Historically, school leadership often focused on educational leadership as the means to improve student outcomes and teacher development and create systems to sustain school improvement. Educational leadership is often premised upon two beliefs: 1) that effective leadership is required to improve school effectiveness, and 2) that student improvement is contingent on effective teaching and learning (Thomas et al. 2008). However, as researchers have recognized that leadership can also contribute to inequities, approaches to social justice leadership began to emerge and continue to evolve in an effort to support marginalized students. Transformational leadership, and equity leadership, and transformative leadership are just a few of these recent iterations of social justice leadership. While each of these leadership coaching and stances can demonstrate a positive impact on school systems, each also has dimensions that have the potential to reproduce inequities–for example, when these leadership coaching models are focused on improving instructional and/or social-emotional outcomes, without the commitment to interrogating systems that prevent all students from excelling in school systems.
Transformational leadership is best defined as an approach that elicits change in individuals and social systems. It can create systems for valuable and positive change in individual members, with the end goal of members becoming leaders (Burns, 1978). Transformational leadership involves three primary elements: setting directions, developing people, and redesigning organizations (Robinson, Hohepa, & Lloyd, 2009; Sun & Leithwood, 2012). Some elements of transformational leadership —building collaborative structures and providing individualized support—demonstrated substantial influence on student achievement (Sun & Leithwood, 2012).
A core component of transformational leadership is instructional coaching (Sun & Leithwood, 2012). Instructional coaching provides access and intentional grade level, standards-aligned coaching to all students, while addressing learning gaps that may prevent student learning and achievement, and has been shown to have a positive impact (Robinson et al.(2009). Transformational leadership is most present in traditional school systems because of its focus on reforming or improving educational systems. However, because of its lack of a critical lens, its use often translates to maintaining or reproducing the status quo (Hewitt, Davis, Lashely, 2014).
Equity leadership is situated between transformational and transformative leadership. Preparing Principals to Lead the Equity Agenda, Barbara and Krovitz’s (2005) explore “equity leadership” where they characterized it as leadership that invests resources that serve the most vulnerable students.
These researchers note that equity leaders have three core values and actions that guide their work: 1) They understand the difference between equitable and equal education, 2) They understand and value the significance of race, 3) They examine white privilege through personal narratives and stories, and lastly, 4) They have systemic and consistent district support. Arguably, post-online learning required leaders to adopt aspects of equity leadership to address pronounced traumas on school communities waged by COVID, academic learning loss, and more persistent learning gaps.
Equity leadership is an emerging educational framework that requires district and site leadership to commit to a shift in mindset, pedagogy, and practice.
Transformative leadership is very different from transformational leadership–and that difference can mean the difference between maintaining a structure where only some students achieve to a system where the most marginalized students have no chance to fail. The orientation of transformational leaders is to transform schools to envision what they can be and then intentionally work towards that vision. Transformational leaders are revolutionary in pedagogy and action because they challenge inappropriate power structures and systems that perpetuate inequity and injustice. Transformative leaders differ from transformational leaders in that transformational leaders improve schools but will maintain the status quo; transformative leaders work to reinvent schools that successfully serve all children.
Transformative leadership “begins with questions of justice and democracy; it critiques inequitable practices and offers the promise not only of greater individual achievement but of a better life lived in common with others” (Shields, 2010, p. 559). As the pandemic has amplified existing inequities in both schools and communities, leaders must now confront systems that produced aggregated data that camouflaged pervasive gaps in resources, learning, and opportunities for marginalized students. Arguably, transformative leadership is required post-online learning to transform schools to do so while crating environments where students receive the care, instruction, and services needed to fully thrive.
Finally, social justice leadership (Furhman, 2012) is an evolution of transformative leadership. Social justice leadership addresses creating equitable opportunities and conditions for all students. As a means to create these conditions, leaders who lead with a social justice orientation deliberately examine systems that create chokeholds or barriers for all students to excel. They understand that for these conditions to be present for students, the workplace for adults must also be present for adults. Efficacy, empowerment, and excellence are present for adults and children. They center the voices of marginalized students and adults with a clarity of understanding that when the needs, rights, and humanity of those most impacted by injustice are met, the conditions are present for all to thrive (Goldfarb and Grinberg, 2002, p. 162).
Social justice leadership marries the practice and pedagogy of dismantling all systems that do not fully encompass humanity.
Social Justice Leadership is inclusive of an ethic of care, critical love, and fully realizing the capacity to assess one’s highest capacity and potential. While many current theories of social justice draw on grounded in Rawls (1971), Alvarez (2019) and Sensoy & DiAngelo (2009) lay the foundation of a social justice framework that is aligned with transformative leadership as consistent actions and ways of being aimed at resisting unfairness and inequity while creating liberatory systems. It focuses on how people, practices, policies, and institutions liberate instead of oppress the most marginalized populations.
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