is theory that suggests that policy change processes are best explained by recognizing policy subsystems comprised of “actors from a variety of public and private organizations who are actively concerned with a policy problem of issue… and regularly seek to influence public policy in that domain” (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999, p. 121).
Agency
refers to the ability of individuals to act and in politics; it particularly implicates that individual’s autonomy and social capital (or power) to align and cooperate with others (Shipps, 2008).
Agenda-setting
is a leadership process described as developing a vision and a plan for achieving it (Bolman & Deal, 2008).
Appropriation
is the process in which a policy that is created in one place is interpreted and remade by those who encounter it someplace else (Levinson et al., 2009).
Behavioral Approach to Decision Making
recognizes information asymmetries and subjectivity in the decision-making process. This approach often leads to the use of procedures or rules of thumb, acknowledging suboptimization, or accepting the less than best possible outcome. The behavioral approach to decision making includes the notion of satisficing, wherein individuals or groups examine alternatives only until a solution that meets minimal requirements, or satisfactory outcomes or decisions, is found (Moorhead & Griffin, 1998).
Civic Capacity
is a term about the degree to which a cross-sector coalition comes together in support of a task of community wide importance (Stone, 1998, p. 234). Civic capacity emphasizes the collective role of community stakeholders, going beyond the view that any one single institution, such as a school, can address the needs of its constituency.
Coalition Building
coalition building is focused on working with parents or community members or stakeholders with common goals (Goldring & Rallis, 1993) leading toward a group decision.
Collaborative School-Linked Service Programs
designed to help children and families beset by problems of poverty, teenage pregnancy, single parenthood, substance abuse, limited healthcare, and/or inadequate and unaffordable housing by incorporating the provision of health and human services into the function of the school (Wang, et al, 1995).
Cooptation
tends to view parents as "external elements to placate" rather than as "true, equal partners." (Goldring & Rallis, 1993, pp. 84-85) and this view can deter effective group decisions.
Coordinated Services
as a term, describes a model of interagency collaboration to provide students and families services for education and health. The location of social services at schools is intended to reach students where they already spend a significant portion of time and to ensure academic success by meeting nonacademic needs (Crowson & Boyd, 1993, Dryfoos, 1998). Many inter-professional tensions and micropolitical issues arise in the coordinated environment (Fusarelli & Lindle, 2011).
Decision Making
is the process of choosing among alternatives (Moorhead & Griffin, 1998). Most decisions involve multiple people and can have effects on other people. All decisions have the potential to generate conflict because of lack of involvement of the stakeholders or over-involvement of a few whose decisions have effect on many others who were not consulted. The potential for conflict often politicizes decisions.
Dependent Power
is a dimension of power where the power of an actor or group is derived from the function of the other person's dependence on the actor (Bacharach & Lawler, 1980).
Dissatisfaction Theory
is a conclusion drawn from research by Lawrence Iannaccone and Fred Lutz about school board elections. They found that uncontested school board elections and sustained tenure on a school board indicated general community satisfaction with schools. In contrast, a contested election tended to signal changes in the community ranging from economic declines or increases, increase or decrease in population, changes in ethnicity and other social conditions. These changes often produced changes in board membership and that change often threatened the tenure of the school superintendent (Lutz & Iannaccone, 1978; 2008).
Ecological Systems Theory
created by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979), is a schema focused on the context (and to a lesser degree, the quality of that context) of a child’s environment. The key question being: How does a child’s world help or hinder continued development? While the family environment is the center of that ecology, schools and communities form a nested connection. The implications are for a shared responsibility in providing a variety of services to ensure any individual’s success as well as the health and wellbeing of the system.
Emotional Labor
is a term that describes the turmoil a person feels when suppressing authentic emotions and simultaneously acting out a completely different feelings (Hochschild, 1983).
