At the same time, it is not contradictory to apply certain existing theoretical “frames” within the inductive research process to initially organize and assess the unique value of my data. In particular, the following concepts (and their interactions) acted as relevant guides to categorize my findings.

Political capital can be thought of as a type of currency that has exchangeable value, mobilizing groups to achieve change and political goals (Casey, 2008). This makes it similar to the foundational concepts of social and cultural capital¹ but less concerned about fitting in and more concerned with the ability to have situational capacity to impact change. Broadly, political capital signifies an individual's ability to influence political decisions and amass political power (Casey, 2008). Political capital theorizes how resources and power are accumulated through factors (trust and goodwill) between stakeholders and constituents.

Education is inherently a political arena, endeavor, and process (Freire, 1970, 2017; Schneider and Berkshire, 2020, 2024) and so is the work of educational leaders (Lindle, 2014). If the aim is to move people, practice, and policy—especially toward status-quo disruptive, more equitable futures—educational leadership must be disruptively political, requiring forms of political capital. Progressive progress and reform are only achieved through challenging long-standing norms and traditions (Anyon, 1997, 2005). In the civil rights era, without the pressure and momentum exerted by Black communities and their allies, there would be no significant legislative changes at local, regional, and federal levels (Wilson, 1978, 2012).

At the same time, however, its exchangeable value is still ascribed within the constraints of the dominant society's ideology and subsequent creation of institutions. Because it is theoretical, political capital may not bring about material changes in the face of oppressive forces (across housing, school, healthcare, and other institutions). William Julius Wilson himself argued (2012) that Black Americans have not been able to fully access the opportunities that exist within civil rights laws—and the cumulative impacts of discrimination—without having accompanied access to economic and social resources (Gilbert et al., 2022; Wilson, 2012).

Non-dominant (Black) cultural capital is a concept developed by sociologist Prudence Carter (2003, 2005) to conceptualize how youth with marginalized identities navigate fitting in academically and socially, simultaneously challenging and resisting oppressive norms and constructs. Rather than exclusively demonstrating “dominant” cultural capital, the forms of culture expected to succeed within cultural and institutional spaces (e.g. schools and the expectation of speaking “standardized” English or wearing “acceptable” hair styles), these students push the boundaries through their non-dominant expressions. Through these cultural processes, youth expertly craft their developing (racial and academic) identities (Carter, 2003, 2005). Non-dominant (or Black) cultural capital allows youth to retain agency and racial authenticity despite lacking sufficient opportunity structures; it is an asset-based framing amplifying existing skills over shortcomings.

Carter demonstrates that young people actively and constantly evaluate/reevaluate the spaces and opportunities presented to them (or not). This theory was monumental in moving the sociology of education field away from portraying youth through deficit models. As educational leaders aim to build and wield forms of political capital to move the needle toward equity, forms of non-dominant political capital are needed to promote equitable change from peripheral vantage points.

Political knowledge and non-dominant political knowledge are generally understood as “the range of factual information about politics” (Carpini and Keeter, 1996: 10) and political events that an individual or group possesses. Through similar logic as Carter (2003), Cohen and Luttig (2020) argue and demonstrate that this conceptualization is narrow and that broader articulations of political knowledge are required to encapsulate the wealth and totality of underrepresented groups’ assessment and critique of political structures. They assert that there are unique, (perhaps non-dominant) forms of political knowledge that go neglected, such as Black citizens’ understanding of the carceral violence against their communities. Once this knowledge base is included within accepted political knowledge—such as police brutality and victims of police brutality (e.g. Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor), the understanding of who wields more political knowledge is disrupted and even flipped, with Black populations having more political knowledge than other groups.

One of my participants, Dr Monica Silver, aptly described her unique positionality and resulting political knowledge. Providing her relevant background, she says:

I am the child of immigrants, refugees, Jews who came here in the early ‘20s as children. The wisdom of immigrants and immigrant children is that we know there are many ways to tell the story of what could be otherwise and what's natural. There's wisdom that grows at the margins. White privilege gave us a little fracture into which my father, who sold plumbing supplies and was in World War II, could enter. I grew up with bifocals on, on one hand knowing marginalization, and on the other hand, having the sense that White skin was getting us into stuff, which you and I might now call assimilation.

