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We share school leaders' perspectives on Zoom videos concerning the needs of immigrant and refugee families in Title I schools. In these videos, participants crafted and shared personal narratives about their leadership experiences during the COVID-19 era of education. Rooted in participatory design research methods, the process of designing these videos were both a research project and an intervention to assist families and school leaders to better understand each other. We present a close analysis of administrators' perspectives and describe how our codesigned video methodology enabled participants to coconstruct new meanings of school-community relationships during the pandemic through a radical care framework. We conceptualize these reimaginings as aperturas--cracks in the dominant family engagement paradigm that allow us to collectively work towards transformative ends which we term community-centered school leadership. We conclude the article with recommendations for how both school leadership and research can approach and reimagine family engagement post-pandemic.

This philosophical essay explores the purpose of educational leadership with a particular focus on where and how leaders interact with education policy. Building on the idea that the purpose of educational leadership should differ from that of business management, this paper analyzes how mechanisms of policy engineering might construct educational leadership as instrumental to serving predetermined policy goals. Using Stephen Ball's concept of policy technologies and Herbert Marcuse's idea of one-dimensional thinking, I analyze the ways education policy controls school leaders. In response to these mechanisms of control exerted through policy engineering, I explore where and how school leaders can challenge such mechanisms and create new possibilities for educational leadership.

This paper critically analyzes gap discourses in student learning, starting from the achievement gap, education debt, and opportunity gaps, applying the lens of coloniality, racial-capitalism, and modernity (CRCM). Gap discourses are the prevalent rationale behind educational policies and school reforms globally. Specifically in the United States, achievement gap discourses contribute substantially to the educational framework that minoritized students (students of color) are inherently -- intellectually and academically -- behind White students. This paper will show the pervasive power of achievement gap discourses and their influence on school policy, practices, and norms. Additionally, we highlight how some of the most formidable achievement gap critiques fail to grasp the power of gap discourses. In some cases, these critiques end up reifying White supremacy ideologies. We propose a decoloniality framework or a layered and multi-disciplinary response to help re-think the entire gap discourses informed by White supremacy.

This portraiture-informed study by Taeyeon Kim challenges the dominant discourse of accountability, which often focuses on high-stakes policies at the expense of relational aspects of accountability in schools. Building on working theories of accountability, humanizing leadership, and paradox theory, Kim theorizes the "human side of accountability," where leaders simultaneously address the tensions of multiple demands and implement policy mandates in ways that attempt to mitigate their unintended harm to students, particularly minoritized students. Using interviews, shadowing, photo-elicited focus groups, and artifacts generated from a yearlong qualitative study of three US elementary school principals, Kim explores how school principals make meaning of accountability in their daily practices and how they address dilemmas created by competing demands. The analysis suggests that leaders' enactment of accountability can be understood as a daily balancing act of promoting equity to provide missing and overlooked support in policy mandates. This article thus challenges existing policy approaches and provides strategies for rethinking how processes of accountability can be imagined in school settings.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the cognitive abilities of listening and reading comprehension and morphological awareness affect children's writing to dictation. Data were collected from 194 first-grade elementary schoolchildren in South Korea on the effects of repetitive practice and memorization by comparing impromptu and one semester's regular dictation tests. The results first revealed that spelling, spacing, and punctuation were highly correlated with the three cognitive abilities in the impromptu writing to dictation, but far less in the regular dictation test. Second, it was found that children's listening and reading comprehension and morphological awareness influenced their spelling, while reading comprehension and morphological awareness affected spacing and punctuation significantly in the impromptu dictation test. However, in the case of the regular dictation test, which involved memorization, the number of significant factors was small, and final explanatory power of those cognitive abilities was much smaller.

