Over the last quarter century, the American high school, like the larger educational industry in which it is embedded, has been subjected to a good deal of critical analysis. Using a longer lens provided by historical research on the development and growth of the American high school as well as an especially robust theory of organizational change…

This paper reviews the rationale behind the recent US Supreme Court ruling in the University of Michigan's "Grutter v. Bollinger" case (2003). It describes the educational benefits of diversity as documented by research and argued by the seventy-five amicus briefs filed in support of the law school's race-based admissions policies. It further…

This paper investigates urban-rural and size effects on public upper secondary school efficiency in Northern Thailand. Efficiency is assessed by a nonparametric technique, namely data envelopment analysis. Urban-rural and size effects are examined through a Mann-Whitney nonparametric statistical test and by Tobit regression analysis, respectively.…

The urban principalship has been researched primarily by studying the school context, and not the leadership required to facilitate school improvement. Through a collaborative inquiry process, six principals and two researchers spent almost two years exploring in depth the nature of the urban principalship in turning around low-performing schools.…

Increasingly school leaders are being challenged to take a more instructionally focused role in their schools. This paper tracks the leadership challenges through a change process involving an assistant principal and a group of teachers, supported by a consultant, through four phases of an action research project. During the project the…

Parents' expectations and demands of schools have traditionally exposed school-level educators to a major difficulty of maintaining a proper balance between parental involvement and intervention with schools. The following study explores how the increase in schools' authority following the introduction of School-Based Management (SBM) in schools…

The pressures of a nation-wide decline in educational funding coupled with the increase in demands for accountability has renewed legislative discussion about the efficacy of school consolidation. This national survey of school superintendents who have experienced school merger, explored the effects of consolidation on school communities,…

This article provides perspectives about influences on the principalship following a state's 1998 adoption--without modification--of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium "Standards for School Leaders". Using literature about reconceptualizing school leadership as the framework, the paper summarizes changes in state-regulated…

School reconstitution, the process of restaffing schools as a mechanism for school improvement, has become an increasingly popular component of education accountability systems across the country. This paper provides an analysis of the impact of one district-sponsored school reconstitution reform on the capacity of schools for improvement. We…

This paper examines two questions: What does it mean to take a distributed perspective on leadership in schools? What are the entailments of taking a distributed perspective for research on school leadership? Arguing that the practice of leadership should be a key concern in scholarship on school leadership, the authors explore the leader-plus and…

This article provides a critical analysis of the teacher leadership literature. It considers teacher leadership within the context of contemporary leadership theory, focusing particularly upon distributed leadership. The article explores different interpretations and definitions of the term "teacher leadership" and considers the implications for…

One lasting legacy of the effective schools movement was the institutionalization of the term "instructional leadership" into the vocabulary of educational administration. Evidence from other recent reviews of the literature on principal leadership (e.g., Hallinger, 2001; Hallinger & Heck 1996; Southworth, 2002) suggest that twenty years later,…

This paper will address the challenge of how strategic leadership can be defined and articulated to provide a framework for developing a strategically focused school drawing on a NCSL research project. The paper is structured into three main parts. Part one outlines the elements that comprise a strategically focused school, develops an…

Today's instructional leaders face disparate accountabilities. On the one hand, they are accountable for use of research on literacy education that has evolved to be understood as holistic literacy instruction based on an integrated use of semantic, syntactic, and phonemic strategies. On the other hand, leaders must meet requirements of current…

This study examined the process of organizational learning in a small secondary school in a company town during a protracted period of turbulence, arising from the downsizing of the community's main employer. The hypothesis was that distributed leadership among school staff created a change in teaching practices from a limited repertoire of…