Administration, Leadership, and Technology

Faculty

Gary Anderson

Professor of Educational Administration

Gary Anderson

Phone: 212-998-5520
Email:

I am a former middle and high school teacher and high school principal. From 1982-1984 I was a high school principal at the Colegio Americano de Puebla. At the university level I have taught courses in qualitative research, action research, cultural studies, organizational theory, politics of education, teacher development, and the school principalship.

My research interests are interdisciplinary and range widely. I am particularly interested in doing research within the tensions between theory and practice in applied fields like education. As a result of this interest, I have co-authored two books on Action Research (Anderson, Herr, and Nihlen, 1994; Herr and Anderson, 2004), and have written extensively on issues of knowledge production in applied fields of study.

I have published most extensively in the field of Educational Leadership. My work attempts to refocus the field through the use of critical and poststructural theories, particularly Marx, Habermas, Bourdieu, and Foucault. I have also done research on organizational micropolitics, and more recently on school privatization and the impact of global neoliberalism on education. I have an interest in Education in Latin America and have received two Fulbright awards to do research in Argentina and Mexico. My most recent research has been a critical discourse analysis of the recent national standards and ETS exam used to credential school administrators.

A central concern of my research has been the symbolic dimension of educational leadership and the ways administrators “manage meaning” (ie. dominant discourses) in schools, school districts, and school communities.

My dissertation research was an ethnographic study of school principals in which I developed a model that explored how administrators mediate political demands vertically within the hierarchy as well as horizontally among school professionals and the school community. (Anderson 1989, 1990). This research led me to further research that explored school micropolitics - the behind the scenes struggle for power within the informal organization (Blasé and Anderson, 1995; Anderson, 1991) – and the micropolitics of student behavior as they struggle to form academic identities in socially stratified contexts (Anderson, 1996; Anderson and Herr, 1993; Herr and Anderson, 1993, 1997). Part of this study of student voices compared data gathered in the U.S. with data from a Fullbright research award in Puebla, Mexico. Given the growing Mexican student population in New York (mainly from the state of Puebla) I plan to extend this comparative analysis in the future.

This research has lead me to a concern with how administrative practices within highly unequal and politicized contexts can shift power to students and communities, particularly in low-income communities of color. I have more recently developed a framework for authentic school-community partnerships (Anderson, 1998) and continue to explore forms of school leadership conducive to equalizing opportunities in urban schools. I explore these issues in my latest book, Advocacy Leadership: Toward a Post-Reform Agenda (2009, Routledge).

I have done several studies using discourse analysis of school and policy texts, national standards and licensure exams for administrators, and media accounts (Anderson and Grinberg, 1998; Anderson, 2001a, 2001b, 2004). These studies trace the shifting role of school leaders in the context of “new economy” demands for greater marketization, corporatization and the increasing privatization of public schooling and the public sphere in general. 


Awards

  • Fullbright Award (Mexico)
  • Fullbright Award (Argentina)

Degrees Held

  • Ph.D. The Ohio State University - Educational Administration/Curriculum and Instruction
    Educational Policy and Leadership
  • M.A. Teachers College, Columbia University
    Bilingual Education/Educational Administration
  • B.A. The University of Iowa - Spanish/English
    Spanish/English

