Educational Administration Research

in Comparative Education, 1995–2018

JOSEPH FLESSA, DANIELA BRAMWELL, AND GISELE CUGLIEVAN MINDREAU

For the past several decades there has been a solid research and policy consensus that
school level leadership is an important lever for school improvement and is an integral
component of the policy implementation process. Although broadly concerned with both
improvement and policy implementation, the field of comparative education has engaged
questions of school level leadership and administration in peer reviewed research un-
evenly at best. This article is a systematic review of the articles published about school level
leadership and administration in 11 comparative education journals from 1995 to 2018. A
conceptual organizer developed inductively from analysis of 109 articles is described. This
organizer reveals the emphases and omissions of these journals’ engagement of the topic.
We conclude by identifying avenues for and benefits to linking comparative education and
educational administration research traditions more explicitly, in part by using our con-
ceptual organizer as a potential starting point.

Introduction

This article presents a systematic review of the articles published about

school level administration and leadership (also called “educational leader-
ship and management” [EDLM]) in 11 comparative education journals from
1995 to 2018.1 The purpose of our study was to conceptually map research
examining school level leadership found in a sample of comparative educa-
tion journals, focusing on a time period when investment in the school prin-
cipalship was a policy preference of growing importance worldwide (OECD
2012, 2016; Day et al. 2016), and when the research consensus affirmed that
“school leadership has a significant effect on features of the school organi-
zation which positively influences the quality of teaching and learning” (Leith-
wood et al. 2019, 2).
Our primary audience for this article are scholars of comparative edu-
cation. It is not our purpose in this article to claim that there is no comparative

We would like to acknowledge the extensive, detailed, and very helpful feedback provided by the
anonymous reviewers of the initial drafts of this article, as well as the input provided by Carly Manion at
an important stage of the research.
1
Categorized articles are found in the online supplement.

Received February 13, 2020; revised October 15, 2020; accepted December 17, 2020; electronically
published June 28, 2021
Comparative Education Review, vol. 65, no. 3.
q 2021 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.
0010-4086/2021/6503-0002$10.00

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 FLESSA ET AL.

research in educational administration. Dimmock and Walker’s (1998) ground-

breaking work has determinedly pushed the field of educational adminis-
tration to look beyond its local or national borders to learn not only about wise
leadership practices but also how those practices change with different con-
texts. Hallinger has worked extensively to bring context “out of the shadows”
of studies of leadership (see, e.g., Hallinger 2018); many other educational
administration scholars have likewise moved in this direction (see, e.g., Harris
et al. 2016; Pashiardis and Johansson 2016; Moorosi and Bush 2020). Our
point is that scholarship within the field of comparative education, as repre-
sented by the publications of a sample of comparative education journals, has
insufficiently taken up questions of school level organizational leadership.
Because comparative education journals can be understood as sites for mo-
bilization of the knowledge researchers consider most important, the absence
of a body of work that examines school level organization is diagnostic of a
conceptual oversight that may be limiting the field’s understanding of a range
of key educational priorities, not least policy implementation. Stated another
way, why is work on school administration and leadership illegible to the field
of comparative education or at least insufficiently important to warrant a sub-
stantial publication record in comparative education journals? Why do scholars
hoping to study, for example, the principalship in comparative context have to
leave the comparative education journals to encounter a robust body of rel-
evant work? In this article we illustrate that comparative education journals
have a sparse record of publishing EDLM research; we organize the EDLM
concepts that have been published in comparative education journals so that
the knowledge base can both broaden and deepen; we speculate on possible
explanations for the distance between comparative education journals and
EDLM research; and we suggest a mutually beneficial path forward for greater
engagement between the fields.

