No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
School leadership in Latin America: research and policy trends
Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of school leadership research and policy trends in Latin America. The storyline of our chapter is as follows: globally there is a shared understanding that leadership matters for school improvement, and school leadership development is an important system responsibility. However, outside the Global North the school leadership research base is nascent and uneven. This means that although much school leadership research concludes that context matters, in many regions of the Global South international/borrowed policies and leadership frameworks dominate. In this paper we highlight the following tension in Latin America specifically: there are two trends that are true simultaneously, namely that the knowledge base is thin and uneven across countries and/but there is growing interest in school leadership among researchers and policymakers in who leaders are, what they do and with what impact, and how systems recruit, support, and evaluate them. This chapter is based on our work originally published in a first-of-its-kind Special Issue on Latin America of Educational Management Administration and Leadership (Flessa et al., 2018). That review covered 2000–2016. As we prepared this chapter, we returned to the scholarly databases to see if our original conclusions would hold in the face of new research published between 2016 and 2021. We believe that they do.
... This variability is particularly evident in Latin America where policies supporting the professionalization of school leaders remain inconsistent and scattered across the region (Weinstein & Hernández, 2016). Recent reviews have shown that there is lack of internal coherence and a systematic approach of the different initiatives in the region seeking to professionalize school leadership (Flessa et al., 2023;Weinstein et al., 2014;Weinstein & Simielli, 2022). ...
... on to explore how key dimensions on school leadership translate into different societal contexts, particularly in developing countries (Weinstein & Hernandez, 2016). Research in Latin America has shown significant movement towards the adoption of policies directly addressing school leadership and policies (Adelman & Lemos, 2021;Cuenca & Pont, 2016;Flessa, et. al, 2023;OEI, 2017;Weinstein & Hernández, 2016;Weinstein, et al., 2014;Weinstein & Simielli, 2022). Table 1 presents a summary of the main characteristics of the research on school leadership in the five systems with available data. 2 Table 1: School leadership research in Latin America ...
School leadership has emerged as a crucial variable for the provision of educational quality. Education policy in Latin America has sought to follow the international trends for the professionalization of school leadership. Following a theoretical model defining the key dimensions for the professionalization of school leadership, the paper examines eight educational systems in the region that have made significant progress in this area.
Five educational systems will be explored using TALIS 2018 principal data, while three others are the subject of in-depth case studies. Our findings show that despite significant advances in the definition of functions and recruitment and selection process, several challenges remain particular regarding the professional development of principals and their working conditions. The paper concludes with policy recommendations on how the region can move forward.
In 2009, the United States Department of Education (USDOE) incentivised states to create more rigorous teacher evaluation systems that better differentiated teacher performance as well as provided more information on what makes a high-quality teacher. One result of these revised teacher evaluation systems was principals, in most cases the primary evaluator of teacher performance, were tasked with collecting new and/or different data on teacher performance. However, little research investigates teachers’ perceptions of how their evaluator carries out this important work. To investigate this phenomenon I asked: (1) What are teachers’ perceptions of how their school principal uses a new teacher evaluation system?; and (2) In what way(s) do these perceptions influence teacher engagement in the evaluation process? Data come from K-8 grade public school teachers in the U.S. state of Michigan and includes interviews with teachers and observations of teachers during their official teacher evaluation process. Findings show teachers generally believe their principals are using new evaluation systems in ways that are beneficial to their growth as educators, which leads to teacher engagement in the evaluation process.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.