UCEA Annual Convention - Conversation/Dialogues

Meta-Analytic Review 1

Running Head: META-ANALYTIC REVIEW

A meta-analytic review of women in educational leadership in K-12 schools since the

National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) of 1988

Yoko Miura

Educational Leadership

Wright State University

453 Allyn Hall

3640 Colonel Glenn Hwy

Dayton, OH 45435

[email protected]

Paper presented at the Research on Women and Education 34th Annual Fall Conference November 7, 2008

Note: This is an unfinished study. Please do not cite this paper without contacting the author. The Study is at its emergence stage and needs revisions. Meta-Analytic Review 2

A meta-analytic review of women in educational leadership in K-12 schools since the

National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) of 1988

Abstract

Lack of quantitative research may cause issues on women leadership in education to get less public attention, funding, and result in insufficient implementations of polices on gender equity. This study aims to grasp trends of published research particularly containing quantitative data on women in school leadership in K-12 schools after the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) of 1988 until June 2008. A meta-analytic review of literature will be discussed as a spring board of future research themes and directions.

Relevance and Importance to Mission of RWE

As many feminist researchers report on glass ceilings (Scherr, 1995), perceptional and other boundaries (Adams, 1997; Schmuck & Schubert, 1995), and daily struggles of multiple roles of women, we are still surprised by shortage of research on women in educational leadership (Stromquist, 1997). From the time of Title IIV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the time of the Women’s Educational Equity Act Amendments (WEEA) of 1984, Women’s access to employment and to improve conditions for women in the labor force had progressed, but little attention had been paid to education, despite of reproductive and transformative power of education. The governments still maintain controls over women’s sexuality, welfare women, abortion and domestic violence change. The feminist lobbying between 1971 and 1974 successfully led into the Special Projects Act of 1974, however, in the amendments of 1984, comprehensive plans for implementation of equity programs at every educational level reduced funding $15 million to $6 million. This trends continued as seen in further decline of the reduced funding from $6 million to $4.5 million in amendments in 1988 (Stromquist, 1997). The large scale assessments such as the 1988 Schools and Staffing Survey School Administrator Questionnaire (SASS) uncovered the shortage problems of female representation in educational leadership in every local educational agency, but did receive sufficient financial attention. Funding for the Special Projects was proposed to be starting with $200 million, but President Ford started its implementation with $39 million and in 1974, WEEA program launched the program with a $6.3 million budget. Its highest budget was $10 million in 1981, but dropped to $500,000 in 1992, finally resulted in zero funding in 1996.

Purpose of Study and Stage of Development

The purpose of this study is to grasp trends of published research particularly containing quantitative data on women in school leadership in K-12 schools after the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) of 1988 until June 2008. It aims to capture the trends of research conducted since 1988 particularly concerning women leaders in K-12 settings to seek future direction of research in hope of promoting, supporting, and nurturing girls and women in vigorous educational leadership participation. Although it is still at its emergence stage, a literature search as the initial approach of a meta-analytic review Meta-Analytic Review 3 suggests the needs of the new research agenda for women in educational leadership. The lack of number of research continues to be a problem as reported earlier by Stromquist (1997). At this stage of this study, I can report that the meta-analysis using quantitative comparison measurement such as Effect Size requires more careful reconsideration of the research design (Glass, 2006) although it may not be impossible. Therefore, this study at the time of the 34th conference can merely serve as a spring board of future research themes and directions.

Theoretical Framework

Critical analysis continues to state that a set of criteria for judging school success as largely subjective with a manipulation of seemingly quantitative measures to sustain the illusion of objectivity (Heck, 2004). Recalling the essence of American public education, how can we comprehend women educational leadership and foster social justice and quality which benefit all children in care of school leaders? Post modernistic views often suggest attentions to specific context in understanding power structure, and tend to study microscopic operations in school systems including women as school leaders (Marshall & Oliva, 2006). On the other hand, lack of quantitative research may cause issues on women leadership in education to get less public attention, funding, and result in insufficient implementations of policies on gender equity (Stromquist, 1997). Shumuck (1987) stated that “the inclusion of women within the domain of inquiry must change the nature of the inquiry” (p.9, in Klein, 2007). This study questions if post modernistic views can also be applied to analyze broader trends of research surrounding women in educational leadership. What can we learn about women in educational leadership by looking for trends of research methods?

