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This study examines the deployment of excellent retired principals (ERPs) as system leaders to facilitate systemic professional capital building in Taipei City, Taiwan. It explores the unique approach of the Taipei City government and contributions of ERPs in driving educational reforms.

This study combines the perspectives of system leadership and professional capital, and analyzes the roles and practices of ERPs in promoting professional capital in Taipei's local education system. It draws on qualitative data gathered through interviews and document analyses.

The findings reveal that the Taipei City government adopted a systemic approach by appointing designated retired principals as system leaders. The findings are categorized into three themes. ERPs serve as systemic capacity-builders, enhancing leadership across the local education system; ERPs act as collaborators and bridge-builders, fostering joint work and a collective sense of professional responsibility; and ERPs function as facilitators and advisors, cultivating decisional capital by providing informed decision-making support based on their experiences and wisdom. These roles challenge the notion of late-career decline, highlight the ongoing contributions of ERPs to the education system, and extend professional capital beyond teacher development, influencing system-wide collective capacity-building, collective responsibility, and policy enactments.

This study contributes to understanding how exceptional retired principals can drive systemic reform and build systemic professional capital. It expands previous research by highlighting the unique Chinese cultural context in Taipei City and continued contributions of retired principals to the education system.

Contemporary debates over the future direction of retirement pensions policy have been dominated by a polemic over the scope of, and the future balance between, the respective roles of public and private sectors in the management and delivery of benefit “entitlements”. This debate has negatively judged the institutional capacity of the state sustainably to supply adequate national retirement provision. This development is viewed as problematic as it is contentious in that it seeks to abandon lessons learned from the long, albeit currently underestimated, historical pedigree of public‐private partnership in institutional pensions provision. Against the ascendancy of World Bank‐driven attitudes regarding the limitations of “public”’ pensions provision, it is argued that due recognition be given to the ongoing capacity of state sectors to contribute positively to the management and delivery of old‐age pensions. Argues further that the social welfare‐driven imperatives which led states initially to become increasingly more involved in national pensions provision remain no less salient today and for the future, and are particularly salient for developing economies with poorly developed private financial sectors.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of how national board administrators, more precisely, officials at the Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE) have perceived the primary influencing factors, or “regulators”, of the national core curriculum reform and the success of the implementation. The alignment between the identified regulators was also explored.

Altogether, 23 FNBE officials participated in this mixed methods study.

The results showed that the officials perceived the core curriculum reform as a systemic entity: the reform was implemented using a top-down and bottom-up strategy, and several regulators were identified at different levels of the education system. The officials also viewed the implementation as successful, and identified more promoting than hindering factors in it. However, they emphasised regulators at the administrative level, whereas regulators at the district or national levels were less often identified. They also highlighted the importance of orchestrating collaboration in comparison with the other regulators.

The results imply that in addition to considering separate determinants of reform success, it is important to pay attention to sufficient alignment between the regulators at different levels of the education system in order to better understand and promote the implementation of a large-scale reform.

This study provides new knowledge on national board administrators’ perspectives on what regulates the implementation of a large-scale curriculum reform.

The purpose of this postmortem is to assess whether the design, implementation, and maintenance of financial policies during the period from 1996 through 2006 were primary causes of the financial system's demise.

To draw conclusions about the policy determinants of the crisis, the paper studies five important policies: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) policies toward credit rating agencies, Federal Reserve policies concerning bank capital and credit default swaps, SEC and Federal Reserve policies about over‐the‐counter derivatives, SEC policies toward the consolidated supervision of major investment banks, and government policies toward two housing‐finance entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The evidence is inconsistent with the view that the collapse of the financial system was caused only by the popping of the housing bubble (“accident”) and the herding behavior of financiers rushing to create and market increasingly complex and questionable financial products (“suicide”). Rather, the evidence indicates that senior policymakers repeatedly designed, implemented, and maintained policies that destabilized the global financial system in the decade before the crisis. Moreover, although the major regulatory agencies were aware of the growing fragility of the financial system due to their policies, they chose not to modify those policies, suggesting that “negligent homicide” contributed to the financial system's collapse.

Although influential policymakers presume that international capital flows, euphoric traders, and insufficient regulatory power caused the crisis, this paper shows that these factors played only a partial role. Thus, current reforms represent only a partial and thus incomplete step in establishing a stable and well‐functioning financial system. Since systemic institutional failures helped cause the crisis, systemic institutional reforms must be a part of a comprehensively effective response.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine more closely the tension between, on the one hand, forms of internal school improvement based on internal evaluation measures and, on the other hand, control and legitimisation needs grounded on external evaluation measures.

