J B Diamond
Biographic Data
| ID | 106435 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J B Diamond |
| GIVEN NAMES | J B |
| FAMILY NAME | Diamond |
| SIGNATURE | DIAMOND J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7486-4862 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 408 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
How Educational Leaders Sustain Equity Work in a Politically Hostile Environment
Beginning in 2021, legislation targeting Critical Race Theory was introduced and adopted across the United States. Over time, these efforts expanded to include banning books and dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in K-12 and higher education. While external pressure has led some educators to scale back their equity-oriented practices, less is known about how equity-focused efforts are maintained in this hostile environ…
Toward Black educational freedom: A commentary on Karida Brown’s The Battle for the Black Mind
Defending the Color Line: White Supremacy and the Legacy of Brown
Building on W. E. B. Du Bois’s color line concept, I argue that white supremacy is deeply embedded in U.S. educational organizations and that White racial actors, opportunity hoarding, and the cultivation of racial ideology and racial ignorance help sustain it. In doing this, I seek to move away from the aspirational progress narratives often associated with Brown to the racial hierarchies and various forms of harm that schools reproduce, even wh…
Disrupting White Supremacy and Anti-Black Racism in Educational Organizations
White supremacy and anti-Black racism are deeply embedded in educational organizations and disrupting them is key to creating more racially just schools. This essay details how the regular practice of organizational routines reproduces racial domination and subordination. We argue that combining critical perspectives on race with organizational improvement approaches can help disrupt this reproductive process. More specifically, educators can eng…
Opportunity Hoarding and the Maintenance of "White" Educational Space
In this paper, we discuss the fundamental whiteness of educational spaces and detail the historical and contemporary mechanisms through which these spaces are created and perpetuate. We draw on Charles Tilly's concept of opportunity hoarding to detail how white racial actors and white-dominated institutions create and defend "white" spaces within education. We expand current educational scholarship in this area by theorizing connections between o…
Reframing Suburbs: Race, Place, and Opportunity in Suburban Educational Spaces
Most students in the United States attend suburban schools. However, most education research focuses on urban school districts. This may be in part because many of the core issues that currently drive education research—issues of race and class inequities, social mobility, immigration, English learning—are believed to be “urban” challenges. In this article, we argue that the changing nature of suburban schools and communities, and the history of …
“The Onus is on Us”: How White Suburban Teachers Learn about Racial Inequities in a Critical Book Study
Racial disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes continue to plague public schools in the United States (U.S.) and are becoming increasingly salient in suburban schools where major shifts in racial demographics have occurred in recent decades. An emerging body of research and practice-based interventions seek to build the capacities of white educators, who make up the vast majority of teachers in U.S. schools, to respond productively …
The Changing Terrain of the Suburbs: Examining Race, Class, and Place in Suburban Schools and Communities
Suburban school districts in the United States (U.S.) have experienced major demographic shifts in recent decades and vary substantially in their student populations. More than half of Asian, black, and Latinx students in large metropolitan areas attend suburban schools, and the suburbs are commonly the first destination for new U.S. immigrants. Thus, suburban schools offer the opportunity to study the confluence of race, ethnicity, class, and im…
Race and Discipline at a Racially Mixed High School: Status, Capital, and the Practice of Organizational Routines
In this article, we study a diverse suburban high school to illustrate how racial inequality is embedded in school disciplinary routines. Focusing primarily on the experiences of Black and White students, we theorize about the relationship between race and students’ experiences with school discipline. Drawing on organizational theory, contemporary race theory, and status construction theory, we argue that in carrying out the school’s disciplinary…
The Color of Mind: Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice
Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice; Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio
School leadership and management from a distributed perspective: A 2016 retrospective and prospective
Over the past twenty years distributed leadership has framed theoretical, empirical, and development work in education. In this article, we take stock of some work using a distributed perspective. We first discuss our motivations for developing this perspective and highlight some lessons learned from work in this area. Second, we make suggestions regarding fruitful directions for future research and practice-based work using a distributed perspec…
Conundrums of Integration: Desegregation in the Context of Racialized Hierarchy
Recent scholarly and public conversations have given renewed attention to integration as a goal, an aspiration, and/or an "imperative." These calls for integration are infused with the conviction that segregation is a linchpin, if not the linchpin, of persistent racialized hierarchies. While the costs of persistent segregation remain clear, the call for integration as the unequivocal answer is more contested. In this article we grapple with some …
Testing the Oppositional Culture Explanation in Desegregated Schools: The Impact of Racial Differences in Academic Orientations on School Performance
