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The elementary education system in Pakistan is fragmented into state controlled, municipal, and private education. The first is over‐controlled under the hierarchical structure, without any system of accountability or democratic control and is subject to political intervention. In urban areas, elementary education is totally left to the municipalities. Owing to their multi‐purpose nature, lack of clarity in the local government laws, and absence of central discipline and administrative control, the real interest of education could never be guaranteed among the municipalities. The political and administrative élite are fulfilling their educational needs from private sector, which is expanding speedily under the auspices of the government. Practically, State and Municipal education is left only to the poor people, who have no say in society. In such circumstances the only option is the establishment of the “education authorities” at division, district or the local level. This step will ensure the involvement of the related interests in planning, administration and maintenance of the educational institutions. It will also enhance a sense of participation and accountability among the educational community and equip the system with local knowledge.

Emerging research on education reform in Shanghai for the last decade or so has either focused on broad contexts and trends of the second-cycle curriculum reform or the professional development in response to the reform or a few detailed cases of teaching improvement to meet the reform demand. Little attention has been paid to how schools as institutions have been made to respond to and enact the reform. Through three detailed school cases, the purpose of this paper is to understand their distinctive responses to reform in terms of how they interpreted, enacted and sustained their reform efforts and how more importantly lesson-case study and multi-tiered research projects has become a reinvigorated form of Chinese lesson study and teaching research to significantly mediate the school’s curriculum reform efforts. Features of sustainable development behind these cases are conceptualized by Lave and Wenger’s notion of transparency of the mediating technology of a community of practice.

Drawing on master’s thesis reports of school leaders (2010-2016), school research publications and lesson cases as secondary data sources, an instrumental multi-case research design was adopted to build detailed case narratives and tease out cross-case comparisons.

Building on unique strengths and legacies to solve school problems, the three secondary schools responded to, enacted and sustained the reform in unique ways: case 1, a municipal key school, has focused on “three translations (of curriculum)” involving all teaching research groups (TRGs) in specifying broad curriculum standards and turning them into concrete, actionable designs and student tasks which are tested and refined through iterative cycles of lesson-case study, with the decision making for each translation informed by research projects studying problems arising. Case 2, a district key school, has capitalized on its strong TRGs and used research projects and lesson-case study to unite teaching, research and PD into a whole; and case 3, a regular neighborhood school, has aimed to build a structured PD system to tackle teacher stagnation by stressing the reflection components of each cycle of lesson-case study, challenging teachers to learn in the district-level curriculum integration experiment, and nudging them into their own research projects with well-staged support. In all the three cases, research projects have been networked connecting municipal, district, school and teachers in building a research climate. The lesson-case study has turned designs into refined actions to ensure quality of curriculum implementation and teacher growth.

This study yields insights into the inner workings of Shanghai’s recent curriculum reform. With strategic injection of research into the familiar institutional structures and organic cultural forms of collegiality, school innovations can be built on familiarity to create a sense of continuity, coherence and institutional identity so that teachers learn from doing with least disruption. The slow and steady work of sustaining innovations and reform goes beyond simple notions of scaling up and relies on building internal drive and institutional and teacher capacity for deep learning in responding to reform.

Though poverty is one of the consequences of the lack of education, this latter can be the solution to poverty, particularly when children and youngsters are prioritized in school. And in the fight against inequality, education for the development of human beings is the key, especially if we want to save children and adolescents in order to guarantee the future.

Aims to study successful school principals in China and to provide details of some unique features of the Chinese educational system that both support and constrain principals and their management of schools.

Examines the philosophy and practice of new principals of two schools, both in Shanghai, but at opposite ends of the quality spectrum. Eastern Senior High School, a municipal key school, is one of the best schools in Shanghai. Northern Junior High School was a failing school in the 1980s.

The two principals studied were successful in creating the setting for drastic improvement in their schools. Eastern Senior High School was at its low tide when the new principal arrived. Through some innovative ideas in sports and music, he succeeded in revitalizing the school and moved it from the bottom five to one of the top ten of the 26 municipal key schools in Shanghai. Northern Junior High School was a failing school in the 1980s. There, the new principal came in 1994 and in subsequent years completely changed the school.

Illustrates that the concept of successful school developed by one principal and his team was simple: create continuous success experiences for students.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to develop environmental scores to complement already existing academic scores in order to evaluate and compare school performance in the context of sustainable societies.

In a case study on one particular Brazilian school, the authors propose three indexes to grade school performance: academic achievement, sustainable design and environmental behavior.

The behavior refers to water and energy consumption, environmental education activities, waste production and sorting, noise level, food scraps and traffic density.

The adoption of the scoreboard induces all members of the school community, students, teachers and service personnel, to participate in the measurements and in targeting.

All measured parameters are reduced to dimensionless fractions of ideal values in order to provide a basis for objective targeting within the school and for comparisons within the school universe.

The scoreboard is transferable to the school universe in the quest for benchmaking environmental performance.