Methodology and Data Analysis Process

Informed by Wolhuter (2008) who argued that “journal analyses have

proved to be an effective way to reveal the identity and trends constituting an
area of study” (324), we conducted a systematic review of the literature: “a review
of the research literature using systematic and explicit, accountable methods”
(Gough et al. 2012, 2). In the words of Hallinger (2013, 145) “research reviews
take the stones cut by individual researchers and mold them into a coherent
meaningful shape.” The “coherent shape” we pursue here will help to under-
stand better how comparative education research traditions, as evidenced by
publications in a sample of comparative education journals, highlight or neglect
scholarship in educational administration. One characteristic of systematic re-
views is their methodological transparency (Gough et al. 2012; Hallinger 2013).
In that tradition, we delineate our research question, data collection, inclusion/
exclusion criteria, search strings, and so forth (see also fig. 1).

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FIG. 1.—Data analysis process
 FLESSA ET AL.

Our research questions were What research exists in a sample of comparative

education journals since 1995 examining school level leadership? How can this research
be conceptually mapped?
Given the limited research in our topic in these journals we opted for an
“exploratory” review (Hallinger 2014), using a bounded search procedure.
We selected eleven journals. Our baseline selection criteria for journals were:
peer reviewed and published in English for an academic, comparative educa-
tion audience. We did not include publications (no matter how well connected
to questions of school level leadership) that would be considered “gray liter-
ature,” such as policy reports published by the World Bank. Although com-
parative in scope we eliminated the journals of International Journal of Lead-
ership in Education and International Journal of Management Education in the review
because their primary audience is located within educational administration.
We selected the following 11 journals, listed below alphabetically. The
initials in parentheses show the abbreviation we use elsewhere in the manu-
script. The number in parenthesis denotes the number of articles from each
journal uncovered by our search that we saved for analysis.

1. Asia Pacific Journal of Education (APJE) (27)

2. Comparative and International Education/Éducation Comparée et Internationale
(CIE) (9)
3. Comparative Education (CE) (3)
4. Comparative Education Review (CER) (4)
5. Compare (18)
6. Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE) (1)
7. European Education (EE) (8)
8. European Journal of Education (EJE) (8)
9. International Journal of Education Development (IJED) (19)
10. International Review of Education (IRE) (8)
11. Research in Comparative and International Education (RCIE) (4)

The 11 journals in our sample include three journals with specific regional
emphases (APJE, EE, EJE); three journals associated with comparative edu-
cation societies (CIE, CER, EE) and one with UNESCO (IRE); two open access
journals (CIE, CICE); and one journal linked to a university program (CICE).
This means our sample has some regional and institutional diversity, repre-
sents some major comparative education societies, and therefore has an in-
terested as well as broad comparative education readership. It also means
there are gaps in our knowledge of work published in languages other than
English, with other regional emphases, or from other academic societies. One
final note about the sample of journals: in an earlier version of this article we
focused on fewer journals. In response to reviewers’ comments we revisited

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both our sample and its justification and expanded the set by two. This ex-
pansion captured five more articles but changed neither the substance of our
argument nor the patterns observed. We are not aware of any journal whose
content would substantially alter our analysis, and we believe that this set of
journals allows us to draw reasonable conclusions about how peer-reviewed
research in English language comparative education journals engages EDLM
research.
In online databases, we searched within each journal separately, using
the following search string—leader∗ OR principal∗ OR manage∗ OR head∗ OR
vice∗—and searching only in the title. We initially tried several searches with
different search strings and also different search parameters (searching in all
of the text, only title, title and abstract, etc.). We found that if our search were
broader than the title, or if the search string were expanded (e.g., if we in-
cluded the term “administrator”), then the number of articles we obtained
was not only unmanageable but also included mostly irrelevant items. We
included everything from 1995 in our search, and we conducted search in
May 2018, meaning anything published after May 2018 was not included. Two
journals have later starting dates for publication (Asia Pacific Journal of Edu-
cation in 1996, and Research in Comparative and International Education in 2006),
so we included everything from their first date of publication until May 2018.
We reviewed only articles; we did not include book reviews, bibliogra-
phies, review essays, notes, or other texts. Our search, bounded in this way,
generated a total of 247 studies. We reviewed the title and abstract of each of
the 247 articles and, in some ambiguous cases, the full article. We saved every
article about PK–12 school level leadership. We excluded studies referring to
leadership in higher education or in other institutions (e.g., in business, NGOs,
or government offices) or articles caught by the search string that were, in fact,
not educational administration. (As an illustration, one article was titled “Glob-
alisation, Political Islam and the Headscarf in Education, with Special Refer-
ence to the Turkish Educational System.” This article was picked up by “head∗”
in our search string but is not focused on educational administration and
therefore we eliminated it from our database.) Our final database for analysis
consisted of 109 articles, all of which we saved in the citation management
program Zotero.
We then sought to make sense of what our database of articles suggested
about how the field of comparative education researches educational ad-
ministration. To do this analysis, we returned to the conceptual literature. We
reviewed multiple previously published analytical frameworks on school lead-
ership and education management. Frameworks developed by Hallinger and
Leithwood (1996), Dimmock and Walker (1998, 2000), and Wang et al. (2017)
were the most relevant for our review: Hallinger and Leithwood for its inclu-
sion of “culture” as a primary lens for understanding EDLM; Dimmock and
Walker for explicitly mapping comparative educational administration; and

