This article examines the importance of caring in schools and school leadership. It analyzes the concept of caring and how it functions and introduces a model of caring school leadership situated within this broader exposition. The analysis and model are informed by literature including academic and professional works from education and education-related fields and disciplines—philosophy, ethics, feminist theory, positive psychology, and the organizational sciences. In addition, the analysis and model draws on literature of human-service occupations—health care, social services, and the ministry—that consider caring and caring leadership at both interpersonal and organizational levels. The synthesis of this literature results in a multidisciplinary and cross-occupational model that extends and deepens current understanding and theory about caring school leadership.

Strong parent-teacher relationships are critical to students’ academic success. Mismatches in parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of each other may negatively affect children’s outcomes. Using survey data collected from parents and teachers in 52 low-income, predominantly Latino schools, we explore subgroup variation in parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of their relationship, and we examine the potential of a school-based family engagement program to shift these perceptions. We find notable misalignment in parents’ and teachers’ perceptions when parents are Spanish-dominant Latinos. We also find that a family engagement program improves parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of their relationship but does not eliminate the gap between teachers’ and Spanish-dominant Latino parents’ perceptions of one another.

School principals can play an important role in promoting teacher leadership by delegating authority and empowering teachers in ways that allow them influence in key organizational decisions and processes. However, it is unclear whether instruction and student learning are enhanced by promoting teacher influence in all aspects of school organization or whether it is better for principals to directly work on certain processes while delegating influence on others. We compare pathways from principal leadership through school organizational processes to student outcomes that include teacher influence as a mediating factor to pathways that do not include teachers’ influence. Our results suggest that effective principals use teacher leadership to improve the school learning climate while they work directly on professional development and school program coherence.

We examine how teachers whom students identified as being relatively more or less engaging spoke differently about how they use information on student engagement to inform their teaching. Using 3 years of data from teacher focus groups in which 21 teachers discussed their perceptions of student engagement and reactions to annual student surveys, we found that highly engaging and less engaging teachers differed along dimensions of reflectiveness, adaptivity, and support. Together, these orientations revealed a sense of agency over student engagement that was more evident in the comments of more engaging teachers. The differences in how the two groups conceptualized engagement and used information on engagement to change their practice have important implications for efforts to increase student engagement.

Previous research focusing on major philanthropic foundations suggests that these actors have collectively converged around a set of jurisdictional challengers promoting market-based education reforms. Using correspondence analysis, network analysis, and geographic information science, this article empirically tests whether this convergence has permeated to less prominent foundations and their grantees, or if these foundations are pursuing alternative organizational strategies to shape K–12 outcomes. The analysis draws from a sample of 15 nonmajor foundations and their 1,069 grantees serving some aspect of K–12 education in 2010. We find that nonmajor foundations have adopted some elements of major foundations’ organizational strategies to influence K–12 education but that their strategies are heterogeneous and reflect both challenges to—and opportunities for—a more varied and democratic structure of policy making.