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Responding to local, regional and international demands and initiatives, the government of Ecuador has rolled out an innovative program Sistema Integral de Tecnologías para la Escuela y la Comunidad (SíTEC) to place information, and communication technologies (ICTs) into the hands of students, teachers, and other educational institutions. SíTEC draws upon several elements of social entrepreneurship and has successfully reached some of the most regionally remote and culturally diverse communities in the country. The SíTEC program is emblematic of many of the criteria set forth regarding social entrepreneurship including the vision of leadership, the focus on a social mission and the importance of innovation in partnership and resource allocation. This study looks at survey and interview data from the Shiña community teachers and school leaders to determine the effects of the SíTEC program and the availability and use of ICTs in schools, SíTEC has equipped public schools with computers, projectors, digital boards, and Internet. Additionally, SíTEC organizes training courses on ICTs for public school teachers and provides schools with educational software available in Spanish, Kichwa, Shuar, and English. While there is still much work to be done, SíTEC and the associated partnerships and programs are beginning to have impact in their specified outcomes. Creative partnerships developed within the Ministry of Education, Office of Bilingual Education, Shiña community have allowed for communication and exchange of knowledge and resources across multiple partners. This chapter explores SíTEC as an innovative government-based program that meets targeted social outcomes in ICTs and education.

This research contributes to understanding emotional and political challenges experienced by middle managers as they work with contradictions inherent in leading change from the middle. Focus group data from 27 such middle managers based in the UK indicate that, once they have been assigned roles and tasks for leading change, underlying dynamics and processes influence the degree to which they become capable (or unable) to shape and navigate that change. A proposed conceptual framework, illustrated by a case vignette, provides a base of existing knowledge for understanding and explaining these dynamics. We also construct a model of the key tensions that are integral to middle managers leading change. A further contribution to practice involves elaborating the importance of collaborative effort across hierarchical and vertical boundaries, despite emotional and political tensions that undermine middle managers’ roles as change agents.

This chapter explores the political economy of banking in Texas at the turn of the last century. The empirical work sheds light on why Texans voted to allow the chartering of banks by the state government. The evidence shows that county-level voting patterns for state-chartered banks were significantly related to business interests, consumer interests, agricultural activity, and the presence of existing national banks. The work also shows that the first counties to receive the new state banks were associated with higher agricultural activity, larger population size, and the presence of existing national banks. By examining the vote and the location of early entrants in state banking, this chapter contributes to the literature exploring the historical development of state-chartered banking and the dual-banking system in the US.

There is a strong body of research that indicates that teacher quality has a stronger effect on student learning than any other school-based factor. At the same time, most teacher evaluation systems have traditionally failed to distinguish among different levels of teacher effectiveness or to link evaluation results to professional development in meaningful ways. In this chapter, we compare teacher responses in S. Korea and the United States to evaluation policies. We provide initial evidence that teachers and principals in Seoul defined “effective teachers” as those who helped manage their schools in areas such as affairs/planning, curriculum/instruction, science and technology, discipline, and extra-curricular activities. In contrast, the Michigan teachers and principals in the study were more likely to view effective teachers as those who planned instruction to meet student needs and provided evidence of student engagement and learning. In addition, educators’ notions of effective teachers seemed related to their responses to new teacher evaluation policies. In particular, the teachers in Seoul strongly resisted the new teacher evaluation policies while their counterparts in Michigan either supported the new evaluation policies or at least did not actively resist them. These differences seemed related to regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements associated with the teacher evaluation policies in the jurisdictions where the teachers and principals worked.

To facilitate innovative software development, more and more software development teams (SDTs) turn to agile methods. Such agile methods develop both extensive and efficient software responses to a client’s requirement change. However, the antecedents of successful agile software development are poorly understood. The authors goal is to propose a model of how power asymmetry and paradoxical leadership interact and affect agility in SDTs, which in turn affect their capacity to innovate. By leveraging insights from research on individuals’ cognition, the authors argue that developers with relatively higher power evaluate their contributions to their teams more ambivalently, which increases their delay or postponement of their contributions to their teams’ tasks. As a result, power asymmetry is negatively related to software teams’ response extensiveness and efficiency. Second, and drawing on leadership studies on behavioral complexity, the authors consider the moderating role of paradoxical leadership that a team receives as an important moderating factor to this effect. The authors argue that, when team leaders exhibit paradoxical leadership behaviors, high-power individuals’ ambivalence is less likely to emerge; hence, transforming power asymmetry to an asset for the enhancement of agility in the SDT.

Teacher effectiveness and teacher quality have become the focus of intense international attention and national concern. Dozens of nations are implementing a diverse set of strategies that aim to improve the quality of education by improving the quality of teachers. These efforts have not been well coordinated, and as the authors in this volume show, core constructs of quality have not been well defined. In this introductory chapter, we discuss why teachers are now “under the microscope” of policymaker’s attention and elaborate how the chapters in this volume identify particularly fruitful avenues for further study. The assembled chapters address two complex questions: (1) what existing cross-national measures of teacher effectiveness and teacher quality are most promising and how can these be aligned to maximize their research potential? and (2) what core constructs of teacher quality or effectiveness are missing from the evidence-base, and how can cross-national comparative research help refine these? To investigate these questions, the chapters in this volume address different aspects of “quality.” While quality may be politically contested, there is a significant need to continue to articulate a truly global perspective on teacher quality. The authors look at a wide range of aspects of quality in order to advance thinking about teacher education, instructional quality and workforce or organizational conditions that affect quality; to analyze instruments, tools, or measures used to assess quality; and identify what measures need to be developed further. We also note how scholarly study of the spread of transnational teacher reforms has failed to keep pace with national policy changes regarding teacher quality, and advance a more general theory of the forces affecting national policymakers.