Strategic Leadership and Public School Principals

This text is meant to serve two purposes. The first is to take stock, assess, and integrate the body of literature on strategic leadership and management in education. As we shall see, the fluctuating interest in the topic has not yielded a particularly orderly, cumulative, or concise set of findings. In fact, the literature on the strategic role of school leaders is immensely diverse in methods and perspectives. The aim of this book is to help the reader navigate and make sense of this profuse domain. The second objective is to go well beyond what is already known and set forth new frameworks, perspectives, testable propositions, and methodological recommendations for the study of strategic leadership and management in education. In places, the ideas are clearly speculative, meant to stimulate debate and systematic testing. This monograph is intended to provide a new platform for theory and research on the strategic role of school leaders, consolidating what is already known, identifying the high priorities for what next needs to be known, and proposing how scholars might fruitfully conduct their inquiries.