Recent studies suggest that anti-achievement attitudes and behaviors that are specific to black students occur most commonly in integrated or predominantly white school contexts. Accordingly, this study examines the degree to which racial differences in achievement-related attitudes and behaviors (collectively called academic orientations) actually contribute to corresponding differences in academic performance among nearly 25,000 students attend…
Accountability Policy, School Organization, and Classroom Practice: Partial Recoupling and Educational Opportunity
In this article, the author examines the links between high stakes testing policies, school organization processes, and instructional practice using data from a study of K-5 and K-8 schools in Chicago. He argues that although the policy environment penetrates the classroom, this penetration is partial—stronger on some aspects of instruction than others—and its impact unpredictable. He highlights four organizational patterns in the schools he stud…
Race and school achievement in a desegregated suburb: Reconsidering the oppositional culture explanation
Recent research suggests that oppositional culture and a burden of acting White are likely to emerge for Black students in desegregated schools in which Whites are perceived as having greater educational opportunities. Using interviews with Black and White students in one desegregated secondary school, this 'school structures' argument is assessed. While Black students perceive race‐based limitations to their opportunities for getting ahead and a…
Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Rethinking the Connection Between High-Stakes Testing Policy and Classroom Instruction
In this article, the author examines the link between high-stakes testing policies and classroom instruction. Using data from classroom observations and interviews with teachers, he argues that these policies influence instruction but are mediated by teachers and filtered through their collegial interactions. He shows that teachers link the influence of high-stakes testing policies to instructional content (the knowledge and skills that they emph…
Towards a theory of leadership practice: A distributed perspective
School‐level conditions and school leadership, in particular, are key issues in efforts to change instruction. While new organizational structures and new leadership roles matter to instructional innovation, what seems most critical is how leadership practice is undertaken. Yet, the practice of school leadership has received limited attention in the research literature. Building on activity theory and theories of distributed cognition, this paper…
High-Stakes Accountability in Urban Elementary Schools: Challenging or Reproducing Inequality? 1
In this article, the authors use data from interviews and observations in four urban elementary schools—two high-performing and two probation schools—to examine how schools respond to high-stakes accountability policies. The authors show that school responses to high-stakes accountability depend on the schools’ accountability status. In probation schools, responses focus narrowly on complying with policy demands, focusing on improving the perform…
African American Parents’ Educational Orientations: The Importance of Social Class and Parents’ Perceptions of Schools
Research on race, social class, and parent involvement in education often implies that parents’ educational orientations result directly from their social class or racial group backgrounds. In this article, the authors study the involvement of working-class and middle-class African American parents. They argue that these parents’ educational orientations are informed by the educational environments they navigate, their resources for negotiating t…
Teachers' Expectations and Sense of Responsibility for Student Learning: The Importance of Race, Class, and Organizational Habitus
This article examines how the concentration of low-income African American students in urban elementary schools is deeply coupled with a leveling of teachers' expectations of students and a reduction in their sense of responsibility for student learning. We argue that this process is rooted in school-based organizational habitus through which expectations of students become embedded in schools. We show that this process can be mediated if school …
Forms of Capital and the Construction of Leadership: Instructional Leadership in Urban Elementary Schools
James P. Spillane, Tim Hallett, John B. Diamond, Forms of Capital and the Construction of Leadership: Instructional Leadership in Urban Elementary Schools, Sociology of Education, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 1-17
Managing in the Middle: School Leaders and the Enactment of Accountability Policy
This article investigates how mid-level managers make sense of and mediate district accountability policy. Arguing that teachers’evolving perceptions and understanding of accountability policies are likely to be mediated by school leaders, the authors explore how school managers enact their policy environments, focusing chiefly on the ways in which they construct district accountability policies. Adopting a cognitive or interpretive frame on impl…
Investigating School Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective
uted through the environments ’ material and cultural artifacts and through other people in collaborative efforts to complete complex tasks (Latour, 1987; Pea, 1993). For example, Hutchins (1995a) docu-ments how the task of landing a plane can be best understood through investigating a unit of analysis that includes the pilot, the manufactured tools, and the social context. In this case, the tools and social context are not merely “aides ” to the…
Investigating School Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective
uted through the environments ’ material and cultural artifacts and through other people in collaborative efforts to complete complex tasks (Latour, 1987; Pea, 1993). For example, Hutchins (1995a) docu-ments how the task of landing a plane can be best understood through investigating a unit of analysis that includes the pilot, the manufactured tools, and the social context. In this case, the tools and social context are not merely “aides ” to the…
