School counselors are called to be leaders to support the development of all students. The study in this article investigated the contributions of the values (Schwartz, 1992) and leadership practices (Posner & Kouzes, 1988) of 163 school counselors to their programmatic service delivery (Scarborough, 2005). Leadership practices made…

How schools are organized and interact with the local community can dramatically alter the odds for improving student achievement. There are five essential supports for school improvement: a coherent instructional guidance system, the professional capacity of its faculty, strong parent-community-school ties, a student-centered learning climate,…

The idea of inclusive education has featured very highly in the educational priorities of many countries. Our involvement with the literature that relates to inclusion leads to the conclusion that, if we are interested in moving towards more inclusive practices, a factor that has to be studied in more depth is leadership and its role in developing…

The focus of this article is about the utilization of student leadership at the University. Based on research, student leadership opportunities at the university have been frequently at a low percentage (Zimmerman, Burkhart, 2002). The researcher identifies practical ways to involve students in various leadership activities. Emphases are placed on…

The purpose of this article is to examine the communication behaviors of online leaders, or those who influence other members of online communities in triggering message replies, sparking conversation, and diffusing language. It relies on 632,622 messages from 33,450 participants across 16 discussion groups from Google Groups that took place over…

Through two school case studies in Cyprus, in this paper I explore the role of small internal collaborative networks in promoting school improvement. The analysis of the two cases revealed a series of interrelated themes which indicated issues related to school improvement, and actually, it provided evidence that small internal collaborative…

This article outlines progress made towards education transformation in Wales. It explores the way in which tri-level reform is guiding system level change in Wales and looks at the implementation of the School Effectiveness Framework, which is at the heart of the reform process. It describes the way in which professional learning communities are…

This case study describes how Porterville Unified School District (PUSD), a rural school district in California's Central Valley, began to fulfill its vision to transform high school and career education through the implementation of Linked Learning. Linked Learning is a state-wide initiative for redesigning large comprehensive high schools into…

This book describes the struggles in which inclusive-minded administrators find themselves when they promote equity initiatives. Administrators routinely struggle when they attempt to include all members of their school communities--teachers, students, and parents--the various aspects of schooling. Given the presence of a host of obstacles,…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 put great pressure to improve student achievement upon principals. Because the principals' work is much more complex since NCLB, it demands a more sophisticated set of skills and understandings than ever before. This qualitative case study examined changes in the principal's role and how current accountability…

Educators and policy makers have placed leadership development at the top of the school reform agenda, believing that aspiring and new school leaders can learn the necessary skills to improve the most challenging schools. Leadership development builds the capacity of educators (teachers and administrators) to be effective in leadership roles or…

This study explores the principal driven collaborative planning (PDCP) phenomenon occurring at SUN Elementary School. SUN Elementary is located near the border of Washington, DC. Exploring this new phenomenon requires a close look at the relationships among teachers, and the relationship between the teachers and the principal. This study…

This report, the fourth in an IERC series on public school principals in Illinois, summarizes recent research on the characteristics associated with principal effectiveness and examines Illinois data on the relationship between principal characteristics, student proficiency, and teacher qualifications. In order to investigate the relationships…

Reforming the way a state distributes its funding to local school districts is clearly a challenging task. This paper presents the Rhode Island story on school funding reform. First, the paper begins with a short history of Rhode Island's school finance system and the key factors that called for school funding reform. Second, the paper discusses…

In this article, the author talks about the resignation of New York State's commissioner of education David Steiner, and how it will affect the state's Race to the Top. He contends that Steiner was savvy enough to understand the importance of Race to the Top and able enough to turn the state's education energies toward it. The "Washington…