Excellence, professional development, and educational leadership -- all of these terms can be seen as unstable, dereferentialised, or empty signifiers - as their meaning (or the work they do) is not fixed. However, in spite of this, they have become 'part and parcel' of educational leadership in the Enlightenment institutions of the 'not so'…

Anti-Black racism and White supremacy continue to have dire impact on the lives and educational outcomes of Black people and students in educational spaces. Examining ways in which this form of racism is disrupted, confronted, and challenged in education and schooling is important not only to Black students, scholars, practitioners, and staff, but…

The purpose of this article was to describe the foundational development of a conceptual framework for cultural competence of educational leaders based on an extensive literature review and to develop the CCEL instrument. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) procedures were used on the data (n = 252) to determine the psychometric properties of the…

Recent studies of Indigenous educational leadership have contributed instructive conceptual insights to decolonize public schools. Building on these theoretical insights, we investigate the organizational and policy constraints leaders face when attempting to enact decolonial strategies. Combining "safety zone theory" and Critical Policy…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to gather the perspectives of educational leaders in the United States and Australia on strategies for transforming an almost exclusively Westernized curriculum into a curriculum that honors Indigenous worldviews. The research design was exploratory in nature and involved an examination of the ways in…

The "purpose" of this study was to understand the perspectives of recently retired principals who were mentors to new school leaders in a high-need urban school district. Mentors reflected on the mentoring needs and challenges faced by new school leaders while also reflecting on their own careers as school principals. This study was…

School administrators from three mid-Atlantic cities were surveyed regarding the levels of emphasis given to components from their university-based leadership preparation programs. Three components--ethics, equity, and community engagement--are explored for this article due to their influential relationship with school response to changing…

Principals play a critical role in school-community engagement, yet there are a dearth of instruments to measure principals' knowledge and practice in this area. This study therefore describes the research base of community equity literacy and explains why it is essential to the work of school principals and their leadership teams. It also…

Three independently developed educational leadership courses used the arts to depart from lecture and passive learning, prime students to solve school problems creatively, and build social justice awareness. Photo captioning was used to promote intrapersonal leadership development around professional identity formation and social justice awareness…

In the field of educational leadership, there has been a proliferation of empirical and theoretical research on social justice leadership. However, a diluted and homogenized rendition of social justice has seeped into the discourse and practice, thus positioning social justice leadership to be reradicalized. As such, the purpose of this article is…

Untold numbers of professional educators hold administrative certificates or licenses but do not use them, never taking formal administrative roles in schools. Why do so many of the graduates of our principal-preparation programs forego taking school-leadership positions and simply stick with teaching or assume other, nonadministrative-leadership…

Literature in leadership studies is devoid of knowledge about the unique ways that Latina/Chicana educators engage as leaders, activists, and agents for change. Women's studies, ethnic studies, and Chicana feminist studies alert us to the complex role that social context and the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity/race, and class play in the…

This purpose of the study was to explore moral literacy and legal reasoning through educational leadership decision making. Participants in the study were students enrolled in a law and ethics course in an educational leadership graduate program. Each student drafted a personal code of ethics at the beginning of the course. Throughout the course,…

This article examines the redesign of two educational leadership programs at different institutions: a medium-sized public university and a small private university. Both were committed to principals of ethical leadership. Each program faced a state mandate to redesign. In one case, state policy focused on detailed accountability measures based on…

Demonstrating the contribution of leadership development programs to student learning has become a problem of considerable recent interest to both school reformers and those attempting to improve how school leaders are prepared. This article describes an innovative approach to improving school leadership developed by the Greater New Orleans School…