Silver's quote vividly describes what could be considered non-dominant political knowledge as “wisdom that grows at the margins.” Her resulting bifocals are from experiencing both dominant and non-dominant political capital and learning when to apply them. Often, individuals who have experienced being marginalized and operating from the margins have valuable lessons for the rest of us on how to work from the outside-in, to promote change.

Together, these concepts make sense of how my sample—specifically scholars of education—engage communities, stakeholders, and even adversaries as they seek to drive equity. At the same time, the existing theories I mention are thorough yet limited. Carter's non-dominant/Black cultural capital does not venture beyond student outcomes into educational leadership territory. Cohen's political knowledge does not address education, educational leadership, and school contexts. Educational research that applies the concepts of political capital or political knowledge in order to better understand changemaking is scarce. These concepts are significantly lacking within studies on educational leadership, even though it is frequently acknowledged that leadership in education is a political endeavor (Miller and Miller, 2018; Niesche and Gowlett, 2019; Schneider and Berkshire, 2020, 2024).

One conceptual frame I offer and apply in the analysis of this paper is the idea of non-dominant political capital/knowledge. This is an adaptation of the concepts mentioned, perhaps useful in considering how leaders draw on unique, non-dominant levers to influence change. Whereas dominant political capital in educational leadership might entail leveraging traditional resources and pathways, like Parent–Teacher Associations or school boards, in order to impact change through acceptable norms and boundaries, non-dominant political capital in leadership implies working around rigid accountability systems and compliance structures. Through considering non-dominant political capital, I am contributing to a lack of understanding around how leaders may promote equity through the application of political capital.

Study and research methods

I performed a qualitative, interview-based, small-scale study of how leading US scholars of education described successful instances of equitable change. I asked participants how they assessed challenges and devised solutions to inequity through mobilizing colleagues, resources, and environments. My sample of 12 individuals consists of leading social scientist-scholars in education who represent a sample type rarely included in contemporary educational leadership research: those who have made a priority of promoting equitable change in and around school contexts through efforts spanning research, practice, and advocacy.

Positionality and sampling selection criteria

I am a sociologist of education, a professor of educational leadership, and a person of color who has extensive experience working with young people of color from low socioeconomic backgrounds and the educators and schools that serve them. Hence, I was drawn to educational leadership because of its rich history of preparing the leaders of our schools; there is great potential within these processes to improve schooling outcomes for students who come from poverty and marginalization—a potential that can be realized with small pivots toward enacting practical efforts to directly improve equity.

My motivations for conducting this research proved more effective for participant recruitment than I expected. A vast majority of the first people I reached out to agree to participate, likely given their similar impulses to effect change in schools through scholarship and research-informed practices.

Purposeful sample and particularistic boundaries

Singh (2021) states that “interview based qualitative research” is effective and compelling when it starts with “a participant recruitment strategy that targets populations uniquely defined by the focus of the study” (p. 294). Qualitative research is apt for developing theories when “partial or inadequate theories exist” that “do not adequately capture the complexity of the problem we are explaining” (Creswell and Poth, 2017: 46; Singh, 2021). I set purposeful boundaries (Merriam, 2002; Singh, 2021) to bring a sharper focus to understanding how seasoned, non-traditional, or sector-adjacent educational leaders who are not school or district administrators promoted equity-oriented change despite barriers. In this paper, the sample I draw from is comprised solely of scholars of education.

During semi-structured interviews, I asked participants about one or two key instances from their careers when they had assessed certain situations as unfair or inequitable for educational stakeholders—mainly students—and how they diminished or removed the most relevant obstacles.

Participant selection

I selected participants committed to equity by examining their research, writings, community engagement, presentations, or other public and/or academic engagements. Specifically, I looked for consistent themes around promoting equity in their work, interests, questions, methodologies, and actions. These scholars not only have a dedicated history of identifying problems but also of solving them through practical application.

