This article will argue that diverse national, regional and local contexts leave different rooms for manoeuvre for school principals. The social technologies applied by the authorities (like accountability systems) can be "tight" or "loose" and so leave little or much room for principals' interpretations of what a good school is and what…

This paper reports on the status of instructional supervision within the current New York City school reform movement. Reports from interviews with New York City public school teachers demonstrate the prevalence of directive, checklist and narrative approaches to supervision, raising serious questions for the future of instructional supervision.…

This article seeks to advance the discussion of the availability of contemporary notions of school leadership for school leaders working within high-stakes accountability reform environment that produce discourses of urgency and legitimize practices of performance that implicitly favour centralized, neo-Tayloristic managerial approaches. Drawing…

The application of market-based principles to school management and the onset of heavy-handed accountability represent a new policy direction in education. The new policy direction has led to a reconceptualization of the purpose of education, the redesign of teaching work and attempts to manage teacher identities to align them with the new…

This paper examines the impact of implementing democratic school leadership via advisory school councils in Philippine public secondary schools. Through an experiment with empirical surveys and interviews, this study reveals that the experimental group had higher levels of commitment, empowerment and trust compared with the control group after one…

This research was carried out in Ceuta, Spain, with the aim of understanding leader's perceptions of multicultural education, their role as leaders and the educative environment of their centres. The city of Ceuta is exceptional: four major cultures coexist in this city (Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu), along with a fifth negligible minority…

Just as trends in medical education are changing continuously, so must curricula. To keep pace with such trends the School of Medicine Tec de Monterrey, Mexico, underwent a curriculum reform process with the goal of developing a new educational model and reducing resistance to change. The Curriculum Committee created seven subcommittees involving…

As educators actively engaged in various aspects of public education in Texas and other states and countries for half of the 20th century, the authors have been both supporters and critics of US schools. In the process of observing and actively working with public school leaders, their critical concerns have steadily grown from an emphasis on…

There is currently much discussion about distributed leadership, both as a model of reality in many schools and as an alternative to focused leadership. One model in practice is co-principalship. This paper offers a preliminary investigation into a unique form emerging in a small body of international schools in China. The Yew Chung model,…

Joining the European Union is a process largely based on meeting a number of pre-requirements associated with a number of factors; the most important being economy. Other factors are associated with trade, education, environment, quality indicators, effectiveness and efficiency. Establishing knowledge and evidence base societies on common grounds…

Two university researchers who have considerable practitioner and research experience in urban schools conducted an interventionist action research project in collaboration with the professional staff of a diverse urban elementary school. The goal was to collaborate with the administration, faculty and staff in an average urban elementary school…

The purpose of the current study was to unearth subjective interpretations of women principals concerning job satisfaction and dissatisfaction in their career and to examine whether their interpretations differ from common, "androgynous" constructions of job satisfaction developed outside the field of education but that constitute the basis on…

The biological basis for differences between the sexes has become increasingly clear in recent years. The nature-nurture debate has made way for the view that the individual is a product of the interaction between genes and environment. For the world of school leadership this means that instead of arguing about them, we should acknowledge the…

This paper shares the results of an ethnographic case study into the role a principal had in maintaining a growing minority language school while implementing an inclusive policy for students with learning and physical difficulties. The principal was very aware of the reputation and image of the school in the public eye. Maintaining a distinct…

This essay provides an argument for the study of monuments and provides an analytical framework to promote thoughtful study. The essay focuses on three points of analyses that educational leaders should consider when exposing their students to monuments. These include: an analysis of referent--the person or event being memorialized; an analysis of…