Editors' summary

1. High need school strand papers (Prepared by Ross Notman)

Daniel Duke’s lead article in the high needs strand offers an overarching view of a US reform approach to high needs schools. The article backgrounds the Florida Turnaround Leaders’ Program (FTLP), its design principles and training implications. The second paper by David Gurr, Lawrie Drysdale, Simon Clark and Helen Wildy focuses on the leadership practice of two Australian school principals in contrasting educational circumstances: an urban school in Melbourne that was formed through an amalgamation of several failing secondary schools, and a small school serving an Aborigine community in a remote region of Western Australia.

Venus Medina, Gloria Martinez, Elizabeth Murakami, Mariela Rodriguez and Frank Hernandez present a third high needs paper which centres on two Latina primary school principals in the United States. Against a backdrop of Latinos being the fastest growing school-age group in the US, the principals locate their leadership as a moral craft in their support of students and families in urban high need areas. The final article in this section is presented by Nino Sharvashidze and Miles Bryant who provide a portrait of a rural, ethnic minority school in the Republic of Georgia. In the face of isolation and variable resourcing, school challenges are linked by the authors to issues of educational quality and social justice.

2. Social justice strand papers (prepared by Annie Cheng)

There are various meanings and practices of ‘social justice leadership’ in different countries and contexts. While there has been increasing emphasis on such concepts globally, there is a need to explore its meaning in different contexts. To compare a broad range of participating countries, a set of interview questions was set to examine how these social justice school leaders make sense of and practice social justice by addressing four major questions:

1. How do social justice leaders make sense of ‘social justice’?

Following the guided interview questions, in the first article, Katarina Norberg, Helene Arlestig and Pam Angelle construct a creative and fictional conversation about social justice among four principals in Sweden and the United States. The authors note that ‘social justice is highlighted in national policy and curriculum in both the United States and Sweden’. Three approaches of principals’ understanding and practices of social justice leadership are identified. They conclude that all four principals were committed to their work, not only based on their earlier experiences, but also on the principal preparation training that strengthened their social justice perspective.

The ISLDN developed a macro- and micro-framework to help understand social justice leadership in different contexts. In the second article, Charles Slater, Ian Potter, Nancy Torres Victoria and Fernando Briceno use this framework to illustrate different understandings of social justice leadership in the two contexts of Costa Rica and England. Although they acknowledge that ‘there is no equivalent set of indicators for social justice’, the authors found that the interviewed principals had similar philosophies of social justice in three areas: challenging inequities in society, respect for individual students, and grounding their faith. They provide an example of making a connection between the school leaders and the macro and micro contexts of the framework.

The next article, by Jayson Richardson and Nick Sauers, examines different perspectives of school leaders regarding how their environment had impacts on the views of social justice and how they enacted such concepts in the diverse contexts of India. The findings of the study illustrate how leaders in elite schools and ‘the most underserved’ schools differ significantly in the varied contexts of the same country. The authors termed the leaders’ enactment of social justice as ‘exogenous’ and ‘endogenous’ acts of social justice for schools serving wealthy or middle-class and extremely poor students, respectively. They conclude that poverty and gender are the two major issues perceived by the social justice leaders, and argue that ‘the leaders should move forward in ways’ that address these complex issues in the context.

Elson Szeto wrote the final article in the social justice strand. Providing a rich Hong Kong education historical background, he portrays the story of the life journey of a social justice leader who changed from being a receiver to being a contributor to the enactment of social justice. This principal emphasized the importance of establishing a team approach culture while enacting social justice. Szeto notes the significance of early equality and equity experience through education that influenced the principal’s own decision to become a social justice leader.