2018 Summer Journal of Scholarship and Practice

The AASA Journal of Scholarship & Practice is a refereed, blind-reviewed, quarterly journal with a focus on research and evidence-based practice. It is designed to benefit AASA members and full-time and adjunct professors.

In the first article, “Preferred Principal Characteristics to ELCC and Texas Principal Standards,” writers Scott Bailey and Barbara Qualls undertake a study to investigate the alignment between the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC) principal standards and Texas principal certification standards with superintendents’ perceptions of the needed professional characteristics of principals. The results determined superintendents often sought characteristics that lay just outside the formal standards. Results provide implications for programs that are intended to deliver employable principal candidates.

In the second research article titled, “Factors Influencing Rural Superintendent Tenure in a Midwestern State,” Shawn Yates and David De Jong examine superintendent responses in a Midwestern state to determine trends affecting the length of tenure. Results of the study are instructive in terms of what superintendents need to consider in order to retain their positions and what school boards need to do to retain superintendents.

The book review is on Commitment and Common Sense, written by David Driscoll, and reviewed by Art Stellar. Driscoll is a former commissioner of education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He takes readers behind the scenes to share his version of the politics, including some unplanned moments, which shaped state education legislation and the subsequent support that made it a reality across the state. Readers, according to the reviewer, will find “the emphasis on the process of political reform, rather than pedagogy … those who consider themselves to be educational reformers should read this book to gain more insights into the real and uneven process of reform.”