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The Research/PracticeDivide Practice
The Professoriate, the Practitioners, And ‘Their’ Periodicals 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.
BY PERRY A. ZIRKEL ASED 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 train-
explore which professional periodicals the members of these two groups choose to read and how they rate them for quality.
ing.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
PERRY A. ZIRKEL is University Professor of Education and Law at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa. Each month, he writes the Courtside column for the Kappan. This article is adapted from a longer version that appeared in Educational Administration Quarterly.
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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 rankings2 or both rankings and readings3 of professors. Another line of inquiry has explored the readings4 or both readings and rankings5 of school superintendents. However, none systematically compared the reading habits and the rankings of educational leadership professors and the superintendents. EXPLORATORY COMPARISON
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.
Average Rank
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 proINITIAL IMPLICATIONS fessors and 38% for the superintendents. The first item on the survey required respondents to The professoriate’s preference for refereed journals is choose the five “best” periodicals in educational leadernot surprising, given the current norms of the promotion ship from a list of 34 and then rank them from 1 to 5 (with and tenure system in higher education. The choices pro5 being the highest rating). Additional spaces were provided for write-in choicFIGURE 1. es. The results, summarized in Figure 1, Average Rankings of Favored Journals show that the professors’ top choices Professors were largely refereed journals: Educa4.0 Superintendents tional Administration Quarterly (EAQ), American Educational Research Jour3.5 nal (AERJ), Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA), Journal of School 3.0 Leadership (JSL), and Educational Researcher (ER). The superintendents’ top 2.5 choices for these quality rankings were 2.0 largely nonrefereed magazines: School Administrator (SA) and the American 1.5 School Board Journal (ASBJ). The two notable exceptions, serving as a bridge 1.0 between the exclusive choices of each group, were Educational Leadership (EL) 0.5 and the Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), both of which are nonrefereed but highly 0 EAQ AERJ EEPA JSL ER EL PDK SA ASBJ selective in terms of their ratio of subRefereed Nonrefereed Nonrefereed missions to acceptances and more scholPractitioner Bridge Periodical arly and in-depth in terms of their articles. APRIL 2007
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fessors make within the refereed category are at least partly attributable to organizational affiliations: EAQ is a UCEAsponsored journal, although it requires a separate subscription, and ER, AERJ, EEPA, and RER are journals that can be chosen as part of the dues of the American Educational Research Association. Similarly not surprising is the superintendents’ choice of such concise, practitioner-oriented magazines as SA and ASBJ. These are the “house organs” of the American Association of School Administrators and the National School Boards Association, respectively. The problem is that the two groups, who are the putative leaders in educational leadership, are marching to the beat of different drummers. Yet each group must continually inform the other if educational leadership is to be effective. A recent study found that educational leadership faculty wrote less than one-fifth of the articles in SA, PR, and a relatively recent NASSP journal, Principal Leadership, further suggesting the disconnection between the scholarly researchers and the purportedly “evidence-based” practitioners.7 The bridging position of Educational Leadership and the Phi Delta Kappan, which both professors and superintendents regard highly and read regularly, represents the
opportune connection. Several steps may help make the most of this opportunity to integrate the perspectives of these two groups, which is more than just “balance between the practice of education and research in education.”8 First, inasmuch as most of the authors in all of these periodicals are professors,9 colleges of education should realign their promotion and tenure criteria to provide greater recognition for publication in these two journals; their selectivity, reputation, and joint readership more than compensate for their nonrefereed status. Second, the editors of these two journals and members of their two constituencies should foster more collaboration: articles co-authored by academics and administrators should become the norm rather than the exception, thus promoting the integration of theory/research and practice that both sides espouse. Third, given the current emphasis on “scientifically based research,” which is embodied in but not at all limited to the No Child Left Behind Act, the editors of the nonrefereed periodicals, including SA and ASBJ, should put a higher priority on the scientific pedigree of the research reported in the articles they accept for publication, thus better aligning these outlets with the professors’ mission.
