Education Conference Speakers

Prof. Anderson is a former middle and high school teacher and high school principal. From 1982 to 1984, he served as the principal of the Colegio Americano de Puebla. At the university level, he has taught a wide range of courses, including education policy, educational leadership, qualitative research, action research, discourse analysis, organizational theory, politics of education, teacher development, education advocacy, and the school principalship.

His research interests are interdisciplinary and diverse, with a particular focus on exploring the tensions between theory and practice in applied fields like education. This focus led to his co-authorship of two significant books on action research (Anderson, Herr, and Nihlen, 1994; Herr and Anderson, 2015), alongside extensive writings on knowledge production in applied fields of study.

His most recent work lies in the field of education policy, with a keen interest in how educational research can better inform policy and in the broader challenges of knowledge mobilization. He is particularly concerned with how neoliberal and privatization agendas are undermining public education and the broader notion of the “public sphere.” He published a study on new governance and policy networks, focusing on the Education Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and is currently working on a study of the State Policy Network and its impact on education policy and the professional identity of public sector workers. His 2018 book, The New Democratic Professional: Confronting Markets, Metrics, and Managerialism, addresses these concerns.

He has published extensively in the field of Educational Leadership, aiming to refocus the field through critical and poststructural theories, particularly those of Marx, Habermas, Bourdieu, and Foucault. His additional research interests include organizational micropolitics, school privatization, and the impact of global neoliberalism on education. With a particular interest in education in Latin America, he has received two Fulbright awards for research in Argentina and Mexico.

A central theme in his research is the symbolic dimension of educational leadership and how administrators “manage meaning,” or navigate dominant discourses within schools, districts, and communities. His dissertation was an ethnographic study of school principals, which led to the development of a model that explores how administrators mediate political demands both vertically within educational hierarchies and horizontally among professionals and the community (Anderson, 1989, 1990). This research further expanded into studies on school micropolitics — the informal power struggles within educational institutions (Blasé and Anderson, 1995; Anderson, 1991) — and the micropolitics of student behavior, particularly as students form academic identities in socially stratified contexts (Anderson, 1996; Anderson and Herr, 1993; Herr and Anderson, 1993, 1997).

A comparative aspect of this research involved analyzing data from the U.S. alongside findings from a Fulbright research award in Puebla, Mexico. Given the growing population of Mexican students in New York, mainly from Puebla, he plans to extend this comparative analysis in future studies.

His research has also focused on how administrative practices in highly unequal and politicized environments can redistribute power to students and communities, particularly in low-income communities of color. He developed a framework for authentic school-community partnerships (Anderson, 1998) and continues to explore leadership models that promote equity in urban schools. These themes are further explored in his book Advocacy Leadership: Toward a Post-Reform Agenda (2009, Routledge).

Additionally, he has conducted several studies using discourse analysis on school and policy texts, national standards, licensure exams for administrators, and media accounts (Anderson and Grinberg, 1998; Anderson, 2001a, 2001b, 2004). These studies trace the evolving role of school leaders in the context of the “new economy,” marked by increasing marketization, corporatization, and the privatization of public education and the public sphere.