Teachers' Expectations and Sense of Responsibility for Student Learning: The Importance of Race, Class, and Organizational Habitus
This article examines how the concentration of low-income African American students in urban elementary schools is deeply coupled with a leveling of teachers' expectations of students and a reduction in their sense of responsibility for student learning. We argue that this process is rooted in school-based organizational habitus through which expectations of students become embedded in schools. We show that this process can be mediated if school …
African American Parents’ Educational Orientations: The Importance of Social Class and Parents’ Perceptions of Schools
Research on race, social class, and parent involvement in education often implies that parents’ educational orientations result directly from their social class or racial group backgrounds. In this article, the authors study the involvement of working-class and middle-class African American parents. They argue that these parents’ educational orientations are informed by the educational environments they navigate, their resources for negotiating t…
Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Rethinking the Connection Between High-Stakes Testing Policy and Classroom Instruction
In this article, the author examines the link between high-stakes testing policies and classroom instruction. Using data from classroom observations and interviews with teachers, he argues that these policies influence instruction but are mediated by teachers and filtered through their collegial interactions. He shows that teachers link the influence of high-stakes testing policies to instructional content (the knowledge and skills that they emph…
Reframing Suburbs: Race, Place, and Opportunity in Suburban Educational Spaces
Most students in the United States attend suburban schools. However, most education research focuses on urban school districts. This may be in part because many of the core issues that currently drive education research—issues of race and class inequities, social mobility, immigration, English learning—are believed to be “urban” challenges. In this article, we argue that the changing nature of suburban schools and communities, and the history of …
Forms of Capital and the Construction of Leadership: Instructional Leadership in Urban Elementary Schools
James P. Spillane, Tim Hallett, John B. Diamond, Forms of Capital and the Construction of Leadership: Instructional Leadership in Urban Elementary Schools, Sociology of Education, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 1-17
Conundrums of Integration: Desegregation in the Context of Racialized Hierarchy
Recent scholarly and public conversations have given renewed attention to integration as a goal, an aspiration, and/or an "imperative." These calls for integration are infused with the conviction that segregation is a linchpin, if not the linchpin, of persistent racialized hierarchies. While the costs of persistent segregation remain clear, the call for integration as the unequivocal answer is more contested. In this article we grapple with some …
Opportunity Hoarding and the Maintenance of "White" Educational Space
In this paper, we discuss the fundamental whiteness of educational spaces and detail the historical and contemporary mechanisms through which these spaces are created and perpetuate. We draw on Charles Tilly's concept of opportunity hoarding to detail how white racial actors and white-dominated institutions create and defend "white" spaces within education. We expand current educational scholarship in this area by theorizing connections between o…
Race and Discipline at a Racially Mixed High School: Status, Capital, and the Practice of Organizational Routines
In this article, we study a diverse suburban high school to illustrate how racial inequality is embedded in school disciplinary routines. Focusing primarily on the experiences of Black and White students, we theorize about the relationship between race and students’ experiences with school discipline. Drawing on organizational theory, contemporary race theory, and status construction theory, we argue that in carrying out the school’s disciplinary…
Accountability Policy, School Organization, and Classroom Practice: Partial Recoupling and Educational Opportunity
In this article, the author examines the links between high stakes testing policies, school organization processes, and instructional practice using data from a study of K-5 and K-8 schools in Chicago. He argues that although the policy environment penetrates the classroom, this penetration is partial—stronger on some aspects of instruction than others—and its impact unpredictable. He highlights four organizational patterns in the schools he stud…
Disrupting White Supremacy and Anti-Black Racism in Educational Organizations
White supremacy and anti-Black racism are deeply embedded in educational organizations and disrupting them is key to creating more racially just schools. This essay details how the regular practice of organizational routines reproduces racial domination and subordination. We argue that combining critical perspectives on race with organizational improvement approaches can help disrupt this reproductive process. More specifically, educators can eng…
Testing the Oppositional Culture Explanation in Desegregated Schools: The Impact of Racial Differences in Academic Orientations on School Performance
Recent studies suggest that anti-achievement attitudes and behaviors that are specific to black students occur most commonly in integrated or predominantly white school contexts. Accordingly, this study examines the degree to which racial differences in achievement-related attitudes and behaviors (collectively called academic orientations) actually contribute to corresponding differences in academic performance among nearly 25,000 students attend…
Race and school achievement in a desegregated suburb: Reconsidering the oppositional culture explanation
Recent research suggests that oppositional culture and a burden of acting White are likely to emerge for Black students in desegregated schools in which Whites are perceived as having greater educational opportunities. Using interviews with Black and White students in one desegregated secondary school, this 'school structures' argument is assessed. While Black students perceive race‐based limitations to their opportunities for getting ahead and a…