Emotional Meaning Making
a termcoined by Brenda R. Beatty (2002), refers to school leaders’ awareness of their own emotions, how they deal with those emotions, and also, how they handle the emotions of others. Emotional situations are tied to learning and to work in schools. Other authors who have written about emotions in school leadership include Ackerman and Maslin-Ostrowski (2002) and Bridges (2012).
English as a Second Language (ESL)
The study of English by speakers whose primary language is not English. English as a Second Language programs in public schools are governed by specific rules and/or guidelines which describe the type of training needed by ESL teachers, the type of curriculum and learning goals for the program, pedagogical approaches for instruction, and methods for evaluating student needs and progress.
Environmental Leadership
is a type of school leadership that focuses on integrating the external with internal school-based processes and procedures and linking implicitly with the school's community, broadly defined (Goldring & Sullivan, 1996).
Group Polarization
describes the situation where a group's average post-discussion attitudes tend to be more extreme than pre-discussion attitudes (Moorhead & Griffin, 1998).
Groupthink
refers to groups that are unified and cohesive and tend toward unanimity in thought, often at the expense of appraising alternative courses of action (Moorhead & Griffin, 1998).
Interest Group,
as a term,commonly, is understood to be a group of people who try to influence decisions towards a particular cause.
Internalized Racism
refers toethnic and racial self-hatred that emerges from a history of white supremacy and oppression. Hatred and racial animus towards other minority groups is a manifestation of this form of racism, as it emerges from (and reproduces) the same ideological mindset of White supremacy and oppression (Fanon, 1952).
Leadership for Authentic Partnerships
describes principals who families and community organizers see as full partners and participants in setting the goals and direction of the school. These partnerships include transformative, inclusive, and social justice models of school leadership, where groups proactively seek equity and cultural responsiveness, reaching out to marginalized students and families (Auerbach, 2012).
Leadership for Nominal Partnerships
describes times when principals are compelled to communicate more with stakeholders through norms and policies, and is characterized by a desire to maintain power. This often means that the school leaders view families and community organizers as liabilities rather than assets, and the desire to continue to exercise a unilateral ''power over" others (Auerbach, 2012).
Leadership for Preventative Partnerships
describes tactics and attitudes of principals who seek to maintain control over goals, buffering outsiders like parents and community organizations from the school, and exercising a unilateral "power-over" other groups (Auerbach, 2012).
Leadership for Traditional Partnerships
is a term used to describe principals who create “family-friendly schools” (Henderson, 2007) by cooperating with parents and communities through joint planning and implementation (Auerbach, 2012).
Media
refers to both traditional news sources such as network television and hardcopy or more and more, website newspapers. In addition, new media influences the political environment of schools as community members and parents often resort to blogs and social media to convey their views, valid critiques, and also, invalid rumors about school governance or other activities (Chandler, 2009).
Micropolitics
is the description and study of daily interactions between individuals and groups who are trying to negotiate for scarce resources, for personal, or other, advantage. Some of the authors who have defined and described micropolitics include Ball (1987), Lindle (1994), Malen (1995), Blase and Anderson (1995), and more recently, Marsh (2012).
Miranda Rights
are invoked in the prescriptive warning that arresting law enforcement must use to alert criminal suspects against self-incrimination when being placed under arrest. Arresting officers usually provide criminal suspects in custody this verbal warning before official interrogation to prevent the admissibility of any statements being used against them during criminal proceedings. This warning emerges from the U.S. Supreme Court case, Miranda v Arizona (1966).
Performativity
is a concept developed in the context of education by Ball (2003). The political pressure to seem to be playing the proper policy mandated role takes precedence over authentically doing the job. Teaching-to-the-test is can be considered a type of performativity.
Pluralism
is a theory that explains that interest groups form “when like-minded individuals join together to pursue their common interests and pressure or lobby government for policies that will favor their group” (Smith, 2005, p. 21).