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 FLESSA ET AL.

Wang et al. for their state-of-the-field overview of EDLM overall. We made a

first attempt to categorize the articles into each of those chosen frameworks
using a separate Excel spreadsheet for each one. However, there was not a
close match between our set of articles and the conceptual categories devel-
oped by other scholars. We concluded that we could not borrow a framework
to understand the conceptual contribution of this body of work; we needed to
develop a conceptual organizer in order to make visible the principles shap-
ing this body of work in these journals from this field. We created the cate-
gories inductively based on a review of all articles. We manually sorted every
article according to its primary focus; we printed out the abstract or intro-
ductory page of each article and physically placed the articles into categories.
Although many articles could have been placed in at least two categories, we
opted to categorize each article under the one topic we judged most relevant
by assessing the weight given it in the full article. We were informed in this
process by work from Foster et al. (2012), who conducted a review of journals
of comparative education to map the field. Like us, they found that each ar-
ticle could be placed in several categories. For example, in their study, an
article about global citizenship education in higher education China could be
placed in a category of citizenship education, of higher education, or of Asia.
Therefore, they decided to work with “mentions” instead of articles, creating
subcategories of articles and thus placing each article in several categories. In
our case, however, since we already had a first filter of “school level leadership”
and had already eliminated articles not connected to leadership or adminis-
tration in K–12 schools, the amount of possible overlap in our categories was
less than what Foster et al. encountered (with the exception of the category of
“context” as we explain in finding 7). By placing articles into only one category,
we gained a clearer understanding of the field’s primary emphases according
to the articles in our sample.
After this sorting of articles, we examined each category for its internal
coherence. In doing so, we discovered categories that did not hold or cate-
gories that needed subdividing. We then conducted a third round of analysis.
We first wrote a sketch of what we thought the categories should be, based on
the previous exercises. We then recategorized the articles physically and once
again, examining each category for internal consistency. This time the cate-
gories held, with the exception of two papers that we recategorized. As a re-
liability check on our approach to coding and categorization, since we had not
read all of the articles fully, we distributed 10 articles among the research team
for full reading, ensuring that each article was reviewed independently by at
least two of the three members of our research team. Our categorization did
not change and thus we concluded that our revision method was effective at
identifying core themes. This interrater check also helped to clarify our use of
terms, ensuring for example that all researchers meant the same thing by
“organizational context” or “principals’ work.” We then held longer discussions,

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attempting to conceptualize the links between categories and the different

possible ways to build the conceptual organizer, based on the ideas in the ar-
ticles. After several iterations, we arrived at a final conceptual model (see fig. 5).

Findings

Our analysis of the 109 articles in our database generated seven findings.
Our first and broadest finding is about the limited scholarship on educational
administration and leadership in comparative education. The remaining
findings describe what we observed in our database of articles.

