Research should improve schools for all its constituencies, especially the most marginalized.
Schools serve many constituencies—students, parents, educators, and communities. Educational research should not be done for the sake of it, but instead with a focus on how the research can support better and more equitable outcomes.
Research should bring theory to bear on practical problems.
I do applied research, especially to support school districts in solving problems that they identify. But applied research should not be divorced from theory. Theory provides a roadmap to understand the social processes undergirding a policy problem and provides useful avenues to investigate that problem.
Research should strive to better understand and disrupt how we frame educational problems, measurements, and theory around racial and ethnic categories.
Researchers often treat classifications, like racial and ethnic census categories; or measurements, like student test scores, as objective and naturally-derived. Researchers should help develop theoretical rationales and practical steps for producing research that better reflects students’ and educators’ diverse experiences.
Making Sense of School Leadership Hiring: A Mixed-Methods Investigation of School Leadership Hiring and Placement in a Large Southeastern School District
My dissertation is a mixed-methods investigation of the school leadership hiring and placement process in one of the 10 largest school districts in the United States. I use six years of novel application and administrative data to examine descriptive patterns in school leadership applications and placement and study the extent to which performance tasks in the application process predict hiring and placement outcomes. To better understand why the outcomes occur, I conduct semi-structed interviews with a purposive sample of leadership candidates and central office leaders involved in the process. Given the paucity of research on leadership hiring, this study provides the field a more holistic understanding of how large urban districts make leadership hiring decisions and provides theoretical ground on which future research into leadership hiring can be built. The study also is practically important: for the district where the study takes place, this work provides insights into how to improve their leadership hiring and placement processes.
Patrick, S. K. & Santelli, F. A. (2022) Exploring the relationship between demographic isolation and professional experiences of Black and Latinx teachers. Journal of Education Human Resources, 40(2). 138-168.
Drawing on theories of proportional representation in organizations, we use Tennessee statewide survey and administrative data to examine whether self-reported professional experiences of Black and Latinx teachers are different when they are demographically isolated. We find that, for Black teachers, the percentage of Black teachers in the school is positively associated with teachers’ perceived satisfaction and support and with the frequency of collaboration. There is also some evidence of threshold effects of demographic isolation for Black teachers, as Black teachers in schools in which at least 60% of fellow teachers are Black report significantly higher satisfaction and support than other Black teachers. Our models do not find any associations between isolation and professional experience for Latinx teachers, but a small sample size and lack of variation in demographic isolation among Latinx teachers makes it difficult to estimate these associations.
Santelli, F. A. & Grissom, J.A. A Bad Commute: Does Travel Time to Work Predict Teacher and Leader Turnover and Other Workplace Outcomes? EdWorkingPaper: 22-691
Using administrative data from a midsized urban school district, we test whether teachers and school leaders with longer commute times are more likely to transfer schools or exit the school system. We find that transfer probability increases roughly monotonically through most of the commute time distribution. Teachers who commute 45 minutes or more to work are 10 percentage points more likely to transfer than another teacher in the same school commuting only 5 minutes. They are also 3 percentage points more likely to leave the district. Consistent with turnover patterns, we find that teachers with longer commute times are more likely to be absent from work. Their observation scores are also lower. These results suggest that schools may benefit from hiring teachers who live relatively close by, at least in the absence of supports or resources to compensate teachers with longer commutes.
Xu, S.., Santelli, F. A., Grissom, J.A., Bartanen, B., Patrick, S. K. (Revise and Resubmit) (Dis)Connection at Work: Racial Isolation, Job Experiences, and Teacher Turnover. American Educational Research Journal
Using longitudinal administrative and survey data, we investigate the degree to which Tennessee teachers who are more racially isolated are more likely to turn over. Accounting for other factors, we find that racially isolated Black and Hispanic/Latino teachers are more likely to leave their schools than less isolated teachers. Isolated Black teachers are more likely to leave their district and the profession altogether. They also report lower collaboration with colleagues and receive lower observation scores.
Santelli, F. A. & Xu, S. The Case for Considering Historical Contingency of Immigration Context in Quantitative Educational Research (In Progress)
In this paper, we draw on theoretical perspectives from QuantCrit, LatCrit, AsianCrit, and segmented assimilation to argue that historical contingency of immigration is a critical piece missing from many quantitative analyses of race/ethnicity in social science. Using data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, we demonstrate the importance of immigration context by comparing educational outcomes between children of pre- and post-Mariel Boatlift Cuban migration waves to South Florida. Post-Mariel migrants faced negative public images and fewer social resources upon arrival than pre-Mariel migrants. We find suggestive evidence that children of post-Mariel migrants attended lower-quality schools and had lower educational attainment than children of pre-Mariel migrants, further suggesting that parents’ immigration context was associated with different educational trajectories for children. We make suggestions for how researchers can incorporate immigration context into quantitative analyses of immigrant groups.