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The range of tasks and demands placed on a school principal can seem to change daily, and indeed, this appears to be a defining element of the role. Leadership in an education setting is special. Fortunately there are specific purposes associated with education that school leaders can employ as guides to action. One of these key purposes relates to ideology and socialization. School principals are responsible for defining and shaping the culture of their institutions in ways that will model and reflect the needs and priorities of the community. In recent years, this has come to include recognizing and responding to the ever-growing concern for our environment. One way this social justice issue has manifested itself in schools is through a trend known as the green school movement. To define and further understand how green school leadership might be different from that of traditional school leadership, research was carried out to investigate how principals lead and manage in green schools and how the environmental missions are promoted and advanced on a daily basis by school based advocates in administrative roles. To conduct such an inquiry, five school principals were observed and interviewed on multiple occasions to gain an understanding of how they lead and influence their schools through their role as a principal.

Schools should be adequately built and operated to protect students' health. Green building rating systems, including Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), assist the construction industry in improving both the resource efficiency and indoor environmental quality of its buildings. Construction professionals may waive some green modifications and available optional credits due to their high costs or construction complexities. This study investigates whether cost-effective green modifications can adequately address the student health.

In an effort to identify how school projects in Dubai, UAE prioritized LEED credits related to occupant well-being, the study identified eight LEED credits (called “Health and wellbeing” credits). Cost data from a sample of nine Dubai schools were used to develop an indicator, named the Feasibility Index Score (FIS), to quantify the attractiveness of LEED credits based on their cost and implementation complexity. Physical measurements taken from the sample schools give a window into current indoor environmental quality (IEQ) conditions of schools in the local region, while FIS provides insight into potential financial barriers towards improving these conditions.

The authors identified eight “Health and wellbeing” credits, which may net up to 14 points or 13% of all possible LEED points. Despite this, assessments of the sample schools revealed that six of the “Health and wellbeing” credits exhibited relatively low FIS values. This may cause these credits to be waived when lower tiers of LEED certifications are desired.

A sample of nine schools was chosen for this research; further investigation using a greater sample size is recommended.

The paper's IEQ assessment indicates the importance of health-related credits and suggests implementing them regardless of their FIS.

This paper recognizes the importance of providing more weight to credits that directly impact the health of occupants, particularly when upgrading existing structures.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate, and advocate for, a deep shift in how the authors conceptualize and enact school leadership and reform. The authors challenge fundamental conceptions regarding educational systems and call for a dramatic shift from the factory model to a living systems model of schooling. The authors call is not a metaphorical call. The authors propose embracing assumptions grounded in the basic human nature as living systems. Green school leaders, practicing whole school sustainability, provide emerging examples of educational restoration.

School reform models have implicitly and even explicitly embraced industrialized assumptions about students and learning. Shifting from the factory model of education to a living systems model of whole school sustainability requires transformational strategies more associated with nature and life than machines. Ecological restoration provides the basis for the model of educational restoration.

Educational restoration, as proposed here, makes nature a central player in the conversations about ecologies of learning, both to improve the quality of learning for students and to better align educational practice with social, economic and environmental needs of the time. Educational leaders at all levels of the educational system have critical roles to play in deconstructing factory model schooling and reform. The proposed framework for educational restoration raises new questions and makes these opportunities visible. Discussion of this framework begins with ecological circumstances and then addresses, values, commitment and judgments.

Educational restoration will affect every aspect of teaching, learning and leading. It will demand new approaches to leadership preparation. This new landscape of educational practice is wide open for innovative approaches to research, preparation and practice across the field of educational leadership.

The model of educational restoration provides a conceptual foundation for future research and leadership practice.

Supporters of charter schools tend to also be the supporters of 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) regarding choice in education. Many minority parents and their children are disappointed with school desegregation benefits and the pace of school finance reform is embracing choice schools such as charter schools. Charter schools are public schools with a specific mission free from the local school district, and are administered by a group of parents. Charter schools proponents argue that minorities will receive an education superior to traditional public schools. We argue that charter schools combined with accountability goals of NCLB by racial subgroups should enhance the academic achievement of minority students. We also assess the combination of the school choice paradigm with a focus on the interaction of charter schools and NCLB.

This paper aims to compare the environmental sustainability practices at the campus operations between two Portuguese higher education institutions (HEIs) at different stages of the implementation of an Eco-School Programme. It also seeks to analyse the involvement of the students in the process of implementing these practices in their institutions.

A questionnaire survey was carried out in two HEIs (a green and a non-green institution). Data were collected from a total of 832 students. Techniques of descriptive statistics and inferential statistical techniques such as the Mann-Whitney test, χ² and Spearman correlation test, were applied.

The results obtained show that, from the students’ perspective, and in both institutions, there is still much to be done on the path towards sustainability, particularly in transport and landscaping. Significant differences were found only between some environmental sustainability practices at the campus level. However, students from the green institution are more participative in sustainability activities.

This study provides a picture of two HEIs’ sustainability behaviour from the students’ standpoint, which can be important for decision-makers in HEIs, in as much that students are one of the HEIs’ major stakeholder groups; furthermore, it enables them to better guide their efforts towards sustainability.

This paper focusses on the students’ perspective and their role in the sustainability initiatives undertaken by HEIs. It can be useful for future research that attempts to analyse the importance of HEIs’ stakeholder participation in sustainability.

