This article explores the sense-making experiences of one specific stakeholder group in education reform -- school leaders -- who find themselves wedged by significant material challenges, on the one hand, and disparate reform efforts, on the other hand. The research draws upon experiences from the Philippines where reform efforts are…

Public education in Morocco occupies the center stage of the development efforts spearheaded by the North African Kingdom. Yet, little, if any, improvement in the quality of education has been achieved over the last two decades. Public schools continue to suffer huge shortages in human and material resources despite several successive waves of…

Since the 1990s, New Public Management has been a part of Argentina's educational policies. Mainly, school-centered management and strategic planning are seen as imperative for establishing and sustaining schools' efficiency. Delegating commitment and responsibility to schools is the key of this managerial logic. Here, we will analyze the dynamics…

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how principal subjectivities are constructed by particular normalizing processes that occur through the disciplinary power of grants and submission writing. An increasing part of the principal's job, under moves towards self-governing schools, is a reliance of grants and submissions in order to obtain…

The purpose of this study was to assess the extent to which the introduction of school-based management (SBM) has affected schools' culture of consumption and the inequalities between schools with different socio-economic backgrounds. An analysis of financial reports from 31 SBM schools over four years reveals that schools have increased rather…

Vocational schools in Germany are currently undergoing administrative reform. The main idea behind this reform, taken from the administrative paradigm of New Public Management, has been to grant schools extended autonomy but to make them more accountable for their results. Critics emphasize that such reform tends to reduce school administration to…

Educational research has contributed a great deal to current understanding of effective school-based management (i.e. Wholstetter and Mohrman 1996, Leithwood and Menzies 1998). Through this research, practitioners have been given guidance on what constitutes effective teams. However, educational research has yet to provide comparable guidance in…

Meeting the needs of the school community in the Australian context in current times has become a complex task, due to substantial school restructuring over the last three decades. More and more, schools are required to engage, and be accountable for developing programs that address the needs of the school community, while satisfying…

Report of a study from Israel that reveals that SBM positively affects teachers' commitment to the profession and students' academic achievement, and negatively affects their commitment to the school and students' social well-being. Further, teachers' autonomy remained unchanged after SBM was introduced. (Contains 4 figures, a questionnaire, and…

Documents the impact of school-based management on educational leadership in Australia. Locates the emergence of new models of leadership within a corporate managerialist philosophy of a new-liberal state that devalues the pedagogical attributes of school leadership and reinforces a growing divide between teachers and administrators. (Contains 39…

Based on an extensive review of the literature, implications for school leadership are examined in the context of four government approaches to accountability-driven educational policy: market, decentralization, professionalization, and management. The article concludes with a discussion of four suggested areas for future leadership research. (PKP)

Explores dynamics of parental involvement in one low-income, urban school struggling to improve student learning and to draw parents into all aspects of their children's education. Embracing a "family metaphor" helped participants overcome implementation barriers (overwhelming teacher expertise, culturally-based role expectations, and…