FIGURE 2.
Regularly Read Educational Leadership Periodicals 60
Professors Superintendents
Percentage Reading Regularly
50
40
30
20
10
0 AERJ
EAQ
ER
EEPA RER
JSL
TCR
HER
JSD Periodical
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EL
PDK
Nonrefereed Bridge
Refereed
SA
ASBJ
NB
Nonrefereed Practitioner
PR
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Fourth, taking a lesson from the professors who read the purely practitioner-oriented journals, superintendents need to take a more active role in at least sampling, if not serving as reviewers or authors for, the leading refereed publications, such as EAQ. Alternatively, Education Digest or a similar publication could help fill the gap for busy administrators. Finally, if educational leadership is to become a fully realized and preeminent profession, then Educational Leadership or some other journal will ultimately have to become the effective equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine. Such a journal will present “serious research knowledge to educational practitioners in . . . a lively and varied . . . manner, and [will be] both a prestigious publication outlet for researchers and a helpful resource for practitioners.”10 Superintendents and their counterparts in academe work in different contexts, but the connections need to be strong and interactive. Professional periodicals serve as one of many bridges that need repair, reinforcement, or even reconstruction to integrate scholarship and practice for effective research-based leadership. 1. Steve Farkas and Jean Johnson, with Ann Duffett, Different Drummers: How Teachers of Teachers View Public Education (New York: Public Agenda, 1997), available at www.publicagenda.org. For the debate, see Evans Clinchy, “‘Different Drummers’ and Teacher Training: Who Is Out of Step
with Whom?,” Education Week, 4 February 1998, pp. 72, 48-49; and J. E. Stone, “‘Different Drummers’ and Teacher Training: A Disharmony That Impairs Schooling,” Education Week, 4 February 1998, pp. 72, 50-51. 2. Martha M. McCarthy and George D. Kuh, Continuity and Change: The Educational Leadership Professoriate (Columbia, Mo.: University Council for Educational Administration, 1997); and Martha M. McCarthy et al., Under Scrutiny: The Educational Administration Professoriate (Tempe, Ariz.: University Council for Educational Administration, 1988). 3. C. Russell Mayo, Perry A. Zirkel, and Brian A. Finger, “Which Journals Are Educational Leadership Professors Choosing?,” Educational Administration Quarterly, vol. 42, 2006, pp. 806-11. 4. Rita M. Fillos and William J. Bailey, “Survey of Superintendents’ kpu,” University of Delaware, Newark, 1978, ERIC ED 163 5886; Richard W. Mason, “What Are Superintendents Reading?,” Journal of Reading, October 1983, pp. 70-71; and Thomas E. Glass, Lars Bjork, and C. Cryss Brunner, The Study of the American School Superintendency (Arlington, Va.: American Association of School Administrators, 2000). 5. C. Russell Mayo and Perry Zirkel, “School Superintendents’ Choices of Professional Periodicals,” Journal of School Leadership, vol. 12, 2002, pp. 397-410. 6. Mayo and Zirkel, op. cit.; and Mayo, Zirkel, and Finger, op. cit. 7. Donald J. Hackmann and David M. Quinn, “Are Educational Leadership Programs Connecting with the Field?,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the University Council for Educational Administration, Austin, Tex., November 2006. 8. Lee S. Shulman et al., “Reclaiming Education’s Doctorate: A Critique and Proposal,” Educational Researcher, April 2006, p. 26. 9. George P. White et al., “Publication Productivity in Educational Leadership Journals,” International Journal of Educational Reform, vol. 8, 1999, pp. 419-23. 10. Carolyn Riehl, “Feeling Better: A Comparison of Medical Research and Educational Research,” Educational Researcher, June/July 2006, p. 28. K
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File Name and Bibliographic Information k0704zi1.pdf Perry A. Zirkel, The Professoriate, the Practitioners, and ‘Their’ Periodicals, Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 88, No. 08, April 2007, pp. 586589.
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