Purpose: This study builds on research scrutinizing school autonomy in policy and school governance by shifting the focus from a formal structural view of autonomy to examining how principals negotiate autonomy in their daily work. Drawing on multiple dimensions of autonomy and street-level bureaucracy, this study examined how principals, as both professionals and bureaucrats, work to expand and strategize their autonomy in practice. Research Methods/Approach: We used portraiture to document and interpret the experience and perspectives of three principals at urban, suburban, and rural PK-12 traditional public schools in the Midwest of US during the 2018-2019 school year. Findings: Principals faced a "bounded" or "partial" autonomy in which they had to constantly negotiate their individual autonomy (e.g., how they spent their time on any given day) with institutional autonomy (e.g., the demands of the role via external expectations). The findings show the ways participants utilized institutional autonomy to support individual autonomy and dealt with the boundaries of their autonomy. While these strategies gave them a bit more "control" over decision-making, they also often resulted in overwork and/or conflict with district priorities. Implications for Research and Practice: Detailed portraits offer key insights for rethinking school autonomy with multiple dimensions intersected in leadership practice. Findings yield knowledge regarding how to best support districts and school leaders in creating greater alignment between institutional and individual demands, thus increasing the likelihood that autonomy, as an improvement strategy, can be effective.

This paper explores multiple logics of accountability by examining patterns of control of various school functions under different accountability systems. Research has shown that accountability is a global phenomenon, but how accountability is understood and enacted is locally contextualized, which implies the existence of multiple logics of accountability in practice. By linking theoretical arguments rooted in literature to empirical evidence observed in TALIS 2013, we aim to theorize logics of accountability and then demonstrate the existence of those logics across countries. We first developed a framework of logics of accountability: control-based, professional-based, test-based, and process-based accountability. We then empirically analyzed three types of control--external, internal, and mixed control--at the school level across countries and within four content areas--assessment, human resource, curriculum, and budget--to infer how each country consistently follows a logic of accountability in their schooling practices. We found that a few countries followed a relatively pure form of control-based, professional-based, and process-based logic; however, most countries followed mixed-forms of logic. Our findings provide a systematic approach for the mapping of accountability logics across countries and suggest that more thought should be paid to how the underlying logic of accountability should manifest across these different functions.

While studies have examined leadership efforts to improve community engagement, less is known about how deeply rooted structured discourses, systems, and practices influence leadership actions and responses from communities. Deficit approaches to educational policy reform are pervasive in the most historically marginalized communities and school districts in the United States (US). Drawing on critical policy analysis, this study examines a disengaged school district's leadership of a Federal School Turnaround Policy from the perspectives of minoritized communities in an urban US school district. We analyzed deficit policy discourses, its enactment, and leadership practices using interview data and archived documents. This study found pathological discourses and deficit frames of minoritized communities, embedded in policy enactment, which directly led to leadership practices resulting in community resistance. In this way, we (re)frame disengaged school leadership; the resistance and the tension in response to pathological and deficit structures and ideologies as, at minimum, healthy attempts of redistributing justice and democracy. In addition, our findings highlight that discourses and enactment of turnaround school reforms were intertwined with undemocratic and racialized practices.

Purpose: Given the context of accountability-driven policy environments, research has shown that school leaders perceive bureaucratic rules and protocols in negative ways, but they also utilize organizational structures and routines to lead changes. To better understand both enabling and hindering mechanisms of bureaucracy in schools, this study explores how Korean school principals understand and perceive bureaucratic structures using a lens of ambivalence. The authors draw on Weber's theory of bureaucracy, with a particular focus on the paradoxical aspect of bureaucracy that might be experienced by individuals within the system. Design/methodology/approach: This study analyzed qualitative data collected from 26 in-depth interviews with 10 Korean school principals between 2013 and 2015. The authors used the multiple cycles of coding to explore patterns and themes that emerged from the participants' responses. Findings: The analysis of this study showed that the participants' ambivalent responses toward bureaucracy were particularly salient in three areas where formal organizational structures were changing through policy initiatives: teacher evaluation, electronic approval system and school-based management promoting decentralized decision making. The study participants reflected on how such changes can enable and/or hinder schools to achieve organizational goals and collective values, from the viewpoints of multiple aspects, which led to their ambivalent responses to bureacratic structures in school settings. Originality/value: This study contributes to the understanding of school organizations by revisiting Weber's theory of bureaucracy in school settings. Using the lens of ambivalence enabled us to reconcile school principals' contradictory perceptions toward bureaucracy, which complicates analyses of tensions and paradoxical responses found in leadership practices within school systems.