In particular, each of the 16 professionals I reached out to engages in various practice-oriented activities and have many leadership commitments beyond scholarship and teaching in higher education. Twelve of the 16 agreed to participate. Of these 12, six are distinguished university professors, four are full professors, one is an associate professor, and one is a research professor working in academia. They come from diverse disciplines across fields, including history of education, urban education, critical race and ethnic studies, women's studies, sociology, and psychology. Two participants have held/currently hold deanships at schools of education at “R1” or doctoral-granting, high-level research institutions, and the majority have run research or educational programming organizations and centers with operating budgets in the millions. Nine of these 12 individuals have advised government organizations at the local, regional, and federal levels.

I intentionally chose a disproportionately higher number of women than men and more people of color than white individuals. Of the 12 participants, eight are women and four are men. Eight identify as a person of color (four men and four women), either Latinx (3), Black (4), or Asian (1). Two women identify as white Jewish and one as white. My sample is also geographically representative, with participants who live and work across the United States.

Interview data and narrative qualitative research

I conducted one 60- to 80-min semi-structured interview with each participant, totaling 16 h of interview data. I took debriefing field notes after interviews to record my perceptions of how participants defined and operationalized certain terms, as well as their tone. I supplemented primary data with secondary data collected from participants’ publicly available writings and presentations and conducted member checking by following up with participants to ensure accuracy of the data collected (Creswell and Poth, 2017; Denzin and Lincoln, 2011). Participants were included in informal peer debriefing, each reviewing the narrative composites I created from their interviews (which will be published as vignettes in a book manuscript in 2025), and they agreed to their validity.

Due to its ability to comprehensively explain and describe the collective dynamics and relationships that influence humans by respecting participants as experts of their own experiences, I used a narrative research methodology to convey complex beliefs, emotions, and viewpoints practically and profoundly (Riessman, 2008).

My semi-structured interviews gleaned how participants made meaning from their experiences of what they considered successful leadership endeavors. All interviews began with an initial prompt: Can you please describe an instance from your career in education, when you identified a barrier to fairness or equity in education and detail what you did to solve this challenge? Through participants’ responses, I sharpened my focus via subsequent questions to gain deeper understanding of their actions, the consequences, and the overall contexts.

Analysis

I used the software Dedoose to sort, categorize, and code my field notes and interview transcripts. I also coded relevant secondary data, among them the scholars’ research briefs, abstracts, and articles, typically including one to two pieces per scholar. This totaled about 30 pieces of raw data used to build theoretical categories. Themes around political change—establishing alliances, confronting adversaries—were prevalent but were different from standard models applied across educational contexts. Standard models of change in and around school settings are those that are frequently used to train leaders, per the existing curricula. This includes the use and application of standards, competencies, traditional accountability measures, hierarchies, and communication channels (Green, 2017).

I looked for leadership approaches extending beyond these traditional management and operations-centered foci, paying attention to how participants described addressing inequitable contexts. I examined how leaders leveraged resources, relationships, and environments to disrupt the status-quo and an inequitable process. Dedoose has many tools to examine themes that appeared in the data. Early codes to build up these thematic orientations included ideas around social and cultural capital, such as “building relationships and networks” and “establishing cultural consensus.”

Limitations

This research is not generalizable across, nor representative of, all leadership pursuits in and around school contexts. In fact, because of its atypical nature and sample, this project can mostly only speak to itself (Creswell and Poth, 2017). Furthermore, qualitative data can take on meanings that depend on the framing applied by the researcher (Singh, 2021). Close attention was paid to how my sensibilities as a sociologist affected my analysis. While these findings are not necessarily broadly generalizable, they offer insight into avenues for research to apply social science perspectives to educational leadership.

