The Professoriate, the Practitioners, and ‘Their’ Periodicals

Abstract

Mr. Zirkel's survey leads him to conclude that, with the exception of their high regard for Educational Leadership and the Kappan, superintendents and professors of educational leadership aren't on the same page. ********** BASED on a series of surveys, Public Agenda reported in Different Drummers that there was an often staggering disconnection between professors of teacher education and public school teachers in their respective views of public education. This finding led to a public debate in the pages of Education Week as to the value of teacher training. (1) Is there a similar disconnection in the field of educational leadership between academics and practicing administrators? One of the ways of addressing this issue is to explore which professional periodicals the members of these two groups choose to read and how they rate them for quality. PREVIOUS RESEARCH Several studies have examined the value of professional periodicals to professors or practitioners in various fields, with the typical measures being ratings of perceived quality (referred to here as rankings) or self-reports of actual usage (referred to here as readings). For the field of educational leadership, one line of studies has explored the rankings (2) or both rankings and readings (3) of professors. Another line of inquiry has explored the readings (4) or both readings and rankings (5) of school superintendents. However, none systematically compared the reading habits and the rankings of educational leadership professors and the superintendents. EXPLORATORY COMPARISON As an initial exploration of academics' and administrators' rankings and readings of educational leadership periodicals, this study compares the results of Russell Mayo and Perry Zirkel's 2002 national survey of school superintendents with those of a subsequent survey of faculty members at the institutions in the University Council of Educational Administration (UCEA). (6) Both studies used the same survey instrument. The results are only exploratory, because the response rates were relatively low--30% for the professors and 38% for the superintendents. The first item on the survey required respondents to choose the five best periodicals in educational leadership from a list of 34 and then rank them from 1 to 5 (with 5 being the highest rating). Additional spaces were provided for write-in choices. The results, summarized in Figure 1, show that the professors' top choices were largely refereed journals: Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ), American Educational Research Journal (AERJ), Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA), Journal of School Leadership (JSL), and Educational Researcher (ER). The superintendents' top choices for these quality rankings were largely nonrefereed magazines: School Administrator (SA) and the American School Board Journal (ASBJ). The two notable exceptions, serving as a bridge between the exclusive choices of each group, were Educational Leadership (EL) and the Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), both of which are nonrefereed but highly selective in terms of their ratio of submissions to acceptances and more scholarly and in-depth in terms of their articles. Another survey item asked the respondents to list the educational leadership periodicals that they read regularly. The results, summarized in Figure 2, show three groupings of periodicals, with more overlap than is apparent in Figure 1. The first group are refereed journals, which--again--were exclusive to the professors; the additions to those in Figure 1 were the Review of Educational Research (RER), Teachers College Record (TCR), the Harvard Educational Review (HER), and the Journal of Staff Development (JSD). The bridge journals--Educational Leadership and the Kappan--were not only common to but also read regularly by the highest percentages of both the professors and the superintendents. The third group of periodicals were nonrefereed practitioner magazines, with School Administrator and American School Board Journal having shared, albeit secondary, readership among professors; the two additions were the secondary principals' NASSP Bulletin (NB) and its elementary principals' counterpart, Principal (PR) magazine, which were choices for the professors, not the superintendents. …