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This pioneering account of a longitudinal study of successful school principals in five nations over five years will be required reading for educationalists. It contains fresh insights that take our understanding of effective school leadership to a new level.

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This work represents a publishing event in education research. Genuinely groundbreaking, it is the result of longitudinal research from five nations over five years. The authors set themselves an unprecedented task: to analyze how it is that successful school principals sustain positive outcomes over a significant period of time. To find out, they initiated the International Successful School Principal Project (ISSPP) assembling 30 multinational case histories and numerous comparative analyses. In doing so, they recorded fresh perspectives on the influence school principals can have on their schools, the quality of teaching in their classrooms, and student outcomes. Revisiting the subject schools in 2007, they found many principals still in place, having steered their organizations through various minefields of political, governance and educational reform.

As the most penetrating longitudinal investigation of the subject, this research has unearthed fascinating new insights into school leadership that add real substance to the sum of our knowledge. It incorporates data from educational systems in Australia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, England and the USA. One key finding is that while all principals delegate a range of leadership tasks, successful ones distribute responsibility on a case-by-case basis founded on personal assessments of their staff as well as on organizational and policy contexts. The research also demonstrates that successful principals maintain close communication with their staff and the wider school environment, and that they are adaptive, maximizing the opportunities presented by new political contexts and expectations, yet without losing sight of their school´s core moral and ethical principles. The volume´s international thematic analysis has allowed comparative conclusions to be drawn on what the principals do to sustain and foster pedagogical and institutional success.

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This book is a pioneering effort that offers a richer understanding of how leadership contributes to school success across different national contexts. The book provides a balanced, data-driven approach that seeks to identify thematic similarities even as it honours variations in leadership practices that are linked to specific societies.
Philip Hallinger, Professor, Hong Kong Institute of Education

This book moves the educational leadership field forward on three important fronts: it provides a rare, longitudinal, picture of leadership and change in a large number of schools; it unearths some of the key leader - related factors that explain a school´s ability to sustain improvements over long periods of time and; it constitutes one of the very few international, comparative, cross-cultural data sets available about school leadership.
Kenneth Leithwood , Professor OISE, University of Toronto

´Standards and testing are a fact of life´. Or are they? It requires exceptional leaders to ´fly below the political radar´. It requires a strong grasp of moral purpose for leaders to reinterpret improvement and accountability. It requires courage and conviction to challenge conventional wisdom and to steer a course grounded in enduring educational principles. The great strength of this book is its international reach, powerfully illustrating how different cultural traditions and differing forms of leadership are responding to pervasive, and often insidious, global pressures.
John MacBeath, Professor Emeritus, University of Cambridge

The chapters in this book provide much needed longitudinal accounts of leadership in schools and they do so by attending to similarities and differences across countries. Such cross national accounts offer great promise in generating new knowledge about school leadership and management.
James P. Spillane, Professor, Northwestern University

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