Findings

This study sheds light on how leading social scientists identified inequities and then targeted those areas to promote equitable change in education. Two themes emerged: (1) Leaders apply structural lenses to understand enduring, inequitable problems and strategize solutions for them, and (2) leaders leverage political capital to manage criticism and pushback during the change they incite. Together, these findings suggest that leaders on these pathways would benefit from assessing their reservoirs of political capital and knowledge, especially non-dominant forms, as they consider how to maneuver around rigid systems, bureaucracies, and conflicts. Such findings and assertions are not typical focal areas in traditional educational leadership literature, which frequently adopts administrative orientations directed at instructional leadership, management of interpersonal conflict, and organizational decision-making (Green, 2017; Minckler, 2014; Van De Valk, 2008).

Leaders apply structural lenses to understanding and addressing equity barriers—A political act

When analyzing barriers to equity in education, participants consider the larger social, cultural, and economic contexts and ramifications of their decision-making (Amemiya et al., 2023) and identify factors that influence outcomes. Some scholars in the public health space have started to refer to these as “upstream” factors, producing effects noticed downstream (Naik et al., 2019). Because such framing is not aligned to the traditional orientation of leadership, this can be considered a non-dominant political perspective, one made more holistic by examining the dynamics between the situation they were assessing and the broader sociopolitical context.

One participant, Dr Eduardo Guerrera,² a distinguished professor and current dean of education, described a time early in his career when he was appointed by the state governor to an authorizing board for charter schools. The board reviewed charter applications and voted whether to approve or deny charters. Guerrera went to a school site to get information that was not in the charter reauthorization application:

I realized two things: they located this school in the same building previously [serving] kids from the projects. In effect, they were taking a school from those kids and giving it to these other kids. Then it turned out that most of the girls attending this [charter school for girls] were fairly middle class. Their parents drove them there, they didn’t have to rely on public transportation, and they were better off than the kids in the projects. So, the question was, ‘Why did they deserve that building more than the kids who historically had it?’

Guerrera learned that the only power extended to the board was that of authorizing specific charters—and even then, sometimes the decisions seemed predetermined by higher authorities, without regard to outcomes. He voted no on the charter application, but the majority still voted to approve it. Because this was not his desired equitable outcome, Guerrera resigned in an open letter publicized by press and media outlets. In this way, he utilized his strengths and relationships to wield political capital and generate awareness (political knowledge) around his cause. It is safe to assert that the general public is not so privy to charter authorization processes and that Guerrera's open letter promoted such political knowledge with hopes of influencing more equitable practices in the future.

Typically, educational leadership students are not taught to be so defiant as to resign from a position of leadership, a political stance, when their values are misaligned with an organizations’, but such powerful acts can demonstrate agency through resistance (Baez, 2000; Givens, 2021). The point being that protesting the status-quo through unique approaches has value. Or as another interviewee put it, “There's only so far obedience is going to get you.” It's perhaps most important to acknowledge that educational leaders’ decisions can have significant political influence beyond the immediate situation. “I can’t just look at the charter and not think about the implications of what's going to happen [from our decision],” Guerrera said.

Thinking structurally may also reveal unwanted consequences of actions. Mentioned earlier, Dr Monica Silver, a distinguished professor of critical psychology and women's studies, has served as an expert witness in cases concerning educational civil rights. In one case, Silver testified for women to be admitted to a military academy, which was, until then, men only. Silver admitted years later in our interview that she now believed her testimony was misguided:

I’m not sure getting young women into that institution was a way to build toward a more just, pacifist future. Now young women at war are often sexually abused by peers and don’t have protections. Nothing changed. They added female bodies into what's often, not always, a kind of white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic culture. People of color and/or women, or people who are gay or gender expansive, pay a huge price because nothing else shifted. You can’t just move bodies into institutions.

Silver laments not thinking structurally enough when agreeing to participate in the case. She now realizes that achieving true equity requires transforming institutions so that they not only receive marginalized individuals but also serve them fairly, attend to their safety and well-being, and strive to improve their opportunities.

