Now imagine she's white: An exploration of Black women's intersectional educational leadership and hidden barriers to retention

As the academic, political, and population landscape evolves, policymakers, school boards, and district leadership must recognize the unique contributions of diverse leaders that are integral to African American students' success. This study explored the leadership experiences of one such group, Black female administrators in K-12 education, contributing to the growing literature on intersectional leadership in education. However, the retention of this demographic continues to decline, posing a problem for the Black teacher and administrator pipeline. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT), Intersectionality, and Grown Black Woman Voice (GBWV) as frameworks, the researcher analyzed Black women administrators' perceptions to allow this historically overlooked demographic to begin to define their leadership ontology and to be the experts concerning the barriers they face to move towards an understanding of why districts continue to fail at closing the opportunity gap and retaining Black women administrators. The findings suggest that Black female administrators exhibit servant leadership style attributes, focused on meeting the needs of others and shifting the mindsets of adults within their institutions while also being positioned as "clean-up women" tasked with addressing systemic inequities. Furthermore, they face cultural taxation, invisibility while being silenced, undermined, overworked, undervalued, stereotyped and unprotected by upper-level supervisors and Human Resource departments. If we know the cause of concern and have identified ways to avoid or counteract it, yet we don’t—perhaps what we see is the only accepted plan and outcome. After the conclusion of this study, one question remains and is the recommendation for further research: Why do these barriers persist?

Name thesis:degree_name

Ed.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educ Policy, Orgzn & Leadrshp

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Westfield, Renayee M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mason, Curtis
• Barnett, Bernice
• Lee, Sharon
• Pak, Yoon

• Black Women Administrators
• Intersectionality
• Intersectional Leadership
• Servant Leadership
• Grown Black Woman Voice
• Black Women Educational Leadership
• Critical Race Theory
• (crt)

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Renayee Westfield

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130155

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F130155