A Critique of Hallinger's “Empirical Reflection”: How Systemic Racism and Systemic Sexism Can Structure Our Research “Choices?”

All articles, studies, or essays have a perspective, a point of view, an orientation, a frame, some assumptions (stated or not), and some parameters (what is excluded and included, methodological choices, etc.), including this one you are reading (see a broad sampling of cites in the endnote ¹ ). Some research, like Hallinger's, appears as if it is without a perspective that shapes the results, but all research has some perspective that shapes the results. Even research that is considered “scientific,” “empirical,” or quantitative brings all kinds of assumptions (stated/unstated) to the beginning of the process, to the process or methodology and analyses choices, and to the interpretation of the results. Even science, especially the social sciences, sits within a historically located socio-culture that deeply influences each specific application of the science, as readily indicated by the long history of racism and sexism in science (Harding, 1991; Jackson & Weidman, 2005; Valencia, 1997).

Accordingly, keeping my perspective about perspectives in mind is crucial to understanding my critical read of Hallinger's “An Empirical Reflection on Educational Administration Quarterly's Distinctive Contributions to the Field, 1965–2020” (55 years). While he became an assistant professor nine years before I did, I have spent over 30 years deeply involved with EAQ, ² UCEA, ³ and AERA Division A. ⁴ In other words, I have “lived” through about the latter half of his 1965–2020 timeframe. Based on my history and experience with EAQ, Hallinger's representation or “reflection” of EAQ does not resonate well; indeed, I find it highly problematic. It is not that I want to eliminate his perspective. However, I think his choices in terms of what data to focus on and on how to analyze that data results in an over-emphasis on some scholars and ideas and an under-emphasis on other scholars and ideas. The most important and highly problematic consequence of his choices, though, is that his approach, and his choices, resulted in an over-emphasis on an old educational leadership status quo whose membership was highly exclusive, White and male, and a membership whose research boundaries excluded many critical social issues connected to race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, language and culture, and immigrant status (Blount, 2013; Lerma et al., 2013; Tillman & Scheurich, 2013a). In addition, Hallinger's choices under-emphasize the more contemporary efforts across educational leadership to address those excluded critical social issues.

Two stories from my own history as a White male researcher in educational leadership illustrate what I mean. First, during my first few years as a new professor at the University of Texas at Austin, I heard more than one White male scholar say that Black doctoral students should not study Black students because the study would be racially biased. Of course, the obvious is true here; no thought was given to whether White doctoral students studying White students would be biased. Second, at a UCEA conference, when I publicly raised racism as a salient issue in a session discussion, one prominent White male scholar, one of the most cited in Hallinger's article, told me, a very junior assistant professor at the time, that racism had nothing to do with research and thus my point was not legitimate, a good example of an academic version of “shut up and dribble.”

When I started going to UCEA and AERA Division A in the late 1980s, it was overwhelmingly White males, and the leadership was even more overwhelmingly White male, though there were a few White women allowed to participate among the elite, an old elite that correlates well with a high percentage of Hallinger's cites and references. I remember going to the annual conferences with only a very, very small number of individuals of color, no visible LGBTQI individuals that I knew of, and few White women in lead positions. Of course, this has been true or continues to be true in other academic disciplines (e.g., Downey-Mavromatis & Widener, 2020; McChesney & Bichsel, 2020). However, when some groups dominate, it is what they think is most relevant and important that also dominates, thus excluding other issues that others may think are most relevant and important. Accordingly, issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, ableism, language and culture, and immigration status, even though these issues were causing major difficulties in schooling and society, were barely addressed, and when they were addressed, it was often from a deficit point of view, that is, the problems were caused by the students, their families, their race, their racial culture, their neighborhoods, their SES (see Valencia, 1997).

Of course, Hallinger could argue that his “empirical reflection” has nothing to do with these issues. He could argue that he is merely representing or reflecting what has been published in EAQ. He might even argue that if there is any indictment of his results, it should be an indictment of EAQ and not him. However, I see it differently, though I would agree that his results do make us problematize EAQ's history, along with the histories of UCEA and AERA Division A. First, for me, he has a moral responsibility as a contemporary scholar, as a scholar of this historical moment, to step back from his research and ask moral questions about his representation of EAQ, and thus of UCEA and AERA Division A. For example, given the large, widespread social acceptance by scholars in most disciplines, universities, medical centers, foundations, and large corporations, among many others, that systemic racism continues as a major problem in the United States and in all education (e.g., Community Health Network, 2020; Fitzhugh et al., 2020), would he not be expected to ask whether systemic racism is consequential to his analyses? Also, given the #metoo movement and the continuing removal of organizational leaders for sexism, would he not be expected to ask whether systemic sexism is consequential to his analyses? In other words, today, can any research in education, especially public education, legitimately proceed without asking what the effects of systemic racism and systemic sexism might be on the researchers and the research? If he had asked those questions and then done an empirical analysis, he would have found that he has largely privileged White males ⁵ and that his analysis choices over-emphasize White male scholarship, even though if you go to UCEA and AERA Division A conferences today and read EAQ more recently, you would readily know that the racial, gender, sexuality, and disability diversity and the related research has grown substantially, as has the range of topics considered legitimate.