As a “bottom-up” management procedure, the study develops the ideal reference values suitable to the particular school in an effort to overcome their absence in the municipal context and to induce their application in that context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the expectations of and possible tensions in school leadership regarding the implementation of the 2014 Danish school reform and, by extension, to address emerging perspectives linking school leadership, learning and well-being.

An analysis of central policy documents in the reform as well as research reports examining the role of leadership in the implementation of the reform offers insights into the new expectations of and tensions in school leadership. Drawing on theories of school leadership, the analysis highlights the various forms and aspects of school leadership that are at play in the reform.

The analysis identifies expectations regarding school leadership, ranging from aspects of strategic leadership that focus on management by objectives and results to aspects that are closer to teaching, such as curriculum and instructional leadership. It furthermore highlights barriers with regard to realizing policy intentions of strengthening instructional leadership, such as encroaching upon pedagogical and curriculum leadership, which have traditionally been the domain of teachers. Meanwhile, the kind of leadership that can be practiced through data-based management by objectives and results seems to have been perceived as a more viable approach in the implementation of the reform.

The papers' theoretical and empirical foundation is rooted in Danish and Scandinavian perspectives on schooling, and thus the generalizability of the findings may be limited to countries with similar perspectives or “packages of expectations” on linking school leadership, learning and well-being.

The paper provides an original contribution through its engagement with the tensions inherent in the specific “package of expectations” and new demands on school leadership in the 2014 school reform.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the superintendent position, its relation to the local political system and the function as superior of principals in the school district in order to illuminate important district-level conditions for student learning. Influences from historical legacies and policy cultures are investigated by means of cross-country case analyses.

This paper is based on data from national surveys of superintendent leadership in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway.

A key point is the observation of a mix-mode system of hard and soft governance. Municipalities, schools, teachers and pupils are – in different degrees across the Nordic countries – subjected to external evaluation and assessment by central control agencies, where the streams of reports, assessments and performance data are assembled. However, shifts in the governance systems are only modestly reflected in the self-reports on the superintendents’ role. Overall, superintendents in the cases express a self-preferred leadership style as professional learning facilitators who focus on pupil orientation, which positions the superintendent in “crossfires” between conflicting stakeholder demands.

The paper reinforces the importance of superintendent leadership in local school governance. It underscores the importance that superintendents facilitate learning conditions for school leaders, teachers and students, which we see as a promising path for further research.

The paper provides empirical evidence regarding superintendent leadership situated in local social and political contexts within the Nordic countries. The cross-country analysis illuminates how path-pendent historical legacies mediate current reform trends.

Municipal amalgamation (or merger or consolidation) is commonly employed in countries around the world to improve efficiency in public service. While mergers occur among jurisdictions of all sizes, the municipal amalgamation discourse is typically limited to one national setting and a focus on mergers of larger local jurisdictions. The existing municipal amalgamation literature pays little attention to predicate conditions for successful mergers. This study seeks to address these deficiencies by examining the premerger conditions and effects of municipal amalgamations that recently took place in four small jurisdictions of similar size in Thailand and the United States.

A holistic multiple case study approach was employed. These two cases share a geographical attribute: one municipal jurisdiction encircled by another.

The evidence indicates that factors associated with what the researchers refer to as “familiarity” facilitated both successful approval of and outcomes resulting from the amalgamation actions. While the study's findings align with international research regarding the potential for reducing administrative support costs through consolidation, its findings diverge from existing international evidence in that the evidence indicates operating effectiveness and efficiency improvements. Economies of scope and marginal economies of scale are in evidence. Although findings from this study indicate that there might be problematic effects regarding political representation and participation, in that the consolidated jurisdictions remain small in size, negative citizen engagement and participation consequences may be less than that evidenced in larger consolidated jurisdictions.

The study introduces the “familiarity” theorem as a theoretical lens to assist in understanding the cases.

This chapter presents a quantitative description of the living conditions in a slum area of an intermediate Argentinean city during the outburst of the Covid-19 crisis using primary data collected four months after the lockdown measures had been introduced. The sample represents 1,500 households which claimed food assistance over this period, and whose deprivations and presence of young members are similar to that of 13% of the city’s population and 23% of the country’s population. Rough estimates suggest a disproportionate drop in employment and a disproportionate increase in unemployment in the area compared to those registered in the aggregate of the main urban agglomerations of the country. Cash transfers implemented during the lockdown, together with in-kind food aid from schools, the municipal government, and the church with non-governmental organizations, entailed a substantial average increase in the coverage of the cost of the basic food basket. However, non-trivial fractions of households were not covered by any of the main cash transfers. Also, and despite efforts, food insecurity could not be avoided. Considering the similarity of the sample to significant fractions of the country’s urban population, the deprivations experienced over 2020 by groups which were already in poverty before the Covid-19 arrival, raise alarms on the future well-being of these populations, especially for infants and children. Novel policies are required, addressing the various critical needs in an interconnected way, integrating the different stakeholders that have proven to be key in assisting these households during such an unprecedented covariate shock.