Leaders who articulated structural barriers appeared to have had more success. Dr Sherryl North has had a decorated career as a professor who also runs a large public-policy research institute. North recounted studying racialized outcomes in schools, such as largely disproportionate numbers of Black children being placed in disciplinary programs, but the school's professionals failed to see race as a factor. She said that in every instance of her successfully challenging and transforming these spaces, she had to name what they were up against, framing equity challenges around socioeconomic and sociopolitical barriers:

If you are arguing that, [for example], race is a fundamental organizing principle in society, and that racism is important and it structures people's lives at every level—which is what my whole career has been about—then to understand how it works and in order to intervene and change it, requires naming it. It requires naming it in all of its manifestations and in ways that people who we work with feel implicated by.

Identifying race as an organizing principle in society is an example of articulating both structural and political, socially layered barriers that must be overcome. Perhaps we can even consider this type of structural thinking as non-dominant political capital that doesn’t shy away from critical discourse. Without using these levers to incite change, equitable transformation may be limited; again, for example, while Brown v. Board of Education essentially eliminated school segregation in policy (de jure segregation), schools today are more segregated than before this ruling because of practice (de facto segregation) and legislations’ inability to address and label systemic racism.

Leaders remain determined, leveraging political capital to successfully face the opposition

The second theme that emerged early from this analysis was that leaders demonstrate determination despite criticism and resistance, often leveraging political capital in the process. In fact, each participant described at least one instance of navigating vehement disagreement while disrupting the racial- or class-based status-quo to promote greater equity. North used “courage” to describe this:

You need courage. If you’re doing this work, someone will try to take your job away. There was a superintendent I knew who was doing great work and there were five organized campaigns to get him fired. And you still have a mortgage ….

[At the same time], people are not trained to be vulnerable in their leadership. People don’t often say, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’ It's important to have good people around you. Build community in a way to work toward change.

North routinely encounters educational leaders who meet with adversity when promoting equity and encourages them to protect themselves from political adversaries because implementing racial equity initiatives can make others uncomfortable or agitated, especially in the modern context of rising cultural disputes in education (Givens, 2021; Schneider and Berkshire, 2020, 2024). North also embraces vulnerability and asking for help, an idea rarely, if ever, described in traditional educational leadership scholarship, but perhaps essential in demonstrating authenticity as a leader and generating trust among allies (Eacott, 2015). Rather, as leaders are typically positioned as strong, determined authorities (Green, 2017), vulnerability may help leaders seem more approachable and down-to-earth, which may be a form of necessary, non-dominant political capital within a society that stigmatizes discussion around emotions and mental health, and especially so with one's leaders (Pischel and Felfe, 2023).

Since academics routinely experience rejection of ideas, often from our own peers, we are particularly conditioned, maybe even trained, to handle criticism. Dr Marsha Cohen, a distinguished professor who also has run a multimillion-dollar research institute, describes embarking on a new national research project that uncovered the ways students experienced and dealt with housing and food insecurity in higher education:

I’ve been told by a college president, ‘This isn’t food insecurity. This is somebody who can only afford pizza and wants to eat sushi.’ … I’ve been told I do research for advocacy, not for science. I’ve been told that I’m overstating the problem. I’m not. I’m understating it. … I believe if you’ve got evidence on your side, eventually you will prevail.

Cohen's research agenda directly pitted her against some colleagues and authorities in higher education, especially administrators made uncomfortable by her findings, which exposed how institutions neglected students’ needs. This was an inherently disruptive political act. Cohen remained steadfast, despite tensions and insults to her work, identifying new (political) allyships to forge and networks to leave behind, an experience that educational leaders in training could benefit from learning about in order to apply themselves as needed.

Cohen advises fellow leaders to arm themselves with evidence to counter inevitable resistance when championing equity. Of interviewees, 75% (nine) described having to leverage data or scholarship to support their stance. While educational leadership programming typically includes basics around interpreting data, more content could be provided around what data to collect and how to use logic and evidence when attempting to change minds.

Sometimes the consequences of standing up to criticism are large. Dr Martha Westover, a former advisor to policymakers, described how data changed her long-held beliefs and scholarly positioning, a realignment that severed her ties with collaborators and friends:

My break [with] former allies was complete. Changing my mind and admitting it in public were difficult. It's not easy to leave and reject a world [where] I was once very comfortable. I did it because I had to. I could not pretend to believe in ideas that … had been tried and failed. … I lost my social-political network but gained my soul.

