Introduction to Special Issue—Engaged Leadership for Urban Education

This special issue presents six cases that take up a central theme: contemporary leadership in urban education demands new ways of thinking, understanding, and acting in order to disrupt patterns that subvert and marginalize the knowledge and experiences of communities of color. The stakes of not listening, not acting, and not forging and leveraging new knowledge systems, rooted in the authentic experiences and perspectives of African America, Latina/o, and Asian children, seems to heighten almost daily. The failed colorblind policies and ways of operating within social institutions have not made racism go away (BonillaSilva, 2010; Leonardo, 2009), though there are certainly large segments of (White) society that would deny culpability in perpetuating racist structures (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2015). In particular, it is important to provide images of, and make concrete, the ways in which leaders’ ability to conceptualize schools as racialized spaces impacts the experiences of children and adults of color in school buildings. Accordingly, how are children affected by educational leaders’ (in)ability to understand and address the ways in which schools function to systematically marginalize, exclude, or degrade children and families of color? How are schools nurturing sites where staff of color can thrive and support children who reflect various ethnic, racial, and linguistic communities in meaningful ways? As is evidenced in the cases, an inability to understand the myriad ways in which Whiteness and institutional racism manifest in schools