Farewell to AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice

AASA EXTRA

An association periodical that has served AASA’s higher education community and public school practitioners is ending its publication run after more than 30 years. The fall 2026 issue of the AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice will be its last.

The quarterly newsletter, known as The AASA Professor at its launch in 1995, gave the association’s university-based members, mostly faculty in educational administration and educational leadership, a peer-reviewed vehicle for sharing their relevant research studies.

At the time it assumed its new identity as the AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice in spring 2004, the publication’s mission was “to provide blind peer-reviewed, user-friendly and methodologically sound research that practicing school and district administrators could use to take action and that higher education faculty could use to prepare future school and district administrators.”

During the past decade, scholarly articles accepted for publication typically fell into one of four categories: (1) evidence-based practice, (2) original research, (3) research-informed commentary and (4) book reviews. Submissions focused on the intersection of issues related to school and district administration.

The publication remained in print until summer 2005 when it became a quarterly digital research journal published on the AASA website as an open-source document.

Editorial Leaders

From its start, The AASA Professor and the AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice relied on some of the association’s most dedicated members as volunteers to shepherd all facets of the editorial and production processes. AASA provided modest staff support and funds for printing over the years.

Fred Dembowski, currently president of the International Association of Organizational Innovation, served as the first editor of The AASA Professor soon after its launch in 1995. After almost 14 years at the helm, Dembowski relinquished the reins with the fall 2008 issue of the newly renamed AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice.

Chris Tienken, an assistant superintendent at the time and now a professor at Seton Hall University, became editor with the winter 2009 issue. He formed a new editorial board that updated the mission and scope that has marked the publication ever since.

Tienken served as editor for eight years. The last two included Ken Mitchell, who worked alongside him as associate and co-editor before assuming the editorship in 2016. Mitchell, a former superintendent and an educator for 50 years, is a member of the faculty at Manhattanville University in New York.

During his tenure, Mitchell grew the quarterly journal issue by issue by creating editorial themes that tied research, best practice and/or commentary together with an editorial of his own that, over the ensuing decade, made logical connections among the work of the writers.

Supportive Contributors

Beyond the editors, many others have played a role. Each editor managed an editorial board that reviewed manuscripts in search of meaningful research that would benefit practitioners. Their contributions were significant. Dembowski said he had worked with 50 reviewers, a mix of university faculty and school system administrators, during his editorship. Tienken and Mitchell routinely had 25 members serving on their editorial review boards.

AASA executive directors Paul Houston, Dan Domenech and David Schuler, as well as members of their staffs, lent support and counsel to the publication, most notably Valerie Truesdale in recent years.

Barbara Dean, who earlier worked parttime on the staff of School Administrator magazine, continued well beyond her retirement in 2006 to serve as associate editor, responsible for formatting and editing each issue of the Journal of Scholarship and Practice for the past 20 years.

Future Access

The published issues of the journals from the past 10 years, dating back to summer 2017, can be found on AASA’s website.

Over its lifetime, about 120 issues of the publication were produced. All or most of them, print and digital, are available through the AASA historical archives in the special collections library at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Jay Goldman is editor of School Administrator magazine. Barbara Dean provided most of the research for this article.