Policy Transfer
refers to the phenomenon of policies whose features migrate and immigrate in to other states and nations worldwide (Ball, 2001, 2003; Levi-Faur & Vigoda-Gadot, 2006).
Political Acumen
refers to the ability to read one’s political environment and determine which political strategies to use, when, and with whom (Ryan, 2010).
Political Discourse
is a form of power analysis, which borrows from linguists to analyze discussions and rhetoric about issues, problems, movements or policies (Shiffrin, Tannen & Hamilton, 2001). In particular, interest groups and individuals choose specific words to represent a particular political perspective (Wilson, 2001).
Power
is the potential ability of a person or group to exercise control over another person or group (Moorhead & Griffin, 1998, p. 385).
Problem Finding
is a little recognized term with a long history in leadership preparation and micropolitics (Immegart & Boyd, 1979). Problem finding is a combination of monitoring data and events while asking good questions about how and why these conditions exist (Copland, 2003).
Problem Framing
generally describes the definitional phase of perceiving a problem. The framing of a problem is a matter of interpreting the problem (Spillane, White & Stephan, 2009). Problem framing requires acknowledgement of the multiple perceptions and perspectives that might both mask and unmask the fundamental issues, assumptions and underlying causes. Without careful problem framing, the range of solutions may be limited and certainly unsuccessful (Copland, Knapp, & Swinnerton, 2009).
Relational Power
describes a dimension of power that analyses the interactional dynamics of power relationships (Bacharach & Lawler, 1980).
Rational Approach to Decision Making
describes individuals or groups, who attempt to follow a logical pattern of steps to arrive at a conclusion, including (a) stating the goal; (b) identifying the problem; (c) determining the decision type (programmed or unprogrammed); (d) collecting data and information, generating, evaluating, and choosing among alternatives; (e) then implementing the plan (Moorhead & Griffin, 1998).
Sanctioning Power
is a dimension of power that accounts for the actual changes actors can and do make to shape each other's outcomes (Bacharach & Lawler, 1980).
Sazón
refers to seasoning or spices used in Latin American cuisine.This term can be used to connote an overall zest or feeling reminiscent of Latino culture, tastes, preferences, etc.
School Board Elections
are the most overtly competitive opportunity for citizens to vote for the specialized jurisdictional boards, which govern public schools. Most school board elections are deemed non-partisan, but the reality is that these elections inherently are political (Hess, 2008). Many of these seats are not contested and voter turnout tends to be light except in jurisdictions where conflict has arisen due to economic or social changes in the community (Lutz & Iannaccone, 1978).
Sheltered English Instruction
isan approach to teaching English language learners that provides for both language and content instruction. Regardless of subject or discipline, all teachers can use this approach. In sheltered English classes, teachers use basic, clear, and simple language to communicate content, while utilizing a host of instructional scaffolding techniques to build on student’s prior knowledge
Social capital
refers to the set of resources that inhere in relationships of trust and cooperation between and among people (Warren, 2005, p. 136), or the features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam & Leonardi, 1993).
Special Districts
is a legal definition of the jurisdictions governed by school boards. These jurisdictions, for more than 10,000 US public school districts, are deliberately differentiated from, and independent of, local municipalities such as counties, cities, towns, or townships (Berkman & Plutzer, 2005; Bowman & Kearney, 1986).
Structured English Immersion
isan approach to teaching English language learners that provides for significant exposure to the English language. Typically, under Structured English Immersion, English will be the primary language of instruction as the primary focus is to learn the language and not academic content per se.
Undocumented
is the preferred term to describea non-citizen who lives in a country without proper documentation. The term is preferred over morecontentious terms such as “illegal” and/or “illegal alien” as these latter terms connote criminality. In the United States, being an undocumented person is a civil offense rather than a criminal one.
White flight
is a term used to describe large-scale migration of White individuals from racially-mixed areas to racially-homogenous ones. Theterm is often associated with suburbanization, and the out-migration of White individuals from urban cities.
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