Educational leadership discourse has for sometime been the major intellectual pillar of what was once known as the field of educational administration. An examination of the postgraduate coursework programmes available to aspiring principal leaders at every Australian university supports such a contention. While this discourse does shed light on…

In the 1960s, as part of the black freedom struggle in the United States, African-American educators increasingly achieved the position of school principal in the nation's big cities, helping to transform that office into a more dynamic force for school reform. This article presents the accomplishments and the struggles of one such principal,…

In September 1931, the Communist Party Central Committee, the highest political authority in the Soviet Union, declared that "single person rule" ("edinonachalie") should prevail in the administration of schools. The history of approximately 100,000 school directors in the 1930s was shaped by a rapid expansion in numbers as well as fundamental…

It is problematic enough trying to extract the lessons from the past to inform the present and the future; it is even more difficult when there is no history upon which to draw. This is the case with respect to a consideration of the impact of sustainable development upon school administration. Whilst there is a history of events contributing to…

This article analyses the changing role of the principal in Mexico, during a period, 1921-1934, in which the configurations sustaining and surrounding schooling were profoundly transformed. It compares the experience of three "directores" working in towns that differed in their expectations and relationship to state and federal government. In this…

As a British colony, New Zealand had early to grapple with how best to implement a state system of schooling. Inspectors of primary schools and governing boards of secondary schools were responsible for appointing school principals. This paper examines the ways in which they dealt with new situations: in the case of the primary schools where there…

The purpose of this article is to argue for a social activist stance in educational leadership that fundamentally addresses social change and human emancipation. This call for social activism is framed within neoliberal, neoconservative, and authoritarian populist discourses in the USA, which to social justice educators and leaders had devastating…

Neoliberal agendas have acted to limit the agency of groups and of individuals through both the imposition of boundaries and through setting up rigorous systems of accountability which together act to codify behaviours. Such systems do not so much remove freedom as influence conceptions about the alternatives available. In this article we outline…

In the Kingdom of Bavaria, the capital city, Munich, created in 1873 positions as "Oberlehrer"--a head teacher in primary schools ("Volksschulen") responsible for one school for boys and one school for girls. The mere existence of these male "Oberlehrer" challenged for the first time the exclusive power of Catholic and Lutheran clerics in the…

Teachers in the English and Welsh State education system have experienced a changing and turbulent relationship with the State in recent decades. This article adopts a historical analysis and argues that the concept of "partnership" is key to understanding the relationship between teachers and the State in the period since the Second World War.…

This article reports on an exploratory study which employed Hodgkinson's values paradigm as an analytical tool for explaining how administrators of transnational education programmes understand national cultural values to affect their work and working environment. In particular, interviews with managers responsible for Australia's provision of…

In this article I examine approaches to school leadership in Scandinavia by applying a historical lens. I start by drawing attention to some aspects of the ideology and the history of the Scandinavian education systems in order to discuss how these aspects intersect with the globalised policy trends, and where there is likely to be tensions…

International developments in the field of household science, debates about women's rights to a higher education and changes in workforce demographics came together in the first decade of the twentieth century to facilitate the establishment of a School of Home Science at the University of Otago. The early years were characterised by struggles…

Britain in the 1950s offered increased opportunities for secondary education leading to better career prospects at a time of full employment. A government report into early leaving in 1954 noted that it was girls of all social classes who were most "at risk" of not staying the course. The following article discusses first the nature of risk and…

The appropriateness of history in primary schools is yet again questioned in the Rose Review ("The Times," 8 December 2008). This age-old debate was in part silenced with the subject's inclusion for all pupils in the National Curriculum, but is raging once more. The Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) has cautioned that history is becoming…