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Introduction
Leadership is a central theme in recent conversations about improving K-12 education. This is not surprising; over the past few decades researchers have consistently reported that school leadership, principal leadership in particular, is critical in developing and sustaining those school-level conditions believed essential for instructional improvement (Rosenholtz, 1989; Hallinger & Heck, 1996). While volumes have been filled with discussions on education leadership, many scholars and practitioners have raised questions about research on leadership. Indeed, scholars have called for a re-focusing of scholarship in the field of educational administration in general.
This special issue of EEPA is designed to contribute to this on-going conversation about refocusing scholarship in educational administration in general and education leadership in particular. The first three articles address the issue of leadership for instructional improvement from a distributed perspective. Eric Camburn, Brian Rowan, and James Taylor show that participation in a Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) model influences the distribution of leadership functions across positions in schools and impacts the extent to which particular leadership functions get activated. Camburn and colleagues also show that professional development can influence leadership practice.
Continuing to look at how the performance of school leadership functions is distributed, the next two articles take a more in-depth look at distributed leadership on the ground. Through a multisite case study of Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC), Michael Copland underscores that the distribution of leadership in schools shifts overtime as school leaders' roles change. Further, Copland shows that while new structures can be a means of building leadership capacity, turnover of key leaders coupled with limited preparation for this turnover threaten sustainability of improvement initiatives. Jennifer Goldstein examines efforts to give teachers responsibility for teacher evaluation through a case study of one school district's implementation of Peer Assistance and Review (PAR). Goldstein's article identifies some core challenges involved in distributing leadership, especially for leadership functions that have been strongly tied to the school principal.
Mary Kay Stein and Barbara Nelson develop the notion of Leadership Content Knowledge (LCK) pressing us to consider what leaders need to know about the teaching and learning of particular school subjects in order to practice as instructional leaders. Contending that educational administration scholars have neglected administrators' understanding of subject matter and how it...