Bridging the Opportunity Gap offers an empowerment tool that investigates and analyzes the experiences of school principals and the processes they underwent in their promotion from educator to principal. Author Dr. Danielle Hyles-Rainford interrogates the notion of career mobility in school systems.
The purpose of this study is to explore actual career barriers that impede the mobility of aspiring educators, with a specific focus on race and gender, and also to give agency attributes and navigational tools to attain personal empowerment and systemic resiliency for career success. Previous research in the field of mobility and leadership in education has rarely brought together issues of race, gender and identity politics with the notions of human, social and cultural capital accumulation.
Bridging the Opportunity Gap explores a variety of closely related topics, including the impact of horizontal versus vertical mobility, the career community web, spiral and the traditional ladder, under-representation and overqualified candidates, and family/childrearing and its effects on promotion in different global contexts.
Most importantly, it explores how to navigate a complex system like the public education system and gives individual and collective agency attributes for success, such as political astuteness, influential mentorship, personal style, higher education, and superior job performance.