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One of the features of the New Zealand secondary schools system is that achievement closely reflects the taught curriculum. The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) directly assesses student achievement on the secondary school curriculum through a combination of criterion‐based internal and external assessments. The nature of NCEA means school‐level results not only reflect student achievement but also the ability of leaders to organise, deliver, and monitor a relevant curriculum for students. This paper aims to describe how NCEA data were used to develop a simple but fair system to assess the relative performance of secondary schools.

No standardised measures of performance prior to Year 11 are available in New Zealand. Nor are student‐level data available. In the absence of these, multiple indicators of gross performance, added value and improvement over time were analysed using a schools‐of‐similar‐type methodology.

Results indicated that schools in the low and middle SES communities were more likely to be improving than others, but these improving schools were also more likely to be already high‐ or mid‐performing. Low‐performing schools were least likely to be improving.

Some advantages of this methodology are its ability to be utilised with any publicly available standards‐based achievement data, its validity as an indicator of leadership and organisational performance, and its ability to track school performance trends over time.

In this chapter, two academics from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan collaborate with the President of their university to present their experiences and ideas about positive strategic leadership. Positive strategic leadership is derived from the juxtaposition of ideas from the growing stream of research on positive organizational scholarship with what is already known from the literature on strategic leadership. The authors embed new views into current theoretical perspectives on strategic leadership to provide an integrative overview and use the president's experiences during the nationally followed Affirmative Action cases as a vehicle for illustrating five themes: (1) A lifetime of experiences shapes who you are, (2) issues commonly choose you before you choose them, (3) begin with a purpose in mind, (4) appreciate divergent views, and (5) be a beacon for the future. Additionally, the authors provide practitioners with some “takeaways” on positive strategic leadership.

Forcibly displaced populations face economic, social, and spatial restrictions that impact how they navigate and make sense of their surroundings. In refugee camps, children and youth’s agency may look less dynamic and obvious. In this study, the authors examine the concept of “thin agency” or “everyday agency” in children’s and youth’s daily decisions and actions in a highly restrictive environment. By analyzing written narratives of 55 adolescent girls in Kakuma Refugee Camp, the authors find that children and youth are constantly exercising agency and/or are actively involved in “agentic practices” on a spectrum consisting of three major categories: thinking, action, and change. Hence, the authors propose taking a balanced approach in the field of refugee education that recognizes not only the multiple complex challenges in forced displacement but also the capabilities and strengths embedded in both the personal and social sphere that help children and youth overcome those barriers.

Using content analysis, the authors examine the purposes of teacher evaluation in relation to the content items on which teachers are assessed and engage in a comparative analysis of teacher evaluation practices in the U.S.A. from three points in time. The overall findings suggest a disparity between the philosophy of teacher evaluation as a mechanism for improving teaching and the practice of teacher evaluation as a tool for administrative decision making, a disparity heavily weighted in favour of the latter. The authors provide evidence that this disparity is historically rooted and likely to endure.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of neoliberalism and the accreditation of educational leadership programs in one Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) country by contextualizing the accreditation process and closely examining the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC) standards used by NCATE, now CAEP, to accredit educational leadership programs in the GCC. By using Habermas’ knowledge constitutive interests (KCIs) and evoking notions of floating signifiers, the paper develops an understanding of the use of Western-developed standards in a country that is different than the one in which these standards were conceived and how the discourse of accreditation standards shapes understandings and meanings of educational leadership.

A critical discourse analysis of the ELCC standards is conducted using a two-prong strategy that applies Habermas’ KCIs and evoking the notions of floating signifiers as a theoretical framework.

Understanding that knowledge is bounded by cultural circumstances, findings indicate that the ELCC standards contain all three KCIs, and various floating signifiers are embedded within the ELCC discourse that are problematic in a culture that is vastly different than the one in which these standards were conceived.

There are a few, if any, studies that have examined neoliberalism and accreditation in a GCC country. In particular, there are no studies that have examined the ELCC standards being used outside the USA. The research provides educators with an insight into the different forms of knowledge and understanding of the surplus of meaning of various concepts that are used within the ELCC professional standards outside the country where the standards were conceived without due regard for contextualization. The study provides discussion on how the discourse of the ELCC standards shapes understandings and meanings of educational leadership and educational leaders.

American and Lebanese women may feel they have different needs and therefore have different wants. This distinction brings to the fore the importance of an integrative analysis of forced and voluntary (push-pull) factors that influence entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to compare Lebanese and American women to determine their push-pull drive for entrepreneurship. Background: women entrepreneurship is developing in various cultural settings internationally as well as domestically. This research paper attempts to address the inference of autonomy, creativity, and non-conformity in comparing American and Lebanese women entrepreneurs with respect to the push-pull framework of entrepreneurship.

An interpretive analysis of 102 extensive in-depth interviews with women entrepreneurs from the USA and Lebanon allows the exploration of the relevance and salience of the proposed push-pull gender related entrepreneurship framework. Contrasting American and Lebanese women responses explains why the number and rate of women entrepreneurs is greater in the USA than in the Arab world, and attempts to answer why American women are more entrepreneurial and how the environment impacts them.

Emerging patterns of female business entrepreneurship in this analysis demonstrate that forced push entrepreneurship is more prevalent among women from a developing economy such as Lebanon than in industrially advanced USA. By contrast voluntary pull entrepreneurship claims more global validity as discovered in the US business culture. Entrepreneurial dimensions analyzed include autonomy, creativity, and non-conformity.

The dynamic interplay of micro, meso, and macro levels of the integrated framework of gender entrepreneurship is taken into further depth by exploring the gender autonomy debate, and highlighting creativity and non-conformity within the push-pull framework of entrepreneurship. This research contributes to reach scopes of practice and research. At the practice level the results show that the economic need is more than the self-satisfaction need to the initiation of new start-up business enterprises for Lebanese women compared to American women. This research sheds a new light on the balancing act of women entrepreneurs between tradition and modernity, between Oriental and Western cultures, and between Americans and Lebanese Arabs.

In recent years, school districts have faced numerous questions surrounding accommodations of transgender students. Strong objections to accommodations have been voiced in public argument and litigation, primarily in the areas of athletics, bathrooms, and dress codes. As younger transgender students express their gender identity at school, however, the existing objections are weakened by considering the context of elementary rather than high school students. Greater numbers of young transgender students will likely encourage accommodation of trans students of all ages, as well as challenge the gender binary unconsciously taught in school.