US contexts of/for educational leadership

This chapter lays out the general challenges facing US principals in different sorts of schools in a variety of settings. The US federal role in public education has intensified since the 1980s, with the passage of several bills aimed at improving equity of educational opportunity. In order to describe how these federal, state, and district mandates impinge on the principal’s role, the chapter draws on the contemporary experiences of successful urban principals captured through long-term ethnographic case studies. US principals work in between national, state, district, and school-level policy pressures and increasingly take on mediating roles in translating external policy directives to their schools, hence the focus on schools more than districts. The chapter illustrates the US principal role as institutional mediator in part by sharing case study findings on school leadership that the authors have conducted in recent years in a variety of different settings.