Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1007/s11256-025-00740-0

Publication Title

The Urban Review

Volume

57

Issue

3

Pages

521-546

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the ways school leaders perceive and engage in community-focused, activist leadership in response to community needs. We rely on a critical qualitative research design that draws on critical urban theory. Sources of data include a pilot focus group, semi-structured in-depth interviews with activist leaders, and publicly available documents. Findings demonstrate the ways that leaders engaged in activism by developing understandings of the communities they served as a first step to activism, rooting their schools as a physical resource for communities, and responding to community needs via activist practices. Through their work, leaders intentionally countered the impact of white supremacist neoliberal policies that negatively impacted their school communities. Our research contributes to the growing scholarship of in-practice models of activist school leadership, highlighting the necessity for leadership practice that addresses the challenges of disinvestment and heightened resource competition in urban communities of color. Furthermore, this study advocates for an expanded concept of equitable school leadership that encompasses both in-school and community-focused justice work as to engage in wholistic school improvement.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "Study participants did not provide written consent for data to be shared publicly."

ORCID

0000-0001-9520-8645 (Richard)

Original Publication Citation

Salisbury, J. D., & Richard, M. S. (2025). Leading beyond the school walls: Understanding principal community activism. The Urban Review, 57(3), 521-546. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-025-00740-0

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