Finding 1: In an era of growing scholarship on and policy interest in school level

leadership, comparative education journals rarely publish on the topic.

The universe of publications on school leadership in the comparative

education journals that we studied is surprisingly small: an average of less than
one research article per year for the majority of journals in our set. Said an-
other way, if all you knew about school level leadership and administration
came from what you could glean from the comparative education journals,
you would have a disparate and shallow understanding of these concepts or
why they might matter. Based on the publication patterns of a sample of com-
parative education journals, our finding suggests that there is little organized
interest within the field of comparative education for the study of school level
administration or leadership. As a symbolic illustration of this phenomenon
we note that the US-based Comparative and International Education Society
(CIES) has many (31 at our last count from the website) special interest groups
(SIGs) but not one dedicated to school level administration, management, or
leadership. More substantively, other scans of the research literature in com-
parative education have observed a similar phenomenon. Foster et al. (2012)
reviewed 605 articles published in four major comparative education journals
from 2004 to 2008 and concluded that “some topics received little attention
from researchers, with the fewest mentions across the journals including in-
spectorate (less than 1%); administration and leadership (1% each), and eval-
uation/ research (2%)” (2012, 717).
Wolhuter (2008) conducted a “journal analysis of articles published in
Comparative Education Review during the first 50 years of its existence” (323) in
order to clarify the identity of the field of comparative education. The words
“leadership,” “principal,” and “head” do not appear in Wolhuter’s article.
One of the themes identified by Wolhuter is the broad category of “admin-
istration and management,” but there is no specific mention of school level
leaders. However, teachers are singled out as a theme, and that theme has
more articles per issue than does “administration and management” (338–39,
table XVI). We mention these statistics in order to illustrate that comparative
education journals do, in fact, publish research about school-level dynamics

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and the work of school-level professionals; in other words, it’s not the level of
analysis (the school) that explains the lack of attention paid to administrators/
managers/leaders. The substantial body of research examining teachers’ work
in fact makes the absence of studies examining school administration more
visible, and perplexing.
As another illustration, Raby (2010) analyzed the 2009 Comparative Edu-
cation Review bibliography and showed that educational leadership is not one
of the most prominent themes in the field (maximum 34 articles in 2009). By
comparison, more prominent themes included higher education (230 arti-
cles); secondary and youth education (112 articles); teacher education (119 ar-
ticles); gender and sexual orientation (147 articles); and minority, refugee, and
immigrant education (113 articles). Our own synthesis table of the CER bib-
liographies of 2010–14 (see table A1) shows an increase of articles on edu-
cational leadership during those years: 32 articles in 2010, 48 articles in 2011,
53 articles in 2012, 60 articles in 2013, and 82 articles in 2014. However, this
trend does not suggest that educational leadership or administration occupies
a growing proportion of the articles published; every year, the CER bibliog-
raphy grows in number of sources, meaning most topics are showing similar
growth (Easton 2017). As evident in table A1, educational leadership is not
a prevalent topic in comparison to other themes in the CER bibliographies
of 2010–14.
In short, other reviews of the comparative education scholarship are con-
sistent with our systematic review’s finding: namely that the record of publica-
tion from a sample of peer reviewed comparative education journals illustrates
that educational administration and leadership research is published rarely.
This publishing record suggests that the field of comparative education inves-
tigates educational administration and school level leadership rarely and un-
systematically, and/or has little interest in publishing such studies.

Finding 2: There are very few articles about school level leadership each year in
comparative education journals; when there are more, special issues are usually
responsible.

