UCSC, Education Department, Professor and Chair

I am a Professor and Chair of the Education Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I received my Ph.D. in Education from The Ohio State University. I was a post-doctoral fellow in the Organizations Research Training Program at Stanford University. I am the Vice President of Division A of the American Educational Research Association and serve on the editorial boards of the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and the Review of Research in Education.

1. Schools operate in a highly institutionalized environment, in which the state and professions enact dominant social values. To maintain legitimacy with key stakeholders, schools respond to the institutional environment by adopting structures that reflect policy and professional norms. I have studied how school organizations’ responses to demands for educational reform affect teachers and instructional practice. Most recently, I have completed a study of the unintended consequences of a school district’s adoption of standards-based curriculum and, in collaboration with researchers from the New Teacher Center at UC Santa Cruz, have undertaken a study of the impact of state and federal policy and district instructional programs on the socialization of new teachers.
   
2. Research on educational reform emphasizes the importance of leaders in implementing and sustaining school-improvement programs. Conventional treatments of educational leadership have focused on the incumbents of administrative roles in school organizations, namely district superintendents and school principals. My work is based on a different view of educational leadership, one that conceptualizes leadership as an organizational quality.  

• Achinstein, B., Ogawa, R. T. and Spieglman, A. (in press). “Are We Creating Separate and Unequal Tracks of Teachers? The Impact of State Policy, Local Conditions, and Teacher Characteristics On New Teacher Socialization.” American Educational Research Journal
• Ogawa, R.T., Sandholtz, J. H., Martinez-Flores, M. & Scribner, S. P. (2003). The Substantive and Symbolic Consequences of a District’s Standards-Based Curriculum. American Educational Research Journal.
• Sandholtz, J. H., Ogawa, R. T. & Scribner, S. P. (2004). The standards gap. Teachers College Record.
• Ogawa, R. T., Crowson, R. & Goldring, E. (1999). Enduring dilemmas of school organization. in J. Murphy & K. Seashore-Louis (Eds.). Handbook of research on educational administration. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
• Ogawa, R. T. (1994). The institutional sources of educational reform: The case of school-based management. American Educational Research Journal, 31.

• Ogawa, R. T. (in press) “Leadership as Social Construct: The Expression of Human Agency within Organizational Constraint.” In F. W. English (Ed.). Handbook of Educational Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Ogawa, R. T. (2004) “Embracing Uncertainty: Organizing and Leading to Enhance the Knowledgeability and Capability of Teachers.” In N. Bennett & L. Anderson (Eds.). Rethinking Educational Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Pounder, D. G. & Ogawa, R. T. & Adams, E. A (1995). “Leadership as an Organization-wide Phenomenon: ItsIimpact on School Performance.” Educational Administration Quarterly, 31.
• Ogawa, R. T. & Bossert, S. T. (1995). “Leadership as an Organizational Quality.” Educational Administration Quarterly, 31.