School Leadership and the Black-White Student Achievement Gap
Open Access DepositedReardon, 2016). This study explores how high school principals conceptualize the relationship between student social capital and the Black–White achievement gap, and how they perceive their leadership role in addressing this disparity. It explores principals’ beliefs about how students’ access to social capital, such as relationships, networks, and institutional support, serve to shape academic outcomes and contribute to disparities in achievement. It examines principals’ instructional leadership decisions related to curriculum, instruction, and school-level practices, focusing on how these decisions are used to build student social capital as a strategy for closing the achievement gap. By centering principals’ perspectives, the study provides insight into leadership-driven approaches for fostering equitable educational opportunities and improving student outcomes. An interpretive qualitative approach was utilized, and data were collected from 13 public high school principals using structured interview questions. The results of the study suggest that leadership rooted in empathy, justice, and cultural responsiveness is essential to dismantling the historical conditions that sustain the Black–White achievement gap. It also demonstrates how transformative leadership, when paired with the intentional cultivation of social capital, can reposition schools as engines of equity and belonging. The results of this study align with extant literature on the role of transformative leadership in dismantling inequities and fostering positive academic outcomes for historically marginalized students, while also underscoring the need for further investigation of instructional leadership as a transformative mechanism for social justice that reinforces the reciprocal relationship between leadership and social capital.
Hanushek & Woessmann, 2017
Grissom et al., 2021
The purpose of this study was to understand how principals leverage student social capital as a means for closing the Black-White achievement gap at the high school level. The dominant explanation for this persistent and pervasive phenomenon has been rooted in racial and socioeconomic disparities. The most prevalent indicators identified through research include systemic racism, segregation, family experience with education, cultural norms and values, poverty, inequities in school funding, as well as organization and leadership of schools (Condron et al., 2013
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