Defending the Color Line: White Supremacy and the Legacy of Brown
Building on W. E. B. Du Bois’s color line concept, I argue that white supremacy is deeply embedded in U.S. educational organizations and that White racial actors, opportunity hoarding, and the cultivation of racial ideology and racial ignorance help sustain it. In doing this, I seek to move away from the aspirational progress narratives often associated with Brown to the racial hierarchies and various forms of harm that schools reproduce, even wh…
Investigating School Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective
uted through the environments ’ material and cultural artifacts and through other people in collaborative efforts to complete complex tasks (Latour, 1987; Pea, 1993). For example, Hutchins (1995a) docu-ments how the task of landing a plane can be best understood through investigating a unit of analysis that includes the pilot, the manufactured tools, and the social context. In this case, the tools and social context are not merely “aides ” to the…
Managing in the Middle: School Leaders and the Enactment of Accountability Policy
This article investigates how mid-level managers make sense of and mediate district accountability policy. Arguing that teachers’evolving perceptions and understanding of accountability policies are likely to be mediated by school leaders, the authors explore how school managers enact their policy environments, focusing chiefly on the ways in which they construct district accountability policies. Adopting a cognitive or interpretive frame on impl…
Forms of Capital and the Construction of Leadership: Instructional Leadership in Urban Elementary Schools
James P. Spillane, Tim Hallett, John B. Diamond, Forms of Capital and the Construction of Leadership: Instructional Leadership in Urban Elementary Schools, Sociology of Education, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 1-17
Towards a theory of leadership practice: A distributed perspective
School‐level conditions and school leadership, in particular, are key issues in efforts to change instruction. While new organizational structures and new leadership roles matter to instructional innovation, what seems most critical is how leadership practice is undertaken. Yet, the practice of school leadership has received limited attention in the research literature. Building on activity theory and theories of distributed cognition, this paper…
High-Stakes Accountability in Urban Elementary Schools: Challenging or Reproducing Inequality? 1
In this article, the authors use data from interviews and observations in four urban elementary schools—two high-performing and two probation schools—to examine how schools respond to high-stakes accountability policies. The authors show that school responses to high-stakes accountability depend on the schools’ accountability status. In probation schools, responses focus narrowly on complying with policy demands, focusing on improving the perform…
African American Parents’ Educational Orientations: The Importance of Social Class and Parents’ Perceptions of Schools
Research on race, social class, and parent involvement in education often implies that parents’ educational orientations result directly from their social class or racial group backgrounds. In this article, the authors study the involvement of working-class and middle-class African American parents. They argue that these parents’ educational orientations are informed by the educational environments they navigate, their resources for negotiating t…
Teachers' Expectations and Sense of Responsibility for Student Learning: The Importance of Race, Class, and Organizational Habitus
This article examines how the concentration of low-income African American students in urban elementary schools is deeply coupled with a leveling of teachers' expectations of students and a reduction in their sense of responsibility for student learning. We argue that this process is rooted in school-based organizational habitus through which expectations of students become embedded in schools. We show that this process can be mediated if school …
Race and school achievement in a desegregated suburb: Reconsidering the oppositional culture explanation
Recent research suggests that oppositional culture and a burden of acting White are likely to emerge for Black students in desegregated schools in which Whites are perceived as having greater educational opportunities. Using interviews with Black and White students in one desegregated secondary school, this 'school structures' argument is assessed. While Black students perceive race‐based limitations to their opportunities for getting ahead and a…
Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Rethinking the Connection Between High-Stakes Testing Policy and Classroom Instruction
In this article, the author examines the link between high-stakes testing policies and classroom instruction. Using data from classroom observations and interviews with teachers, he argues that these policies influence instruction but are mediated by teachers and filtered through their collegial interactions. He shows that teachers link the influence of high-stakes testing policies to instructional content (the knowledge and skills that they emph…
Accountability Policy, School Organization, and Classroom Practice: Partial Recoupling and Educational Opportunity
In this article, the author examines the links between high stakes testing policies, school organization processes, and instructional practice using data from a study of K-5 and K-8 schools in Chicago. He argues that although the policy environment penetrates the classroom, this penetration is partial—stronger on some aspects of instruction than others—and its impact unpredictable. He highlights four organizational patterns in the schools he stud…
Testing the Oppositional Culture Explanation in Desegregated Schools: The Impact of Racial Differences in Academic Orientations on School Performance
