The COVID-19 pandemic created numerous disruptions for schools and districts that are still being dealt with heading into year three of the pandemic. These disruptions significantly impacted approaches and initiatives that were being set in motion prior to the pandemic. However, recent political and social shifts in U.S. society have exacerbated…

Bram Stoker talks about the beguiling nature of the vampire; the manipulation, the desire, and the threat. This article looks to outline some of the factors in international schools that impact the organization, especially leadership, and that drain energy. It utilizes the folkloric and literary metaphor of the vampire to illustrate, understand,…

The premise of this article is that studies of distributed leadership could benefit from further incorporation of institutional approaches to better understand complex reform demands facing school leaders working for instructional improvement. We begin by articulating the core components of a distributed perspective on leadership and of an…

While past studies on school district decentralization found that central office leaders can limit school leaders' decision-making power, the studies did not examine how they do so. We investigated this in eight elementary schools in two large urban school systems with official policies of school site-based decision-making. We found that even…

Greenfield's subjectivist approach to the construction and interpretation of social reality is examined and applied to school organizations in an attempt to demonstrate that such organizations may be advantageously viewed as entities constructed and sustained by ideas in people's minds. The path to understanding schools and their administration…

If judged against prevailing understandings of community schools (CSs) in the scholarly literature, all Romanian schools should qualify as CSs in light of the regulatory framework. However, few Romanian schools are genuinely CSs. This article describes a recent NGO-led initiative to assist Romanian schools in becoming CSs and explores the nature…

Demand for school reform, particularly urban schools labeled as "failing," requires a community engagement strategy centered on intermingled social problems: poverty, racial isolation and discrimination, cultural clashes, socio-economic inequalities, and funding disparities. While school administrators are challenged to turn schools…

In this article we discuss how school leaders address challenges when implementing innovative international education curricula, namely International Baccalaureate (IB) programs. Specifically, we frame challenges in curriculum implementation of and transition between IB programs from a "disconnection" perspective. We have often noticed…

This article explores what leadership practices are associated with International Baccalaureate (IB) student achievement. Using a combined data set of Diploma Program (DP) exam scores and teachers' survey responses about school leadership from 29 schools in Southeast Asia, the article reports certain leadership practices (i.e., strategic…

This study seeks to identify and assess factors that contribute to effective independent school governance at the board of trustees level. A review of extant literature reveals two major challenges: (a) definitions and standards of board effectiveness are inconsistent, and (b) there is very little empirical evidence to support existing definitions…

The Leadership Alliance is a national academic consortium currently comprising 32 academic institutions including Ivy League and major-research and minority-serving institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). For 2 decades these institutions have worked collaboratively to train, mentor, and support…

Scholars have increasingly sought to understand how the process of school improvement differs among schools operating in different school levels, conditions, and contexts. Using Rosenholtz's (1985) conception of "moving" and "stuck" schools as a framework for thinking about school improvement, this study examines the learning…

This study examines distributed leadership in Information Communication Technology reform in a government school in Singapore. The study adopts a naturalistic inquiry approach, drawing upon a case study of the aforementioned school for much of its data. The study found that leadership for Information Communication Technology reform is distributed…

This article examines the essential role of school principals in China's "Quality-Oriented Education" national reform movement. Keeping China's cultural and historical context in mind, and taking into consideration the impact of political and societal forces on the nation, we discuss the major challenges faced by Chinese schools,…

William Boyd's contributions to the education field's understanding of the political nature of school leadership are formidable. In this article, I describe the growth and development, over a roughly 30-year time span, of his key insight that successful school leaders should have the capabilities of a "political strategist" and that the…