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ABSTRACT While educational leadership and management has experienced impressive development over the last three decades the fact that a robust comparative branch of the field has failed to emerge is equally conspicuous. This article builds a case for comparative and international educational leadership and management, arguing that the development of conceptual frameworks and instrumentation are imperative if the field is to keep abreast of globalisation of policy and practice. Accordingly, a conceptual framework is described and justified based on a cultural and cross-cultural approach focusing on the school level as the baseline unit for analysis. Specifically, the proposed framework is architectured around the interrelationship between two levels of culture, societal and organisational, and four elements comprising schooling and school-based management, namely, organisational structures, leadership and management processes, curriculum, and teaching and learning. Finally, limitations and implications of the model are discussed, including the need for the framework to be operationalised by developing appropriate research instruments.
Introduction
Educators and politicians in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea expound the necessity for their East Asian school systems to become more like those in the West. They complain that there is too much rote learning, uniformity and standardisation and too little emphasis on creativity, diversity and problem-solving. In addition, competition is fierce for scarce places in elite schools and universities, leading to unfulfilled ambitions and wastage of talent among the high proportions of young people failing to gain entry. Meanwhile, their counterparts in the USA and Britain look in the reverse direction to these same East Asian countries and wonder what they can learn from the superior academic results of East Asian students on International Achievement Tests in mathematics and science (Atkin & Black 1997).
This relatively new phenomenon, a reciprocal interest of `East' and `West' in each other's school systems, characterised much of the 1990s. Other factors, besides those mentioned, fuelled the tendency to look beyond national boundaries for answers to educational problems. While many developing countries have for some time looked to Europe and North America for their policy models, what was particularly new about the 1990s was the interest taken by the developed countries, such as the USA and UK, in the school systems of East and South-East Asia (Dimmock 2000).
In this...