One way that research on school administration and leadership enters our
set of journals is via special issues; special issues provide a substantial number of
the articles in our set, and they also help explain some of the regional emphases
we see. We found six special issues (1996, 1998, 2000, 2009, 2014, 2015), two of
which come from the same journal (Asia Pacific Journal of Education). As seen in
figure 2, there are spikes in publications in the years 1996, 1998, 2000, 2009,
2014, 2015, and 2016. All of these years coincide with the publication of special
issues, except for 2016. We cannot yet explain this 2016 spike.
The existence of special issues is an interesting counterpoint to our earlier
observation that CIES has no special interest group on school leadership or ad-
ministration. Special issues de facto illustrate that there is indeed some interest,

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FIG. 2.—Trends in years of publication. A color version of this figure is available online.

somewhere in the scholarly community, in school level leadership, but they also
illustrate that the topic is peripheral enough to the central emphasis of a journal
that a special focus is necessary in the first place. Special issues can break new
ground by centering work that might otherwise be considered marginal to the
larger literature base. They direct readers’ attention to a curated and focused set
of articles and point to a scholarly community engaged with the topic. Special
issues reflect a confluence between the initiative of guest editors and the support
(or consent) of a journal’s editorial board. Our systematic review leads us to
conclude that special issues have opened up new spaces for the examination of
K–12 educational administration in comparative context. Absent special issues,
the database of EDLM articles would be even more sparse.

Finding 3: A small set of scholars (six) have produced almost a third (31 percent)
of our data set.

Although our data set contains a wide range of scholars, some researchers
were more prominent. Dimmock and Walker have published the most arti-
cles at the intersection of school level leadership and comparative education
(seven articles each, several written together). In addition to having published
the most articles in our set, they have also published some of the most influ-
ential, such as introductions to special issues. Other prominent authors, those
who published three or more articles, are Bush (six articles), Hallinger (four
articles), Harris (three articles), and Oplatka (three articles). As a group, these
authors have published 30 articles, which accounts for 28 percent of our data
set. By publication count they have done the most visible work to advance the
consideration of EDLM in comparative education journals.

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 FLESSA ET AL.

The baseline literature on comparative educational administration is

formed by the work of these six scholars. Importantly, for our argument, these
scholars’ academic homes are more identified with educational administra-
tion, management, and leadership than they are with comparative education
per se. Said a different way, this research core shows EDLM researchers pub-
lishing in comparative education journals, not comparativists taking on school
leadership, management, or administration. Therefore, it is still an open ques-
tion what we could learn about school level administration and leadership,
across the globe, if more comparative education scholars began to research this
field and/or publish work in these journals.

Finding 4: Most work is single-system studies.

Our data set shows that most studies were single country/education sys-
tem studies. In our data set of 109 articles, we found articles addressing
75 different education systems. There were 75 single country/education sys-
tem studies, 17 studies comparing two or more countries/education systems,
and 10 studies that spoke to a region/continent/ “type” of country (i.e., “de-
veloping countries”). There were also seven articles that were not geographi-
cally bound (e.g., a discussion about how context influences leadership). Most
education systems are represented in only one study in our set. However, cer-
tain education systems appeared in more articles. In figure 3, we show the single
education systems around the world about which there were more than two
articles. The education systems most represented in our set were Hong Kong
(eight), China (eight), and Israel (six).

FIG. 3.—Articles per education system. A color version of this figure is available online.

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As table 1 shows, there were 17 studies that explicitly compared school

leadership in two or more education systems. This table shows a different
representation of countries, with the UK the most prevalent. We understand
this set of comparisons to be a mixed bag—some are cross-national, some are
city comparisons—but we include the specifics here to illustrate the idiosyn-
cratic way that comparisons of EDLM emerge in this sample of comparative
education journals. We do not discern a unifying theory or noteworthy pat-
tern that could explain this diffuse set of small-scale comparisons.
There were also 10 studies that spoke to a region, continent or “type” of
country: Asia Pacific (two), Caribbean (one), developing countries (one), East
Asia (one), East and Southeast Asia (one), and Europe (four).
Our finding here is consistent with what other reviews in comparative
education have found: single system/country studies are more common in
the field of comparative education than are studies comparing two or more
education systems/countries. For example, Foster et al. (2012), who mapped
the research of 605 articles published in 2004–8 in four major comparative
and international journals, found that 77 percent had a single country or
regional focus, and 21 percent were concerned with several countries (others
were not focused on a geographical region).

