The problems with colorblind leadership revealed: a call for race-conscious leaders

Race-Conscious Ethics in School Leadership: From Impersonal Caring to Critical Responsibility

“…This article draws from interviews with 22 school leaders working in 14 school districts in a metropolitan region in one northeastern state. In the larger study from which these interviews were drawn, we sought leaders' perspectives on gaps in achievement and opportunity, their use of data to identify and address gaps, and their moral and philosophical grounding about their equity-based leadership practices (Flores, 2018;Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019, 2021. The interview design adapted Seidman's (2013) phenomenological interview method to a single semistructured interview with three components: history, focus, and reflection.…”

“…Like Foster, who led a school with fewer than 5% students of color and 10%-15% qualifying for free-or reduced-price lunch, most of the White principals in the sample led predominantly White schools in suburban districts and had little to say about racial competence (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019).…”

“…With the rise of accountability policy and subsequent attention to more equitable educational practices, these authors, as well as others, have argued that leadership practices that promote greater equity should be grounded fundamentally in caring moral perspectives (Shapiro & Gross, 2013;Starratt, 2014;Stefkovich & Begley, 2007). For the past 15 years, theorists and empirical researchers have grounded equity leadership in race-conscious and culturally responsive leadership practices (Diem & Carpenter, 2012;Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019;Gooden & O'Doherty, 2014;Khalifa et al, 2016;Oplatka, 2014;Touré & Thompson-Dorsey, 2018), and a need has been identified to link educators' experience of race and ethnicity and their experience of caring (Louis et al, 2016). Researchers of school leadership have also expanded the meta-ethical bases for these discussions, applying broader and recent ethical theory, specifically drawing from critical, feminist, and critical race theory (Bass, 2009(Bass, , 2012(Bass, , 2016(Bass, , 2020Witherspoon & Arnold, 2010).…”

Diversity Ideology and School Leadership: Obscuring Inequities for Emergent Bilingual Students in Career and Technical Education

“…Furthermore, some researchers have critiqued the practices of educational leaders who sustain colorblind racial ideologies and fail to address the specific needs of racialized students (e.g., Brooks and Watson, 2019; Flores and Gunzenhauser, 2019). Flores and Gunzenhauser (2019), for example, found that school leaders articulated viewpoints that reflect a range of colorblind perspectives which include maintaining a colorblind perspective and recognizing race without taking action to address racial inequities. Similarly, Brooks and Watson (2019) found that school leaders were influenced by racism “at individual, dyadic, subcultural, institutional, and societal levels” (p. 649) but, by and large, failed to hold any discussion about societal racism or take collective action that would result in real structural change.…”

“…Despite the development of robust theoretical knowledge about CRT and social justice leadership (see Capper, 2015 for an overview), some researchers have argued that the transformations called for by social justice leadership scholars have "yet to happen soundly and consistently in the field of educational leadership" (Khalifa et al, 2016(Khalifa et al, , p. 1272; see also Allen & Liou, 2019). Furthermore, some researchers have critiqued the practices of educational leaders who sustain colorblind racial ideologies and fail to address the specific needs of racialized students (e.g., Brooks and Watson, 2019;Flores and Gunzenhauser, 2019). Flores and Gunzenhauser (2019), for example, found that school leaders articulated viewpoints that reflect a range of colorblind perspectives which include maintaining a colorblind perspective and recognizing race without taking action to address racial inequities.…”