The clash of these forms of evaluation is at the core of the paper, dealing in particular with the changing evaluation systems in the Cypriot education system. Therefore, the case study approach is utilised here. More specifically, the case of Cyprus is used as a system under transition in order to move from a primarily teacher inspection system, which is externally driven, to a combination of a teacher/school inspection system, which is based on both external and internal processes and is directed at both formative and summative evaluation processes.

It is asserted that the new proposed appraisal system for Cyprus addresses the deficiencies of the current evaluation system and generally aims at achieving a balance between external and internal processes. Finally, the conditions for the acceptance and successful implementation of new evaluation systems are described.

The results of the study constitute a rich setting of future developments for Cyprus schools with regard to important issues such as school accountability, school improvement, teacher evaluation, internal school evaluation and external inspection, through the proposed appraisal system. Therefore, the paper provides an important source of information for those who have the responsibility of creating educational policy and planning for the years to come in the area of teacher appraisal.

This chapter examines one vocational high school's response to a state exit exam. Many states now require high school students to pass an exit exam before graduating, a key element of standards-based accountability reforms. Little is known about how educators and students inside vocational schools respond to these exams which typically emphasize literacy and academic skills. We examine how one such school attempted to respond to demands linked to the exit exam and the state's labeling the school as underperforming. While teachers reported support for state intervention and placing stronger demands on the school, one remedy involved becoming more selective in terms of new students admitted. As a result, tensions arose between academic subject and vocational teachers. Deep frustrations were voiced by several teachers and students about whether preparation was sufficient to ensure a reasonable pass rate. We employ a critical public policy framework to illuminate how this policy shock spurred positive action while penalizing students for years of insufficient preparation in the public schools.

This study examines the trust-repair practices after organizational change.

Previous research on this topic is limited, so an abductive qualitative research approach was adopted. The data were collected from key informants through focus group discussions and interviews.

Beyond previous research findings, this study identified that employee trust can be repaired after benevolence-based trust violations by enforcing ethical behavior and fostering managers' emotional intelligence and after competence-based violations by fostering the sense-making process and by involving third parties in trust recovery. In addition, transparent information sharing and strong management actions predict positive trust outcomes in a change context.

This paper makes three key contributions to the literature on organizational trust by (1) identifying trust violations after organizational change, (2) proposing a process model on trust repair and (3) extending understanding of trust repair practices by revealing new elements.

This study provides practical information from a real work context and can improve managers' understanding of active trust-repair practices.

This paper outlines active trust-repair practices in an organizational change context and expands the current theory by presenting novel insights into organizational trust repair. In addition, this paper contributes to the trust-repair literature by proposing promising avenues for future trust repair research.

Over the past decade most central governments across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have begun to decentralize some fiscal, political, and administrative responsibilities to lower-levels of government, local institutions, and the private sector in pursuit of greater accountability and more efficient service delivery, often in an attempt to solve broader political, social, or economic problems (SARA, 1997). Education, in particular, has been fertile ground for such decentralization efforts. From Ethiopia to South Africa, SSA countries have engaged in some form of education decentralization, though the pace has been quite uneven. Ethiopia, Uganda, Senegal, and South Africa, for example, are proceeding fast, while Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe are under way more slowly. Guinea, Niger, Zambia, and Nigeria are at the other end of the continuum. Decentralization of social services, including education appears to be embedded in the political changes occurring in the region. In almost all SSA countries the introduction of decentralized systems are accompanied by popular elections for local councils as part of the general trend of the introduction of or return to democratization.

This article examines the loosely coupled nature of the US educational system and explores recent systemic reform initiatives designed to improve education through more tightly coupled education policy and practice. The utility and limitations of loose coupling as an organizational construct are examined and critiqued. A number of significant forces are exerting ever‐greater pressure on policymakers to more tightly couple US education, including environmental pressures, the emergence of powerful new institutional actors, an emergent institutional capacity, and institutional isomorphism. After reviewing the effectiveness of systemic reform initiatives in several states, the article concludes that education in the USA is moving toward a system of fragmented centralization in which policymakers have greater opportunity to craft more coherent, systemic education policy amidst competing demands for limited resources.