Learning to lead socially just schools: an exploration of candidate readiness for equity-focused principal preparation in the United States

In spite of concerted improvement efforts to improve curricula, many university-based principal preparation programmes in the United States do not explicitly attend to issues of equity or social justice in a thorough way. While curricular efforts are important, they are not enough on their own; a working theory in the field of educational leadership is that an equity-mindset is also needed and that social justice-oriented principal preparation programs should select individuals who already ‘have a propensity, at a minimum, to critically question the inequities found in schools’ for admission into programs. Generally speaking, however, there is a dearth of literature on both candidate selection for preparation programs and equity beliefs of current and pre-service school leaders. In this paper, we explore how potential candidates for a principal preparation program in an urban school district view equity and the vexing question of how to prepare socially just leaders Figure 1–8.