Accountability and Educational Equity in the Transformation of an Urban District

Abstract

In the fall of 1999, began to work as part of a research team that was assembled to explore the effects of district leadership on academic outcomes with low-income children and children of color. During the course of that project, I was able to interview a considerable number of central office personnel, administrators, teachers, parents, and other community members in four districts in Texas that were experiencing remarkable levels of successful achievement with African American and Latino children. That study focused on identifying the best practices in four school districts across the state: Aldine Independent School District (ISD), Brazosport ISD, San Benito Consolidated ISD (CISD), and Wichita Falls ISD. The explicit objective of the project was to learn how certain districts in the state of Texas are managing to achieve high levels of performance with low-income children of color and to disseminate the findings to key organizations and persons in hopes of effecting statewide reform quickly and efficiently. Although I acknowledge that the plan to identify the best practices across several school districts represents a legitimate approach given the objective of bringing about statewide educational reform, I feel it is also imperative not to lose sight of the richness that the study of the singularity (Bassey, 1999) can provide. Hence, in this article I adopt a case study approach to explore, in depth, the details of how Aldine ISD has managed to move from being a district in which token representations of minority achievement were conceptualized as evidence of districtwide success with children of color to becoming a district in which success for all children is the operating paradigm.