This article explores how policy actors in South Korea understand and make meaning of school-related policies responding to COVID-19. Using sensemaking and crisis theory as a framework and informed by literature on policy culture, we analyzed qualitative data collected from interviews with teachers, educational leaders, and parents. The findings show that our participants initially thought the crisis situation would "just pass," but they experienced "fear" and "chaos" when online and hybrid classes were implemented. After adopting unexpected policy changes to cope with the spread of COVID-19, participants sought shared responsibility to overcome the crisis. In addition, our participants made meaning of the crisis as an opportunity to transform schools, suggesting that COVID-19 catalyzed democracy, innovation, and equity in Korean school education. We conclude this article with a discussion on the role of crisis in sensemaking and the importance of national policy culture and sociohistorical contexts in shaping policy actors' meaning making, extending comparative perspectives in education.

In this essay, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic drove key changes in schooling and what forces can sustain these changes. Responding to the argument that COVID-19-driven changes may not be sustainable, this essay offers a counter narrative from the Korean context, in which educators re-visited existing school systems and re-constructed policies and teaching practices to fill the educational vacuum caused by the pandemic. This essay specifically builds on interviews conducted with Korean educators throughout the 2020 school year during COVID-19. First, we discuss "ownership of educational change" as reflected in educators' narratives. We then explore three driving forces behind the transformation of the "grammar of Korean schooling": policy discourse about "future education," professional teaching culture, and administration for creativity. Based on our analysis, we offer several suggestions for policymakers, district leaders, and educators around the world for how to leverage and sustain the educational changes catalyzed by COVID-19. We conclude by arguing that educators' desires to achieve change must be actualized in schools and policies through collaborative foresight and system-level support.

Despite increasingly egalitarian attitudes toward women in the Middle East and North Africa, nations in this region continue to rank among the lowest in measures of gender equality. Using survey data, we examine the relationship between educational attainment and support for women. We find that increased educational attainment is predictive of greater support for women's employment and women's participation in post-secondary education. We also find that egalitarian attitudes have increased over time and education continues to remain a strong predictor of these attitudes. We argue for increased investment in education that promotes egalitarian attitudes for both genders in the MENA region.

School principals play a critical role in evaluating teachers and providing feedback, but high-stakes evaluation policies at the local and state levels can create ethical dilemmas for principals. In this case, an underresourced rural school principal has to report a certain number of "ineffective" teachers to meet a requirement from the district teacher evaluation, even though the principal does not think any teacher in his school deserves to receive an "ineffective" rating. This study can be used to help students unpack issues of dilemmas coming from consequential accountability policies that overlook the relational ethos of educators and leaders in school practice.

Departing from the view that learning is a linear progression, we argue that through the lens of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and cultural logic, teacher learning research can be advanced. Applying these two constructs to a collaborative autoethnography of two emerging scholars' transnational teaching and learning experiences in the US and South Korea we argue that implicit and explicit norms in a culture influence the process of "becoming teacher" in the Korean context. Findings suggest that socio-cultural elements of implicit beliefs and norms outside of schools are linked to teacher learning inside schools, thereby suggesting that teacher learning at the micro-level needs to be understood alongside meso-level artefacts and macro-level factors in the complex process of "becoming teacher." This study supports the view that becoming teacher is nonlinear and culturally situated.