Research Questions

I am particularly concerned with the following three questions to initiate the inquiry and dialogues evolving from this study:

(1) What are the data available about women leadership (principals, superintendents, or other leaders) in K-12 settings in the U.S. since 1988? (2) What are the researches published about women leadership in K-12 settings in the U.S. since 1988? (3) How do we measure success of women leadership in K-12 settings in the U.S.?

Rationale

While quality is an educational concern for over a 150-year period, policies developed in the 1980s and early 1990s ensure it to be one of the core values in our public education (Heck, 2004). In the recently released report titled Democracy at Risk, the Forum for Education and Democracy (2008) reminds us that “the welfare of our nation rests heavily upon our system of public education. We strive to provide all of our children with equal access to a high-quality; free education because we know that without it, our democratic way of life will be at peril.” How does this translate to the context of women in Meta-Analytic Review 4 educational leadership in K-12 schools? Government policies with funding can bring “equality” and “equity”, however, the studies of Stromquist (1997) , Weis (1997) and many others about American policy uncover that even in intense efforts to reform education systems, the deeper equity issues are missed. How does it interplay with issues on equality and equity such as racial, cultural, linguistic, or socio-economic minorities? And what does the existence or lack of quantitative data suggests guiding future direction of research on women in educational leadership?

Literature Search as the First Step of the Method A search of existing literature began by using the general terms about “women”, “educational leadership” since 1988 published in English. 1988 is chosen due to the 1988 Schools and Staffing Survey School Administrator Questionnaire (SASS). First, keywords “women or female,” and “educational leadership,” but not “higher education” in the databases of the Dissertation Abstracts database for interdisciplinary search to seek trends of dissertation published about women educational leadership since studies particularly dealing with femininity may be viewed as secondary and less scholarly to stand alone. This search resulted in 172 studies. 30 studies were eliminated from this analysis due to its irrelevancy (studies in other continents, referring to administration in general but not specific to the K-12 education context). The second search of ERIC database extracted 89 studies. Of the extracted 89 studies, 32 studies were eliminated from this analysis because of the focus of the study (teachers, students, and parents), or the type of the article (editorial notes, opinion paper, or conceptual framework). Educational Research Complete search did not add any extras, there were many overwraps with the 2 previously searched databases. The database PsycINFO search added 5 studies using the same procedure. The database Sociological Abstracts resulted in the additional 3 studies using the same procedure. Also, research reports containing the analysis of data including K-12 school administrators were sought from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), yet not analyzed yet. After articles, reports, and book chapters are selected, search terms will be further defined and all reviewed articles will be coded to seek patterns and themes. Based on the extracted patterns, consideration of selecting measures and methods of a statistical analysis will be fully considered. Discussions The summary of the trends among the remaining 142 dissertations suggests the consideration of category extraction for the future statistical analysis. Note the numbers in study are dramatically different form the report of Shakeshaft, Brown, Irby, Grogan and Ballenger (in Klein, 2007). 9,701 total number of dissertation research related to female superintendents and principals, yet only 185 studies were listed in the research on women by methodological approach between 1985 and 2005 in the report. The trends show increase in all methodologies, more focus on qualitative and historical approach, as if to respond to the warning by Skrla, Reyes, Scheurich (2000) noted “the lack of empathetic research methods that would record the voice of women” Shakeshaft, Brown, Irby, Grogan and Ballenger, 2007). Being aware of the shortcoming nature of quantitative focus of this study’s meta- analysis, I still proceeded with the attempt to quantify research on women in K-12 educational leadership. Why did I focus on K-12 Educational Leadership? Besides the key elements for equality in K-12 is the presence of women as administrators (Shakeshaft, Meta-Analytic Review 5