Westover implies there is sometimes a clear need for educational leaders to forgo their existing political ties, no matter how powerful. In fact, Westover's former allies attempted to smear her reputation in a variety of ways. To protect herself while promoting her cause, Westover found it imperative to build new alliances. Stories such as Westover's teach future educational leaders that there can be a silver lining to broken networks, such as peace of mind from upholding one's values.

Discussion

This research has identified potentially understudied concepts, avenues, and ideas useful to educational leaders in the challenges they will undoubtedly face but which require further consideration and future research to validate.

At a basic level, my participants’ narratives described the importance of identifying, categorizing, and illustrating the ways inequalities manifested and influenced outcomes. They recognized deeply rooted structural challenges to find solutions. Implementing those solutions meant a leader had to maintain resolve to withstand disagreements, criticism, and resistance.

My empirical findings also indicate that equity-driven leaders leverage and wield forms of political capital—from individual acts of political defiance to collective, politically strategic alliances—to attain more inclusive and fair educational systems. Sometimes, this political capital could be considered non-dominant, an area that merits further investigation. Specifically, I and other researchers should feel encouraged to ask, What is non-dominant political capital, and what are manifestations of it in practice? In this exploratory paper, I offer a few examples of what this capital could look like, from framing challenges structurally, to being vulnerable in one's leadership, to forgoing political ties with powerful entities.

While a leader's individual talents, approach, and demeanor all matter in their overall effectiveness, working with and around the broader environmental context is key to establishing the strategies required to achieve change. While tensions between the personal and environmental dimensions of leadership exist, these only become constraints if leaders remain unwilling to adapt (Miller and Miller, 2018). Fundamentally, it seems important that leaders trust themselves and their allies, understanding that the road to achieving greater equity across education is a slow and rugged one.

Conclusion

I believe there is a gap between existing social science literature on educational inequities and the scholarship typical of academic programming in educational leadership. Including the perspectives of more diverse educational stakeholders, especially marginalized voices that have experienced challenges and successes across schooling contexts, can broaden conceptions of what educational leadership is and looks like. These vantages are especially important as we confront new and emerging threats to public education and academic freedom.

This study surfaced two traits in educational leaders and scholars important to their work to promote equity: they analyzed problems structurally to devise targeted solutions to them, and they remained steadfast in their convictions to stick with their solutions despite criticism, often leveraging non-dominant political capital. Intended to generate and inform future research around how educational leaders can promote equitable change in the face of enduring structural blockades, leaders must learn how to build and wield forms of political capital to protect themselves and their constituents against oppression.

Plainly, education involves a social ecosystem made up of different stakeholders, communities, and institutional partners, and educational leaders must collaborate with cross-sector, non-traditional colleagues and improve educational conditions holistically. My hope is that this study gives some insight into better preparing novice educational leaders for the environments they will encounter. And seasoned educational leaders may discover something to add to their toolbox.

Dr Paola Webster put it plainly: “There are multiple typologies of the kind of academic labor that we do. … There's room at the table for all of us. But I, especially, am interested in the marriage of what I was trained to do as a social scientist with how to translate that effectively into interventions that solve social problems.” As researchers, we should heed our collaborative instincts in order to correct the regressive course that our school systems are on. Because our schools continue to serve students and families with immense needs situated at the margins, it remains more important than ever that we diagnose multifaceted challenges and offer clear solutions to repairing broken systems that do not live up to their promises. Educational leadership can play a significant role in promoting equity-oriented change, but these pursuits should be informed by science to be most effective.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Anindya Kundu

Notes

Author biography

Anindya Kundu is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies. He is a sociologist who researches the social and cultural contexts and resources that promote student agency and the achievement of students with social and economic disadvantages. He also studies approaches within educational leadership for reducing inequality in and around schools. In 2020, his first book, The Power of Student Agency, was published by Teachers College Press. It was a 2021 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) Finalist. His second book, The Power of Educational Leadership will be published by Oxford University Press in 2025.

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