Leadership and Policy in Schools | 2021
Commentary: Rethinking Educational Leadership and Policy in Schools in Challenging Circumstances
Abstract
As Arar and Örücü note in their introduction to this special issue, research interest in the leadership of schools confronting challenging circumstances continues to grow. From a personal perspective, I first began working on this agenda almost 20 years ago. I had gotten a Ventures in Leadership grant from the Wallace Foundation in 2002 to study three high needs elementary schools in Western New York that had experienced a marked improvement in student academic performance shortly after the arrival of a new principal (Jacobson et al., 2005). “High need” was a term that was relatively easy to quantify in New York at that time because the State had created an index based upon student economic disadvantage, which was determined by the percentage of students eligible for a free or reduced lunch as compared to the funding available to the school. The lower the available school funding as compared to the percentage of economically disadvantaged youngsters, the greater the need. Using this metric, we were able to focus only on those schools in the highest quartile, i.e., schools with the highest need and presumably the most challenging of circumstances. These first three cases subsequently evolved into the formation of a research team from the University at Buffalo (UB) that was invited to join the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) to study school principals who had led their schools to improve measurably (Jacobson et al., 2007). At the time, the team from UB was the only one of the ISSPP’s seven original national teams that were examining schools in challenging circumstances exclusively. The members of the UB team felt strongly that it was essential in the USA to focus on those schools at which principals had to overcome what seemed like the most overwhelming of odds. In other words, we felt strongly that if quality leadership mattered, researchers needed to study communities where the need for such leadership was greatest. In 2005, Leithwood examined the first round of ISSPP case studies and, in an often-cited article, reported that progress in the study of successful principals was being made on a broken front (Leithwood, 20052005). Specifically, he noted that the growing number of qualitative case studies had begun to reach a mass sufficient enough to start revealing patterns in the data, with perhaps the most notable of these patterns being that context mattered, whether across national boundaries or even amongst schools within the same nation. In the intervening years, the number of ISSPP national partners has grown to over 20, and additional teams in the USA were formed at the University of Texas – San Antonio, University of Arizona, Indiana University, Boston College and Clemson. Consequently, the research output from just this network alone has grown exponentially, with the number of publications produced by ISSPP members now in the 100s (www.uv.uio.no/ils/english/research/projects/ isspp). Not surprisingly, within this expanded research base on successful principals, more and more high needs schools became sites of study. Interest in the work on schools in challenging circumstances was so great that by 2008 the International School Leadership Network (ISLDN) was formed as a collaboration between members of the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS) and the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA). ISLDN focused its work around two main strands: 1) leadership in high needs school and 2) social justice leadership (isldn.wordpress.com/about/), and the overlap of these two strands