Joseph Flessa’s research while affiliated with University of Toronto and other places

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.

How do leaders make the impossible choice between harm enacted on racially oppressed students and families, and harm enacted on them as advocates for racial justice in systems steeped in whiteness? How do they negotiate multiple harms in Black and Brown bodies? Purpose: Situated in between the literature on tempered radicalism and Applied Critical Leadership (ACL), this study explores the experiences of six Black and Brown mid-level and senior-level district leaders in Greater Toronto Area, in Ontario, Canada. Research Methods/Approach: We draw on counter narrative methodologies including in-depth oral history interviews and ongoing communication with participants to explore the impossibilities and possibilities of leading for racial justice. Findings: Impossibilities include complicities and complexities, accountabilities and alliances, and different metrics, different expectations. Possibilities include present and future hopes, personal power and voice, and joy and fulfillment. Implications for

This counternarrative study positions two distinct bodies of literature in conversation: mid-level district leadership in the literature on educational change and anti-racist approaches to leadership framed through Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies. Interviews with twelve, mid-level district leaders committed to anti-racism in Ontario, Canada, reveal fundamental differences in leaders’ knowledges and capacities compared to those identified in the literature on educational change and promoted in the corresponding leadership frameworks in Ontario. In centering power, racialization, and whiteness as a logic of oppression, anti-racist approaches to leadership fundamentally reconstitute conceptions and enactments of leadership. Findings speak to the importance of knowledge(s) about race and racialization, racism and intersecting oppressions, and how whiteness subverts anti-racist efforts. Findings also speak to developing capacities such as: visioning that both owns historical injustices and imagines future possibilities; organizing and collectivizing as a means of power sharing and decentering the individual leader; facilitating difficult learning in the face of racist resistance and multiple frameworks; securing accountability for rights by building informal accountability structures while advocating for formal ones; aligning resources and creating structures in support of students from historically oppressed communities; and, sustaining the self in the face of the impending harm in doing this work. With a focus on whiteness, this study invites scholars and practitioners to turn the gaze upward and consider what might need to be undone and unlearned from multiple and intersecting systems of oppression, what the authors refer to as unleading.

Ontario school districts are struggling to respond to racism in schooling and society. How has the literature on school district reform in Ontario addressed these ongoing and growing concerns? Through a narrative synthesis and a systematic literature review, we map and characterize the existing literature on school district reform in Ontario in the past 25 years. By combining systematic searches in main online databases with key journal and author search, we analyzed and coded a total of 95 documents. Framed through Critical Race Theory (CRT) and in conversation with recent studies on anti-racist district reforms in the United States, we conceptualize four approaches to district reform literature in Ontario: The Politics of Race Evasion, the Politics of Illusory Equity, the Politics of Representation and Recognition, and the Politics of Anti-Racist Resistance. The authors conclude with a commentary on the use of these conceptualizations in district operations and policies, as well as directions for future research. They also propose a potential fifth approach to district reform, The Politics of Regeneration.

Es recurrente la afirmación de que el liderazgo directivo no solo es el segundo factor intraescolar de mayor significación para la mejora de la calidad educativa, sino también de que su efecto sería mayor en los establecimientos escolares de alta complejidad sociocultural. sin embargo, dicha constatación empírica no suele ir acompañada de explicaciones teóricas respecto de por qué existiría esta mayor incidencia ni menos de qué sería lo peculiar y distintivo del ejercicio del liderazgo en estas condiciones. esta es justamente la temática que hemos querido abordar en este libro: ¿cuáles son las características que posee el liderazgo directivo en las escuelas de alta complejidad sociocultural? ¿Qué elementos se mantienen y cuáles son distintivos respecto de la labor directiva en otros contextos de menor complejidad? ¿Qué competencias debieran cultivarse y qué prácticas de liderazgo desarrollar los directivos para ser eficaces en estas difíciles realidades escolares? reflexionar en torno el liderazgo en escuela de alta complejidad sociocultural es un tema relevante para chile y américa Latina, con sistemas escolares que, reproduciendo la estructura social y económica de sus (desiguales) sociedades, están marcados por una fuerte segregación social y educativa, lo que afecta la calidad de la educación que reciben los niños, niñas y jóvenes. de modo que a nivel regional las escuelas y liceos que poseen una alta complejidad socioeducativa no son una pequeña fracción de los establecimientos, como acontece en muchos países desarrollados, sino que constituyen una proporción significativa del sistema escolar. adicionalmente, hay nuevos fenómenos, como los masivos movimientos migratorios o bien la expansión del narcotráfico y la violencia en amplias franjas territoriales de nuestros países, que están cambiando la vida y las relaciones sociales dentro de las comunidades más desaventajadas, introduciendo aún mayor complejidad en los retos de su educación.

Presentación de número especial de la Revista Calidad en la Educación, dedicada al tema de la investigación sobre liderazgo escolar en Chile

Una vez establecida la relevancia del liderazgo educativo para transformar la calidad de la educación en cada escuela, la pregunta que sigue refiere a como se cultiva dicho liderazgo ente actores claves como los directivos o los docentes. En efecto, no basta con constatar la existencia o inexistencia del liderazgo ni tampoco basta con hacer una caracterización de los tipos de liderazgo que resultan más eficaces para promover la mejora y el cambio escolar: se requiere indagar en cómo puede desarrollarse, y así multiplicarse, el liderazgo educativo. De hecho las políticas educativas han buscado crecientemente entender cuáles son los modos de preparación y acompañamiento de los líderes escolares, actuales y futuros, que más y mejor impactan en el trabajo de los líderes escolares, de manera de poder invertir en aquellos. Este libro trata sobre este estratégico tema, sobre el cual se sabe en el mundo actual mucho más de lo que creemos –y de lo que habitualmente tomamos en consideración– en Chile y América Latina. No en vano en muchos sistemas escolares ya se cuenta con precisos estándares de calidad respecto de la formación de directivos escolares, que fijan los requisitos básicos que deben cumplir los programas formativos para poder acceder a recursos públicos o bien para poder ser considerados como un peldaño dentro de la carrera directiva. Así, una “buena formación” en liderazgo educativo cuenta con parámetros fundamentados en evidencia sobre los cuales posicionarse, lo que debiera permitir al Estado y también a los propios directivos, que aquella no se improvise ni se deje llevar por la última moda vigente.