Recent studies suggest that anti-achievement attitudes and behaviors that are specific to black students occur most commonly in integrated or predominantly white school contexts. Accordingly, this study examines the degree to which racial differences in achievement-related attitudes and behaviors (collectively called academic orientations) actually contribute to corresponding differences in academic performance among nearly 25,000 students attend…
Conundrums of Integration: Desegregation in the Context of Racialized Hierarchy
Recent scholarly and public conversations have given renewed attention to integration as a goal, an aspiration, and/or an "imperative." These calls for integration are infused with the conviction that segregation is a linchpin, if not the linchpin, of persistent racialized hierarchies. While the costs of persistent segregation remain clear, the call for integration as the unequivocal answer is more contested. In this article we grapple with some …
School leadership and management from a distributed perspective: A 2016 retrospective and prospective
Over the past twenty years distributed leadership has framed theoretical, empirical, and development work in education. In this article, we take stock of some work using a distributed perspective. We first discuss our motivations for developing this perspective and highlight some lessons learned from work in this area. Second, we make suggestions regarding fruitful directions for future research and practice-based work using a distributed perspec…
Race and Discipline at a Racially Mixed High School: Status, Capital, and the Practice of Organizational Routines
In this article, we study a diverse suburban high school to illustrate how racial inequality is embedded in school disciplinary routines. Focusing primarily on the experiences of Black and White students, we theorize about the relationship between race and students’ experiences with school discipline. Drawing on organizational theory, contemporary race theory, and status construction theory, we argue that in carrying out the school’s disciplinary…
The Color of Mind: Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice
Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice; Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio
“The Onus is on Us”: How White Suburban Teachers Learn about Racial Inequities in a Critical Book Study
Racial disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes continue to plague public schools in the United States (U.S.) and are becoming increasingly salient in suburban schools where major shifts in racial demographics have occurred in recent decades. An emerging body of research and practice-based interventions seek to build the capacities of white educators, who make up the vast majority of teachers in U.S. schools, to respond productively …
The Changing Terrain of the Suburbs: Examining Race, Class, and Place in Suburban Schools and Communities
Suburban school districts in the United States (U.S.) have experienced major demographic shifts in recent decades and vary substantially in their student populations. More than half of Asian, black, and Latinx students in large metropolitan areas attend suburban schools, and the suburbs are commonly the first destination for new U.S. immigrants. Thus, suburban schools offer the opportunity to study the confluence of race, ethnicity, class, and im…
Reframing Suburbs: Race, Place, and Opportunity in Suburban Educational Spaces
Most students in the United States attend suburban schools. However, most education research focuses on urban school districts. This may be in part because many of the core issues that currently drive education research—issues of race and class inequities, social mobility, immigration, English learning—are believed to be “urban” challenges. In this article, we argue that the changing nature of suburban schools and communities, and the history of …
Opportunity Hoarding and the Maintenance of "White" Educational Space
In this paper, we discuss the fundamental whiteness of educational spaces and detail the historical and contemporary mechanisms through which these spaces are created and perpetuate. We draw on Charles Tilly's concept of opportunity hoarding to detail how white racial actors and white-dominated institutions create and defend "white" spaces within education. We expand current educational scholarship in this area by theorizing connections between o…
Disrupting White Supremacy and Anti-Black Racism in Educational Organizations
White supremacy and anti-Black racism are deeply embedded in educational organizations and disrupting them is key to creating more racially just schools. This essay details how the regular practice of organizational routines reproduces racial domination and subordination. We argue that combining critical perspectives on race with organizational improvement approaches can help disrupt this reproductive process. More specifically, educators can eng…
Defending the Color Line: White Supremacy and the Legacy of Brown
Building on W. E. B. Du Bois’s color line concept, I argue that white supremacy is deeply embedded in U.S. educational organizations and that White racial actors, opportunity hoarding, and the cultivation of racial ideology and racial ignorance help sustain it. In doing this, I seek to move away from the aspirational progress narratives often associated with Brown to the racial hierarchies and various forms of harm that schools reproduce, even wh…
Toward Black educational freedom: A commentary on Karida Brown’s The Battle for the Black Mind
How Educational Leaders Sustain Equity Work in a Politically Hostile Environment
Beginning in 2021, legislation targeting Critical Race Theory was introduced and adopted across the United States. Over time, these efforts expanded to include banning books and dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in K-12 and higher education. While external pressure has led some educators to scale back their equity-oriented practices, less is known about how equity-focused efforts are maintained in this hostile environ…
Sociology (22 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (11 works) · Critical Race Theory in Education (10 works) · Public relations (10 works) · School Choice and Performance (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works)