With the need for rapid school reform amid changes in socioeconomic and political situations, evidence abounds that today's school principals operate in a stress-strained environment. Participants of this study identified at least a form of stress on the job. More than 96% claimed to have experienced work-related stress at a level they believed…

The notion of "success" is narrowly defined and appropriated within an educational context. Typically limited to objective measures of organizational productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency, "successful" principal practices, we argue, engender action and attention to a broader array of issues and interrelationships. In this study, we conducted…

School superintendents' role has shifted from the traditional emphasis on managerial aspects to one on instructional leadership (on teaching and learning issues) achieved by generating collaborative learning opportunities at the both school and district levels. Whereas collaborative learning processes in schools have generally been associated with…

The professional expertise of educational leaders has been defined through the lens of problem-solving processes. Problem-based learning has therefore become an increasingly popular instructional approach in principal preparatory programs. As such, this study represents an initial attempt to explore learning from success (i.e., success-based…

This article details the struggles that principals faced as they sought to enact an equity oriented agenda. Utilizing a qualitative approach combined with principles of autoethnography, seven urban principals described the resistance they faced "at every turn" in their pursuit of equity and social justice. This resistance was produced by such…

This article reports the two-year tenure of a woman superintendent in a small southern city. Placed against the background of local community politics and school district politics it shows that women in the superintendency still face issues of gender stereotyping that influence the way they are perceived as leaders of school systems. A feminist…

Leadership continues to be a central focus for research in educational administration. Until recently, many studies about leadership have been based largely on the experiences of white males and interpreted based on the structural-functionalist perspective. In this paper the writer explores the phenomenon of leadership through the eyes and…

A statewide cadre of principal certification students (N = 516) completed a principal job survey and role-played as applicants for a principal position by completing a principal job evaluation instrument. Significant predictors of principal job rating included the following: self-reported capability to do the job, expected satisfaction with work…

The recent press for high-stakes accountability has challenged school leaders to use data to guide the practices of teaching and learning. This article considers how local school leaders build data-driven instructional systems to systematically improve student learning. Such systems are presented as a framework involving data acquisition, data…

Organizational issues are of particular importance in the planning of university-school-community partnerships because in their efforts to pool resources for the attainment of mutually agreed-on ends, it is evident that partnership participants commonly operate in diverse living, schooling, and working environments. This qualitative study sought…

Both principal leadership for professional development and leadership for social justice offer promising but underdeveloped conceptions of professional development content that school principals promote toward teaching for academic excellence and social justice. This article examines the professional learning content promoted by three school…

This article examines the relationship between trust and the development of distributed leadership. It presents a theoretical argument with supporting evidence from longitudinal fieldwork examining distributed leadership development in comparative cases of two secondary schools. The analysis suggests that trust matters in the design, performance,…

Districts play a key and relatively unexamined role in distributed leadership research. This article explores how leadership was distributed through a district structure designed to improve the quality of teaching by improving the quality of teacher evaluation. It examines peer assistance and review, a policy designed to address the key problems…

This study examined the job and growth satisfaction of secondary school administrators. Three sets of variables (job, organizational, and personal characteristics) were tested in terms of their impact on 2 related but distinct dependent variables: job and growth satisfaction. The participants included 153 school administrators, 66 principals, and…

This study sought to identify important antecedents of principals' self-efficacy (PSE) beliefs among 558 principals in Virginia. Analysis of variance demonstrated that the school context variables of school level, school setting, and the proportion of low-income students had no significant relationship to PSE. Multiple regression revealed that, by…