Publications

  • Anderson, G.L. (2009) Advocacy Leadership: Toward a Post-Reform Agenda in Education. New York: Routledge. (view)
  • Anderson, G. L. (2009). The politics of another side: Truth-in-military-recruiting advocacy in an urban school district. Journal of Educational Policy, 23(1), 267-291.
  • Anderson, G.L., Herr, K., and Nihlen, A. (2007). Studying your own school: An educator's guide to practitioner action research. (2nd edition) Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. (First Edition, 1994)
  • Anderson, G.L. and Herr, K. (Eds.) (2007). Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (Three Volumes) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Pub. (link)
  • Alexander, B, Anderson, G.L., Gallegos, B. (Eds.) (2005). Performance theory and education: Power, pedagogy, and the politics of identity. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Herr, K. and Anderson, G.L.(2005). The action research dissertation: A guide for students and faculty. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Pub.
  • Anderson, G.L. and Montero-Sieburth, M. (Eds.) (1997). Educational qualitative research in Latin America: The struggle for a new paradigm.
  • Blase, J. and Anderson, G.L. (1995) The micropolitics of educational leadership: From control to empowerment. New York: Teachers College Press
  • Anderson, G.L. (2007) Media’s Impact on Educational Policies and Practices: Political Spectacle and Social Control. The Peabody Journal of Educaton.
  • Anderson, G.L. and Pini, M. (2005) Educational Leadership and The New Economy: Keeping the “Public” in Public Schools. In G.L. Anderson (Ed.) Vol. 3 Politics, Policy, and School Reform. In F. English, (Ed.) The Handbook of Educational Leadership. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Pub.
  • Anderson, G.L. (2005, September 27). Academia and activism: An essay review of Jean Anyon’s Radical Possibilities. Education Review, 8(1), 1-14.
  • Anderson, G.L. (2004). Performing School Reform in the Age of the Political Spectacle. In B. Alexander, G. Anderson, B. Gallegos (Eds.) Performance theory and education: Power, pedagogy, and the politics of identity. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
  • Herr, K. and Anderson, G. (2003). Violent youth or violent schools?: A critical incident analysis of symbolic violence. International Journal of Leadership in Education 6(4), 415-434.
  • Anderson, G.L. (2002). Reflecting on Research for Doctoral Students in Education. Educational Researcher,31(7), 22-25.
  • Anderson, G.L. and Pini, M. (2005) Educational Leadership and The New Economy: Keeping the “Public” in Public Schools. In F. English, (Ed.) The Handbook of Educational Leadership. (pp. 216-236) Newbury Park, CA: Sage Pub.
  • Anderson, G.L. (2002). A critique of the test for school leaders. Educational Leadership, 59(8), 67-70.
  • Anderson, G.L. (2001). Disciplining leaders. A critical discourse analysis of the ISLLC national examination and performance standards in educational administration. International Journal of Leadership in Education (4), 3, 199-216.
  • Anderson, G.L. (2001). Promoting educational equity in a period of growing social inequity: The silent contradictions of Texas reform discourse. Education and Urban Society, 53(3), 320-332.
  • Anderson, G.L. (2001). Hacia una participacion autentica: Deconstruyendo los discursos de las reformas paricipativas en educacion. In Narodowski, Mariano; Nores, Milagros & Andrada, Myrian (eds.) Nuevas tendencias en políticas educativas. Buenos Aires: Temas/Fundación Gobierno & Sociedad.
  • Anderson, G.L. and Jones, F. (2000). Knowledge generation in educational administration from the inside-out: The promise and perils of site-based, administrator research. Educational Administration Quarterly, 36(3), 428-464.
  • Anderson, G.L. and Herr, K. (1999). The new paradigm wars. Is there room for rigorous practitioner knowledge in schools and universities? Educational Researcher, 28(5), 12-21.
  • Anderson, G.L. (1998). Toward authentic participation: Deconstructing the discourse of participatory reforms. American Educational Research Journal, 35 (4), 571-606.
  • Anderson, G.L. and Grinberg, J. (1998). Educational administration as a disciplinary practice: Appropriating Foucault’s view of power, discourse, and method. Educational Administration Quarterly, 34(3), 329-353.
  • Herr, K., and Anderson, G.L. (1997). Identity politics and student voice: The cultural politics of identity: Student narratives from two Mexican secondary schools. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(1), 45-61.
  • Anderson, G.L. (1994). The cultural politics of qualitative research in education: Confirming and contesting the canon. Educational Theory, 44(1), 225-237.
  • Anderson, G.L. and Irvine, P. (1992). Informing critical literacy with ethnography. In C. Lankshear and P. McLaren (Eds.) Critical literacy: Politics, praxis, and the postmodern. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • Anderson, G.L. (1990). Toward a critical constructivist approach to school administration: Invisibility, legitimation, and the study of non-events. Educational Administration Quarterly, 26(1), 38-59.
  • Anderson, G.L. (1989). Critical ethnography in education: Origins, current status, and new directions. Review of Educational Research, 59(3), 249-270.

Courses

  • The excellent/equitable school Seminar I: Design Issues
  • Educational Reform and Leadership in the New Economy
  • The Dissertation Seminar
  • Action Research

Editorial Boards

  • Youth and Society, Editorial Board Member
  • Educational Theory, Editorial Board Member
  • Educational Administration Quarterly, Editorial Board Member

Research Interests

  • School reform, educational leadership and the ""new"" economy
  • School micropolitics
  • Organizational theory
  • Critical theories of class, race, and gender
  • The growing militarization and criminalization of youth in schools
  • Research methodolgies, particularly participatory action research, discourse analysis, and ethnography