Purpose: This study examines how district governance and different school contexts in Denver's portfolio management model affect shared leadership for learning. We define this as shared influence on instructional leadership and school-wide decision making, which research suggests have strong ties to student achievement and teacher commitment. Method: We analyze interview data from 53 administrators, teacher leaders, and teachers in eight case study schools and teacher surveys in 48 schools. In both data sets, we purposively sampled based on variance in school performance ratings and by school type (e.g., traditional public, standalone charter, charter management organization [CMO], and innovation schools). Findings: We find that perceptions of shared instructional leadership were generally high across the school contexts, though CMO and innovation schools had the highest perceptions in both the survey and case study data. Schools varied substantially in shared decision making, but innovation schools had higher average scores than other school models. Centralized policies and supports, alongside organizational visions spanning networks of schools, helped explain the enactment of shared leadership for learning. For example, schools within Denver's "innovation" network shared a common vision of teacher empowerment, while CMOs that had more prescribed policies and practices across their schools had lower reported levels of shared decision making. Implications for Research and Practice: Portfolio management models that prioritize school-based autonomy and choice between different kinds of schools are proliferating in urban areas. Our study helps explain why and how shared leadership for learning differs between school models and explores important implications for this variation.

This paper argues that the 'new governance' narrative should be revised and modified to reflect context-specific details of the policy sector and styles of government. I discuss the modified network governance narrative, including how the theory of bureaucracy informs the function of network governance. I then apply it to analyze a case study of Korean educational assessment policy, specifically the National Assessment of Educational Achievement, as empirical evidence to support the claim. The case study revealed that central government was a major force in the policy development, and its bureaucratic power combined with soft and hard capital was strong. Responding to central government, opposing groups tried to change the policy by forming networks for collective action, utilizing the media and discovering flexibility within bureaucratic rules, which led to partial changes of the policy in the next regime. The study concludes with several remarks that contribute to policy analysis in education: (a) the usefulness of the modified network governance framework in analyzing policy; (b) bureaucratic structures as useful resources for stakeholders in policy; (c) educational and political beliefs as critical factors in forming and tightening networks; and (d) broader implications for understanding testing policy in Asian contexts.

We investigated the relationship between principal instructional leadership and teacher participation in multiple types of professional development in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Using the Teaching and Learning International Survey dataset of 2013, we employed two-level logistic regression models to estimate the rigorous effects of principal instructional leadership that were separated out from teacher-level effects. We found that the influence of principal instructional leadership on teachers' participation in professional development varied across types of learning activities and countries. Our analysis suggests that principal instructional leadership can influence teachers' participation in mentoring, mentoring, peer observation, and coaching compared to the other types of professional development. Our study builds on and extends research on cross-national characteristics of teacher learning by adding evidence about the relations between principal leadership and teacher professional development in the three Asian countries.

In this study, I explore how school principals experience transformative learning in relation to leadership development and how these experiences influence their leadership practices and perceptions. Transformative learning is critical for school leaders because it can lead to meaningful learning that qualitatively changes their leadership practices. Assuming that personally significant incidents are important for transformative learning, I analyzed qualitative data collected from 12 school principals in the United States. Analysis revealed that with these transformative learning experiences, school principals established strong foundations of leadership assumptions and strategies by changing and expanding their views of themselves and others. My findings suggest that education for principal leadership development should provide opportunities to explore multiple dimensions of learning, how relationships and school contexts influence leadership decision making, and how principals perceive themselves as leaders. This study contributes to a more dynamic understanding of how school leaders make actual change in their leadership practices.

This article analyzes the relationship between Korean mothers' beliefs about early childhood English education and preschoolers' attitudes toward English learning. English experiences in the home were also projected to be significantly related to the aforementioned factors. Participants consisted of 159 mother-child pairs in South Korea. This study yielded three main results. First, correlations were found between the mothers' education level and all three factors, while the fathers' education and family income levels correlated only with preschoolers' English experiences at home. Second, the subfactors of the mothers' beliefs, the preschoolers' home English experiences, and their attitudes toward learning English were revealed to be partly related. Third, the study showed that preschoolers' English experiences at home mediated the relationship between the mothers' beliefs in the importance of English education and the preschoolers' attitudes. In effect, while the mothers' beliefs about early childhood English education did not directly affect their children's attitudes, indirect effects were found to be mediated by English experiences at home. Based on these results, we propose that it is necessary for parents to create a rich language environment in the home that engenders in children positive foreign language learning attitudes.