2026 Fall Journal of Scholarship and Practice

The fall issue of the AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice is now published on the AASA website. It is also, after 30 years, the final issue of this publication by AASA.

This issue begins with an editorial by Ken Mitchell, who has served as the fulltime editor for the past 10 years plus an additional two years as associate editor with Chris Tienken. His editorial is titled “Reimagining Public Education: Leadership, Learning, and the Shift Towards Human-Centered Schools.”

Each article has been vetted and chosen and around a theme that reflects “a shift from one-size-fits-all approach towards frameworks that account for complexity, individual context, and lived experience,” says Mitchell.

In the first article, writers William Holmes, Jentre Olsen, Kellen Adams, and Courtney McKim undertake a superintendency study that examines how district leaders in rural districts are navigating crises, such as teacher shortages, fiscal challenges, and governance conflict, that traditional models weren’t designed to handle. The writers suggest amplifying voices left out of policy conversations.

The second article written by Dario Sforza, “makes an underlying tension explicit: longstanding cognitive frameworks like Bloom’s Taxonomy, built for a different era, are being challenged by AI demands of an AI-influenced, rapidly changing world,” writes Mitchell.

In their commentary, Matthew Fifolt and D. Keith Gurly describe a case study that looks at the “level of structural and cultural school design, rethinking spaces and disciplinary practices to serve students who don’t fit the traditional mold,” says Mitchell.

In summary Mitchell says, “The common thread is a shift from rigid, hierarchical, one-size-fits-all models toward equity-minded, collaborative, and contextually responsive approaches to leading and teaching in schools.”