This paper aims to make a comparative study on the latest version of green campus evaluation standard between China and America: Green Campus Evaluation Standard (GB/T51356-2019) and the sustainability tracking, assessment and rating system (STARS 2.2). The differences of evaluation methods and contents are analyzed and their respective characteristics and advantages are sorted out, so as to promote the development of sustainable campus evaluation standards.

The research mainly adopts the method of comparative study, which is carried out from three dimensions, namely, the related policies development of campus construction and world university sustainable rankings; the content of evaluation standards (including evaluation methods and evaluation categories and scores); the characteristics and current application of standards.

There are great differences between the evaluation standards of China and America in organization and participation mode, evaluation method and content. Public engagement, energy and campus engagement are the hot spots. Buildings, energy, food and dining and investment and finance will become the focus of sustainable campus in the future. Specific optimization strategies of key points, evaluation method and content and organization and participation mode of Chinese standard are put forward.

This paper clarifies the advantages and disadvantages of the current global sustainable campus, and provides the basis for the next stage of construction policy. At the same time, it is helpful for all countries, especially China, to formulate construction guidelines that not only meet their own actual needs but also conform to the trend of global sustainable campus development.

The connotation of sustainable campus is enriched, and the evaluation standards of sustainable campus are improved. The development of sustainable campus is promoted, so as to realize the sustainable development goals.

This research expands the scope of the study to the whole campus, rather than just one aspect of campus buildings. It compares the evaluation standard of green campus in China with STARS in the USA, and no longer compares leadership in energy and environmental design for schools. It discusses the campus building’s energy conservation while paying attention to the campus green consciousness, green management and green planning. Based on the relevant data currently used by STARS in the global evaluation, this paper analyzes the hot spots and shortcomings of the current global sustainable campus construction and puts forward some optimization suggestions for China’s green campus evaluation system.

We present ten patterns and design examples in this paper, revealing some of the most relevant trends in educational design, drawn from our research on charter schools. An interdisciplinary team of students in architecture, urban planning, business, education, and psychology have completed a series of case studies of best practices, as well as profiled charter schools locally, to develop patterns and guidelines for the facility planning and educational development of charter schools. Charter schools are public schools of choice in the United States that receive more administrative and pedagogical autonomy and flexibility than district schools in exchange for meeting the performance goals specified in each school's charter. Charter schools often have innovative curriculum, challenging traditional education methods and facility design. This research addresses the connections between the designed physical environment and the learning innovations it supports, while encouraging the entrepreneurial charter school vision, emphasizing creativity in the renovation, adaptive reuse, and non-traditional use of existing buildings, efficiently maximizing student safety and learning, and adhering to best-practice standards of ecological design.

The existing concept in the building rating scheme especially in developing countries was more focused on the environment, economic, social and culture. The new approach of the classroom condition index (CCI) assessment scheme has its uniqueness in environmental and social aspects because of high building performance in secondary school buildings. The requirements set by the Ministry of Education Malaysia include providing a conducive learning environment, especially for students who are considered as the main users of classrooms in school buildings. Currently, the school administration needs to manually record the condition of the classroom to increase its comfort level. The lack of a structured scheme for classroom assessment makes it difficult for school administration to focus on the overall classroom condition (physical environmental aspect) in the school building. The purpose of this study is to develop a framework for classroom conditions by proposing a CCI assessment scheme for a secondary school building in Malaysia.

Mixed methods were used to carry out the study. The first stage of this study concentrates on developing a system for CCI that relates to physical elements in the classroom. This is done by reviewing the literature on the classroom physical performance, as well as a comparison between several building rating systems locally and abroad. The structure of the proposed CCI scheme is grouped into four main themes, namely, space management quality (SMQ), building condition (BC), indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and teaching and learning quality (TLQ). In addition, there are 12 categories and 23 indicators listed under this theme. The second stage focuses on formulating assessment categories with their relevant performance indicators. This phase undergoes a validation process by conducting a survey (questionnaire) toward the classroom’s main users, which are students and teachers. This is to ensure the accuracy of classroom conditions in the school building. A semi-structured interview was also conducted among building experts. They are building surveyors, building engineers, building designers and building performance experts to support the main findings in the second stage. Relative importance (RI) index approach has been applied to show the indicators weighting and ranking are used as data collections method by using Statistical Package of Social Science software to examine the RI of each category and indicator, respectively.

The findings show that prominent RI and balanced weights are formed from these four main themes. They are SMQ (19.9%), BC (26.6%), IEQ (33.2%) and TLQ (20.3%). The outcome of this study will contribute to a detailed assessment scheme for CCI at the secondary school building. The contribution of the CCI Assessment Scheme is more comprehensive and holistic than the conventional assessment process for BCs. It focuses specifically on classroom space as it is the most important area to achieve a high level of comfort comparing to other spaces in the school building. This holistic approach encompasses all types of classrooms. The concept of one tool fits all is seen as no longer a relevant adaptation in this context. This proposed tool is to be used only for the classroom (as the name CCI implies) and it cannot be used for the other types of spaces, for instance, teacher room, library, meeting room, toilet, canteen and, etc. This is because different spaces represent different physical indicators to be classified. This, in turn, contributes to a conducive learning environment for students in the school.

This paper provides the current information, knowledge and findings related to the classroom physical indicators in developing the assessment scheme for the classroom environment. It will assist both technical and non-technical experts to clarify the current condition of classroom physical performance that ideally may affect the students’ learning environment. The novelty of CCI development is not only on the adopted method but it also includes the ideas on next generation model of rating system that ideally need specific indicators and weighting to be generated into an intelligent computerized system.