Marshall, Stromquist, etc), there had been research reporting the match between transformational leadership and women leadership. This trend, together with my personal experience of being denied of a leadership position due to the bias in superintendent’s office, made me reexamine the relationship between leadership style shift in education and representation issues in K-12 educational leadership. The hiring committee confidentially told me that the problem was that I “belonged to the wrong race and gender combination” in the inner city school district. While voicing such experience can be powerful, I found a place in higher education in statute instead, where we train future educational leaders. Other areas (textbooks, curriculum, teacher training, and guidance) can be influenced by leaders as well. How to define school leadership? Building principals impact on school culture through leadership styles and community relations. Whitaker & Hein (1991) used Attitude Research Instrument (Ringness, 1964) and found that in 19 out of 26 categories, women administrators were perceived to be more capable than men mostly at p< .001 level in their ANOVA analysis. Most of the 26 items are attributes of more transformational leadership. Another trend was research about relationship between instructional leadership and women leadership. Two Contradictory examples were reported by Bell and Chase (1995), about styles of women superintendent leadership: one is task-focused, and the other is follower- focused. Goldberg (1990) reports personality and leadership traits (5 big factors: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) as a replicate of Norman (1963), Tupes and Christal (1961) and evolved by McCrae & John (1992) through expert judges, and studied in many countries by McCrae & Costa (1997). Big 5 are heritable and stable over time (Costa & McCrae, 1988; Digman, 1989). Neuroticism is negatively correlated to leader emergence and leader effectiveness. Agreeableness is also negatively related to leadership. What is an implication of such report? How could they be used to my attempt of quantifying what is extremely hard to quantify, which is, the attributes of women successful in educational leadership? How do we strategize research? No one can deny the power of numbers, quantitative data and equal opportunities research (Dunne, 1996), although such power has significant limitations as pointed out by many feminist researchers. This study continues to make effort of capturing meta-analytic review in a quantifiable manner. Meta-Analytic Review 6

References

Adams, N. (1997). Toward a curriculum of resiliency: gender, race, adolescence and schooling. In (Series Ed.) & C. Marshall (Vol. Ed.), Educational policy analysis: Feminist critical policy analysis: A perspective from primary & secondary schooling. London, Washington, D.C.: Falmer Press. Bell, C. and Chase, S. (1995). Gender in the theory and practice of educational leadership. Journal for a Just and Caring Education. 1(2).Glass, G. V. (2006). Meta-analysis: The quantitative synthesis of research findings. In J. L. Green, G. Camilli, & P.B. Elmore. (Eds.). Handbook of complementary methods in education research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 427-438). Heck, R. H. (2004). Studying educational and social policy: Theoretical concepts and research methods. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Marshall & Oliva (2006). Building the capacities of social justice leaders. In C. Marshall & Oliva (Eds). Leadership for social justice : making revolutions in education. Boston, MA : Pearson/Allyn and Bacon. (pp.1-15). Scheer, M.W. (1995). The glass ceiling reconsidered: Views from below. Women principal’s views on sex equity: Exploring issues of integration and information. In D. M. Dunlap & P.A. Schmuck (Eds.), Women leading in education. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. (pp. 313-323). Schmuck, P. A. & Shubert, J. (1995). Women principal’s views on sex equity: Exploring issues of integration and information. In D. M. Dunlap & P.A. Schmuck (Eds.), Women leading in education. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. (pp. 274-287). Shakeshaft, Brown, Grogan, & Ballenger (2007). Increasing gender equity in educational leadership. In S. Klein (2nd Ed), Handbook for achieving gender equity through education. Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 103-129). Stromquist, N.P. (1997). Gender policies in American education: reflections on federal legislation and action. In (Series Ed.) & C. Marshall (Vol. Ed.), Educational policy analysis: Feminist critical policy analysis: A perspective from primary & secondary schooling. London, Washington, D.C.: Falmer Press. Weis, L. (1997). Gender and the reports: The case of the missing piece. In (Series Ed.) & C. Marshall (Vol. Ed.), Educational Policy Analysis: Feminist critical policy analysis: A perspective from primary & secondary schooling. London, Washington, D.C.: Falmer Press. Whitaker, K.S. & Hein, A. (1991). Principals’ perceptions of female capabilities in school administration. Journal of Research and development in Education. 25 (1). (pp. 40- 50).