Second International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration (review)

The complexity of studying and explaining leadership has troubled theorists throughout this century. Although few have come close to defining it, almost everybody believes they know what leadership is. This book joins the international discourse on school leadership and administration, which exploded in the 1980s and continues today. It is a completely revamped edition including all new material and many new authors. This review summarizes the book and offers a critique of its usefulness and limitations in understanding and improving school leadership.

Section 1, "Leadership and School Improvement," surveys the landscape for education, including escalating performance expectations and rapid changes in the external environment. Within this landscape are conflicting assumptions about how people function in organizations, how missions, visions, and goals are developed, and how leadership should be practiced. The chapters consider implications for schools, their leaders, and the process of leading change.

Section 2, "Leadership in the Creation of Community," focuses on the multiple internal and external communities that leaders must successfully navigate and harmonize. Such inherent tensions to be managed include competing interests and goals, autonomy versus collaboration, and the dichotomy between centralized control mechanisms and decentralized school management. The authors analyze forms of school governance for their usefulness in managing these tensions and find them ineffective, yet no viable alternatives are offered.

"Leadership in Diverse Contexts and Cultures," Section 3, explores the situational nature of school leadership as a phenomenon of time and place and all that this characteristic implies, including ever-evolving cultures, politics, and societal needs, economies, technologies, etc. The chapters here echo those of the previous two sections: Leaders must manage relationships between the internal and external environments and guide schools' responses to emerging needs. The scope and function of such leadership is far broader than ever before and lacks universal norms.

Section 4, "Organizational Learning and Leadership," discusses the connections between leadership and organizational outcomes, implications for strategic leadership, distributed (collective) versus individual leadership, knowledge management, and organizational learning and problem-solving. It includes an exhaustive literature review of strategic school leadership and a detailed analysis of distributed leadership.

The next section, "Contexts for Leadership at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century," returns to the topic of contextual leadership. Included are analyses of education for the public good, the neo-liberal agenda for school reform, and contemporary approaches to leadership. Discussions include the future of public schools, approaches to ensuring accountability, and the many new capacities required of school leaders.

The final section, "Leadership Development," thoughtfully considers how individual school leaders are trained, selected, and developed. The chapters include analyses of leadership development programs from a variety of fields, modes of leader selection, the role of mentoring, and gender differences in leadership aspirations.

With 55 contributing authors from 11 countries, no one theoretical framework unites the chapters, but several points are repeated: Schools are in an era of rapid, global change and must respond to increasingly diverse and conflicting external forces; local schools have lost control of the educational agenda and must balance centralized system control with decentralized institutional management; school leaders are accountable for making strategic improvements but face a host of competing assumptions about what is wrong with schools and how to fix them. It quickly becomes clear that the need for competent leadership is more critical than ever.

Although this book lays out the many problems that plague educational leadership today, the reader who expects useful answers will be disappointed. While the authors make strong arguments for distributed leadership as an ideal model—a democratic, collective phenomenon that empowers and taps the leadership capacities of all members of school communities, distributing responsibilities among them—they make very little attempt to instruct leaders on how to get there. The most concrete suggestion is pointing out that reflectivity, aimed at fostering self-learning and...