Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on a case study of 93 parents' attitude toward their involvement at various levels of school education in a special school. It also examines the relations between parents' education backgrounds and different levels of parental involvement. Design/methodology/approach: This study adopted quantitative…

Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard in research but may not fully explain or predict outcome variations in community-based interventions. Demonstrating efficacy of externally driven programs in well-controlled environments may not translate to community-based implementation where resources and priorities vary. A bottom-up evaluation…

In the light of the Scottish Government's commitment to the principles enshrined in the Christie Commission and developing approaches worldwide to public administration, this article considers the forces at work and the major arguments for suggesting the need for increased and enhanced participation by parents in educational decision-making and…

During the first half of the current Coalition Government, co-production--a form of participatory governance--was implemented widely in the conceptualization, design and implementation of early years policies. Seen as a revolutionary approach to public service reform, resulting in more effective and more cost-effective public services, the joint…

Scholarly attention regarding faculty involvement has primarily focused on faculty opinions of shared governance and faculty influence on institutional decision-making. There has been limited attention given to academic service productivity and the effectiveness of traditional approaches toward the accomplishment of faculty service requirements.…

This study examines the relation between principals' leadership and teachers' organizational commitment, mediated by distributed leadership. Data were collected from 1,495 teachers in 46 secondary schools. Structural equation modeling indicated that the effect of principals' leadership on teachers' organizational commitment is…

Recent literature has emphasised the distributed nature of leadership in higher education (HE) and the multitude of actors and factors that contribute towards organisational outcomes. Gronn suggests, however, that rather than using such evidence to provide broad, normative accounts of leadership practice, greater attention should be directed to…

Noting a lack of quantitative research on perceptions of culture, leadership and change in the shared governance environment of Higher Education, this study utilized the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (Cameron & Quinn, 2011) to measure current (now) and preferred cultural perceptions of faculty and administrative leaders.…

Purpose: Reflecting the Mauritian government's "quality" agenda and its focus on school leadership, this paper reports the findings of research exploring Mauritian principals' views about the use of total quality management (TQM) for school improvement. While aspects of this research have been reported elsewhere, the purpose of this…

The "Quality Practice Project" (QPP) is the National Association of Charter School Authorizers' (NACSA's) multi-year research initiative to identify what high-performing authorizers do to achieve stellar student and public interest outcomes. Participants and researchers collaboratively investigated the perspectives and practices of…

Federal law stresses shared accountability between schools and parents for high student achievement. Yet, there is minimal regulation regarding what parental engagement programs must actually look like. As a result many school districts fail to consider nontraditional constructs of parental engagement that honor the available cultural capital,…

The purpose of this book is to examine the tensions, gaps, and intersections between the practices of leadership in educational systems, school leadership preparation programs, and the often different worlds of academia and k12 schools. Voices from both academia and k12 schools are used to illustrate the tensions that cluster around capacity,…

A professional learning community (PLC) is one of the most promising strategies for effecting change in educational practices to improve academic achievement and wellbeing for all students. The PLC facilitator's role in developing and leading blended (online and face-to-face) PLCs with members from Ontario's school districts was examined through a…

The rigidity of teachers unions has been given as a primary reason for their lack of representation among America's rapidly growing, although still relatively small, charter school sector. In the case of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, the city rapidly converted from a union-backed teacher workforce to a largely nonunionized charter school…

Casual and sessional academic staff have traditionally been on the margins of institutional life despite the expansion of this cohort across the university sector. This paper details a project to address this lack of recognition through a workforce strategy to engage, support and effectively manage this often neglected cohort of the academic…