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The objective of this chapter is to analyze educational leadership policy in New Jersey, US, and Ontario, Canada, focusing on the inclusion of the unique needs of systematically marginalized students, specifically refugees and forced immigrant (RFI) youth. Modes of inquiry are qualitative document analysis of New Jersey and Ontario leadership policies, preparation requirements, and standards. The objective of this paper is to present an extensive literature review of policies related to educational leadership and supporting RFI youth and their teachers as well as to reveal gaps in policies and examine pre- and in-service training requirements. Within the field of comparative and international education, this chapter highlights the institutionalization of trends in educational leadership at state or provincial levels and how these macro-level policies influence educators’ abilities to meet the needs of students from marginalized communities, such as refugees and immigrants.

School-level leaders are suffering. They are experiencing a well-being crisis after years of working long work hours, managing an unrelenting workload, and navigating shifting policy contexts. School leaders that are experiencing work intensification and highly stressful work environments can suffer personal and professional consequences. On a professional level, school-level leaders are immersed in intensified work environments that mute the power and potential increasingly associated with their role. This chapter describes challenges that threaten school-level leaders' productivity, job satisfaction, happiness and well-being, such as work intensification, burnout, stress as well as loneliness and isolation. In these ways, the emotional aspects of their work can influence school-level leaders' ability to lead happy and healthy lives, while also having the supplementary effect of making the position less attractive for the next generation of school leaders. Research conducted in jurisdictions around the world is discussed throughout the chapter to demonstrate that the well-being crisis experienced by school leaders is an international phenomenon. I also use this discussion of the challenges facing contemporary school-level leaders to encourage them to reconnect with the reasons why, and the emotions they felt, when first pursuing a position in K-12 school-level leadership.

School-level leaders should not be expected to be mired in emotional turmoil and sacrifice their own health, happiness and well-being to do their jobs effectively. While the emotional aspects of school-level leadership have continued to evolve and become increasingly complex since the turn of the twenty-first century, the supports available to these individuals remain outdated, ineffective, and moribund. If mentoring, anonymous telephone support lines and other ‘old school’ approaches for supporting school leaders were still effective, they would not be struggling to deal with the emotional aspects of their work and workload. Further, there is a need to provide ‘just-in-time’ supports that are available to school-level leaders when concerns arise. Absent structural changes, isolated and individualized approaches to self-care cannot mitigate the challenges principals face or the physical, mental and emotional toll associated with their work and workload. Communal strategies and policy levers are recommended in an effort to go beyond mindfulness and other (potentially) individualistic and neoliberal approaches to self-care. This chapter also explores how principal preparation programmes and other formal professional learning opportunities are an untapped resource in terms of strengthening school-level leaders' emotional regulation capacity and building a general appreciation for the emotional aspects of school-level leadership.

Everyone wants accountability in education. President Bill Clinton wanted accountability in education. In his 1999 State of the Union address, the President announced “…a plan that for the first time holds states and school districts accountable for progress and rewards them for results.” Through his proposed Education Accountability Act, President Clinton sought to insist, “…all states and school districts must turn around their worst-performing schools, or shut them down” (1999, pp. 202–203).

School marketing and its contribution to school success is a controversial issue in education, and although marketing activities are taking place in schools, they are usually not recognized as such. Relationship marketing (RM), collaborative interactive relations that enlist partners in loyal and supportive long-lasting connections, is no exception. By studying five successful Israeli schools, this study aims to reveal how successful school principals engaged in RM and contributed to their school's success. An “ideal type” of RM was extracted from the data, showing that good RM starts with a key event, develops under enabling conditions, and brings about the desired outcome along with additional consequences. It concludes that successful school principals, like Molière's protagonist who has unwittingly been speaking prose all his life, create RM in their ongoing work without terming it this way, and that this RM contributes to school success. Theoretical and practical implications are presented in the discussion.

This chapter presents a cross-cultural comparison across the Commonwealth, namely, Australia, Canada, and Kenya. The three cases explore these indigenous principals’ perceptions of leadership development and how effectively these experiences prepared them to meet the challenges within their complex school communities. The chapter presents a discussion of the historical educational legacies of imperial rule, leadership preparation opportunities that were available to aspiring and novice leaders, the challenges the principals encountered in their leadership role in the school and within their communities, and these leaders’ beliefs and attitudes toward leadership. A final synthesis is presented, which identifies a number of commonalities in leadership approaches across these very different cultural contexts: the school communities were endeavoring to rediscover their cultural history, heritage, and beliefs and were frequently developing positive relationships with elders and others who held, and were willing to pass on, the historical and cultural knowledge and expertise. The leaders themselves held strong beliefs about the importance of cultural identity in order to forge new and contemporary pathways to success for their students. They all had a heightened ethic of care ethos that extended beyond the confines of the school building and office hours. These leaders adopted entrepreneurial leadership approaches to think and act innovatively rather than simply managing schools and were dedicated to promoting educational success for all students within their care. Leadership development implications included the need for formal, informal, and experiential experiences, as well as, for the inclusion of specific knowledge and skills that would enable leaders to effectively and sensitively lead within predominantly indigenous school communities.

A vast array of leadership dispositions associated with school and student success is well-documented in extant leadership development literature. However, persistent challenges face practitioners as they attempt to measure leader dispositions and apply what is known about dispositions to hiring, selection, development, and retention of school leaders. We begin this chapter with an exploration of the essential leader dispositions which surfaced through an exhaustive cross-disciplinary review of literature, in concert with a review of disposition tools and frameworks in use in a variety of practical settings. Next, we illuminate significant challenges associated with reliably measuring school leader dispositions and explore promising emergent innovative strategies for assessing disposition development. Though difficult to measure, we argue that dispositions are too important to ignore and conclude with practical recommendations for using research on leader dispositions to cultivate outstanding school leaders.