Linda Skrla is an associate professor in the Educational Administration   and Human Resource Development Department at Texas A&M University .   She holds B.B.A. and M.Ed. degrees from Sam Houston State University   and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin , where she was a Cycle   XI fellow of the Cooperative Superintendency Program. Prior to joining the   Texas A&M faculty in 1997, Dr. Skrla worked for 14 years as a middle   school and high school teacher and as a campus and district administrator   in Texas public schools. Her research focuses on educational equity   issues in school leadership, including accountability, high success   districts, and women superintendents. Her published work has appeared in numerous journals, including Educational Researcher, Educational Administration Quarterly, Phi Delta Kappan, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. She is also the author of four books, the most recent of which are Reconsidering Feminist Research in Educational Leaders (2003, SUNY Press) with Michelle D. Young and Educational Equity and Accountability: Paradigms, Policies, and Politics (2003, RoutledgeFalmer) with James Joseph Scheurich. She received the Jack A. Culbertson Award as outstanding junior professor of educational administration from the University Council for Educational Administration in 2001.

I was class member of the very first Women in Leadership class at SHSU in 1990. At the time, I was a high school teacher in a small town Texas school district, and there were ZERO women administrators in the entire county in which I lived. The Women in Leadership class was incredibly important to me in ways I understood at the time and in other ways that would not become clear until much later in my career. First, it provided me with regular interaction with role models who were smart, strong, successful women--the professors and my fellow classmates.

Second, the class introduced me to the academic literature on women in school leadership, which I previously did not know even existed. This literature helped me understand that the insecurities I felt and the discrimination I faced were not individual, personal failings but were, instead, manifestations of larger societal oppressions. This literature was immediately useful to me as a school leadership practitioner, and it later became the theoretical foundation for my dissertation work and the basis for one part of my research agenda as a professor. The third huge benefit I gained from the SHSU Women in Leadership class was a connection to the Texas Council of Women School Executives and the opportunity to present at its annual conference. This organization and the women in it proved to be absolutely invaluable in helping me see, and work toward, a future for myself beyond that high school classroom in rural Southeast Texas .