A second reason I see it differently is that he made methodological choices on what and how to analyze that resulted in privileging older White males like himself (and myself). One choice he made was not to control for time from publication to the present. In other words, an article that has been out for 10 or 20 years has a much greater chance of being cited more often (i.e., being more influential) than an article that has been out for three to five years. We might think that articles “fade” with time, and they probably do to some extent, but I get monthly reports on citations of my work, and my work from the early 1990s is still being cited regularly, thus continuing to increase my count and impact. This “time” effect is readily evident in his Table 1 of “Top-cited documents published in EAQ, 1965–2020.” There is no article published after 2011, six in the 1990s or earlier, and 11 in the ought's, which together comprise 85% of the list. Thus, his analysis choice means that an earlier time when White males overwhelmingly dominated is more highly favored.

An alternative way he could have addressed this would have been to control statistically for time. Also, he could have taken periods of, say, 10 years each and analyzed each separately to see what dominated in each period and how the field shifted over time. An additional way he could have addressed some of these issues is to analyze whether a smaller group was getting repeated publications during, say, each 10 years of his timeframe, while more recently it may be that a wider array of scholars may be getting published in EAQ; that is, in the earlier period a fewer number of scholars may have been dominating EAQ, while in the more recent period, a wider array of scholars may be publishing in EAQ. This is what I mean by perspectives leading to methodological choices. Thus, there were analytic choices he made that majorly influenced his results and that, even if unconsciously, resulted in emphasizing (privileging?) the dominance of older White males and their ideas of what is and is not important. Unfortunately, this is the way systemic racism and sexism work; they do not announce themselves at the schoolhouse door nor are they publicly labeled; they are just built into norms and assumptions, that is, systemic.

There is one other critical issue his analysis does not address. As was well known among those of us working to raise issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, culture and language, and immigrant status, getting these issues into EAQ was very difficult in the past. Even qualitative research was difficult to get into EAQ during the early years. This, of course, was true across education, leading in the 1980s to the “paradigm wars” (which was mainly about the legitimacy of qualitative research and its allied epistemologies) and after that with the struggle to get legitimacy for social justice issues. At one point, a prominent scholar in Hallinger's list wrote an article that was widely read that said we had to choose either equity or excellence, as we could not have both. In response, scholars who favored equity and justice started talking about having both equity and excellence. ⁶ I also have another personal story that goes to this point of content control. When I was a doctoral student at Ohio State, I worked with two of my mentors, Robert Donmoyer and Michael Imber, to publish a book, called The Knowledge Base in Educational Administration: Multiple Perspectives (1995) in response to UCEA's production of what many of us considered a highly limited and narrow educational leadership “knowledge base.” A person who had a formal position within UCEA called the publisher, the State University of New York Press, and threatened the publisher if they published the book. The publisher ignored this person, but the publisher's representative told me she had never experienced anything like that before.

What this story shows is the level of control that some older White men in UCEA tried to assert during these earlier years. However, the larger point is that while many of us with a focus on equity and justice were banging on EAQ's door, that is, what was seen as legitimate and allowable for EAQ was largely limited to the already established status quo, which typically meant excluding issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, and immigrant status. This, of course, is a critical problem with citation analyses. Did EAQ restrict (consciously or unconsciously) what was seen as legitimate? It did, and those of us pursuing issues of equity and justice experienced this not just in EAQ but in the UCEA and AERA conferences. The problem with this restriction is that those who are included get expanded influence, privilege, and advantage, while those excluded do not get access to the premier educational leadership journal or the premier conferences, meaning the latter experience a disadvantage. This, too, is part of how systemic racism and systemic sexism works.

It should be apparent then that perspective matters. If educational research, like that in EAQ and other education journals, ignores systemic racism and sexism, which too much of it still does, even though there is broad scholarly support for the salience and relevance of systemic racism and sexism in all of education, this matters. It matters morally, and it matters in research choices made by the researcher. Thus, using the word, “empirical,” does not mean no legitimate critique is possible. Indeed, using the phrase “empirical reflection” in the title could be seen as a form of “virtue signaling,” a way of signaling the value and virtue (almost the truth) of the article, when really all that empirical means is that the article is based on some kind of data, qualitative, quantitative, or both, while it says nothing of the choices made in perspectives, assumptions, methodologies, or parameters or the consequences of those choices. Unfortunately, sadly, in my perspective, Hallinger's choices and, thus, his results, whether consciously intended or not, would reinstall a White male regime of who and what counts in educational leadership, a regime that should no longer be validated. We can certainly take from those earlier years of EAQ some research that continues to be valuable, ⁷ but we need to continue to problematize the earlier White male-dominated history of EAQ, UCEA, and AERA Division A and the negative consequences of this domination; we also need to problematize any articles, like Hallinger's, that recenters that domination.

However, this is really not just about Hallinger; it is about all of us who participate in EAQ, UCEA, and AERA Division A. In our research and teaching, we are only at the beginning of addressing inequities—at the systemic level—in educational leadership departments, our journals, and our national organizations. The deep and pervasive harm in not doing so continues literally week by week in the daily lives of children of color, female children, children from low-income families, children with disabilities, LGBTQI children, children whose home language is not English, children whose home culture is not that of educated White people, and the children of immigrants. It can easily be argued that we are disastrously failing most of these children. Thus, choosing both equity and excellence requires, mandates, that we engage reflexively in our own deep complicity in the substantial inequities and injustices of systemic racism and sexism. Hallinger is a tiny problem; we, professors and students of educational leadership, including me, are the larger part of the problem, given the broad failure of our K12 school system to achieve anything near equity and excellence in K12 schooling.