Bradley Carpenter

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Baylor University

The purpose of this study is to provide an understanding of how successful secondary schools located along the Texas-Mexico border, particularly those enrolling predominantly Latino students, have supported high achievement among their student population and promoted parental involvement. The roles and perspectives of parents and school community m...

Changes in the public service sector during the last stages of the twentieth century contributed to an international reconfiguration of state-centric governance. Supported by the discourses of individualism, marketization, national governance, and competition, this (re)shaping of governance presents a specific dilemma for the political identity of...

Despite the dramatic shift in demographics occurring within public schools, there is still a dismal amount of research connecting issues of diversity and race with the curricula guiding educational leadership preparation programs. In the field of leadership preparation, little information has been offered as to how professors facilitate social just...

This article assesses the association between the Title I School Improvement Grant (SIG) program’s personnel replacement policy and teacher employment patterns within an urban school district. Hannan and Freeman’s population ecology model allowed the authors to consider schools within districts as individual organizations nested within a larger org...

Using a critical policy analysis framework, this article examines the discursive foundation of the most recent era of educational reform. The purpose of this article is to provide educational practitioners and scholars with a better understanding of how neoliberal and globalized discourse may codetermine what practitioners—the readers and implement...

Aspiring school leaders must be equipped with skill sets to facilitate the critical examination of district policies that reproduce inequities. Policies such as school choice, which have racial and socioeconomic implications for educational opportunity, require leaders to operate from a social justice identity while seeking to enhance their sense o...

School leaders will undoubtedly confront complex racial politics in their school communities, and therefore need a leadership orientation and practice that more explicitly focuses on antiracism than those shaped by general frameworks associated with equity and social justice. This is particularly important for leaders and leadership programs nested...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an example of how critical policy analysis, specifically the dramaturgical analysis of policymaking, is able to broaden the examination of discourses in isolation. This chapter expands the field of the discourse analyses often found within critical policy work by examining how dominant discourses (privilege...

Although there is a significant body of research evaluating the potential effectiveness of parent involvement programs, little research has studied effective methods to reach non-traditional caregivers, specifically grandparents. The purpose of this study is to examine how grandparent caregivers in a particular setting consider the barriers to, and...

Meaningful community involvement has been linked to enhancements in student achievement and quality of educational experiences. Assistant principals are positioned to build effective partnerships yet remain understudied in the leadership preparation field. This qualitative study investigated how assistant principals (N = 9) serving historically mar...

In the context of high-stakes accountability, education-related policy efforts have aimed to address the improvement of persistently low-achieving (PLA) schools via turnaround reform strategies. Such strategies provide opportunities for educational leaders to influence the process; however, limited research examining the role of the assistant princ...

The federal government recently revised the Title I School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, which in large part focuses on ameliorating the inequitable outcomes often realized in predominately low-income and school communities of color. While one of the embedded assumptions of Title I SIG is that the allocation of competitive subgrants will provide...

During the past two decades, shifting discourses have significantly altered professional expectations for educational leaders. Driven by a globalized reconfiguration of the values defining educational purpose, definitions of effective leadership, processes for evaluating them, and the very boundaries of educational policy have narrowed and distille...

Despite the federal government’s historical effort to ensure educational equity via policies targeting issues critical to U.S. urban cities, a transformation has taken place in the discourses shaping educational policy solutions. While policies targeting educational equity have not completely vanquished, they have been largely re-written by discour...

Changes in the public service sector during the last stages of the twentieth century contributed to an international reconfiguration of state-centric governance. Supported by the discourses of individualism, marketization, national governance, and competition, this (re)shaping of governance presents a specific dilemma for the political identity of...

This case outlines a dilemma encountered by an assistant professor and graduate teaching assistant teaching within an educational leadership preparation program. The case offers a detailed illustration of a race-related conflict occurring in a course focused on preparing school leaders to address issues of social justice within diverse settings. Ad...

Abstract. While over the course of the past decade the field of educational leadership has placed a more purposeful focus on exposing practitioners to the importance of social justice leadership, beginning principals are often ill-prepared to address the diverse range of political complexities associated with public schooling in today’s society (Br...

The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the inclusion of race-related conversations within educational leadership preparation programs.We consider how students and professors within one preparation program conceptualize the ways in which conversations pertaining to race are present and/or missing within their courses. Specifically, we a...

The continued move toward high-stakes accountability has significant consequences for public schools located within communities occupied by historically marginalized populations, as the majority of chronically low-performing (CLP) schools are housed within metropolitan areas where students of color are the primary population (Noguera & Wells, 2011)...

In the field of education, critical conversations focusing on race and race relations are of primary importance given the continued inequities within our society. Statistically, public schools continue to be racially and socioeconomically separate and unequal. In our continued efforts to address such inequities, this study examines the ways in whic...

The premise of this chapter is that the ability of today’s graduate student to obtain the proper work-life balance is significantly influenced by the discourses of neoliberal ideology and the shallow enactment of democracy, what Dean (2009) refers to as communicative capitalism. To sup- port this argument I call upon two resources: (a) Dean’s (2009...

There are two primary purposes of this study. The first is to examine the distribution of teacher quality in Texas across schools with different percentages of economically disadvantaged students, percentages of minority students, and percentages of all students passing all TAKS tests at all grade levels. The second purpose is to examine the school...

This article interrogates the value of leadership preparation programs connecting academic and political spheres as endorsed in the 2008 revised ISLLC Standards. Specifically, a number of exemplar teaching and learning practices are shared that led to the planning and implementation of legislative advocacy projects for educational leadership profes...

This article is drawn from a qualitative study of the role school building leaders play in building parent and community involvement in their schools. The article focuses on four of the principals involved in the study who - with their students, staff, parents and community members - developed inclusive, meaningful, and transformative communities o...

This article interrogates the value of leadership preparation programs connecting academic and political spheres as endorsed in the 2008 revised ISLLC Standards. Specifically, a number of exemplar teaching and learning practices are shared that led to the planning and implementation of legislative advocacy projects for educational leadership profes...