Finding 5: East Asia, Europe, and North America are well represented in our data-
base; studies of educational leadership in all other regions of the world are under-
represented in these comparative education journals.

The papers in our database highlight some of the education systems from
East Asia, Europe, and North America. However, other regions of the world
are less represented. For example, there are only three articles from Latin

TABLE 1
COMPARISON OF TWO OR MORE E DUCATION S YSTEMS

Australia, Malaysia, and South Korea

China and England
England and South Africa
England, Wales, and Singapore
Finland and Singapore
Germany and United States
Ghana and Tanzania
Greece and Cyprus
Honduras and Guatemala
Israel and Hong Kong
Israel and Turkey
London, New York City, and Toronto
New Zealand and United States
Singapore and United Kingdom
Sweden, Ontario, and Texas
Thailand and United States
United States and Turkey

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 FLESSA ET AL.

America in our data set. Two of them are from Chile, and one of them is a
comparison of Honduras and Guatemala.
Some reviews of comparative and international education as a whole
suggest similar findings in terms of the distribution of research across geo-
graphical regions, while others do not. Foster et al. (2012, who mapped the
research of 605 articles published in 2004–8) wrote, “We found only the
Middle East to have received limited attention (3% of the articles), slightly
more than North America (2%), and Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania
(1%). Africa was the focus of 24% of the articles (the highest percentage of
any region), and Latin America 8%” (722). It seems further research is war-
ranted to untangle the relationship between topical and regional emphases
and more importantly, to understand the meaning of those trends.

Finding 6: One fourth of the articles are conceptual; three fourths are empirical.
Of the empirical articles, more than half are qualitative.

The articles in our database utilized a variety of methods, including inter-

view studies, ethnographies, surveys, program evaluations, “large n” quantitative
studies, action research, literature reviews, and document analyses. There were
several conceptual papers (31 percent of our data set), which either developed
theory or made recommendations for action. As shown in figure 4, of the em-
pirical papers (69 percent of the data set), 54.67 percent were qualitative,
22.67 percent were mixed methods, and 22.67 percent were quantitative. This
evidence of research diversity suggests that a methodology filter is not what’s keep-
ing school level leadership research out of the comparative education journals;

FIG. 4.—Percentage of articles using each method. A color version of this figure is available online.

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we infer that the limited attention given educational administration is more

likely attributable to subject area preferences rather than methodological ones.

Finding 7: Although the database of articles examining school level leadership be-
tween 1995 and 2018 is smaller than we might have hoped, it does provide the
building blocks for a conceptual organizer for educational leadership in comparative
context.

Finding 7 is a conceptual organizer. Our goal is to present, in a straight-

forward visual, the various levels of analysis and topics we encountered in
our review of EDLM scholarship in comparative education journals. The con-
centric circles of figure 5 move inward from the broadest level of analysis (rel-
evance of global education ideas to EDLM) to the most fine-grained (EDLM
research on leaders’ day-to-day work and career trajectories in different
contexts).
In our work we have attended to what Hallinger (2014) has called the
“bricks and mortar” of systematic reviews: “the conceptual framework . . . can
be likened to bricks that contribute to the structural integrity of a research
review. Mortar is represented by the quality of inquiry, and data synthesis
applied in a review paper. Both are necessary to construct a sound review of
research” (569). We developed a conceptual organizer showing the relation-
ships between categories.
Overall, across the 23-year period we focus on here, 10 major topics on
school leadership emerge in the comparative education literature: (1) be-
coming a principal, (2) training and preparation, (3) principals’ roles and
styles, (4) leadership and student outcomes, (5) principals’ performance eval-
uation and standards, (6) leadership succession, (7) identity and career path,
(8) organizational structure and culture, (9) societal culture and context, and
(10) global ideas and culture. Although the majority of the articles in our da-
tabase dealt in some way with context, we only placed articles in this category
for which context was the primary focus. Next to each theme is a number in
parenthesis. This number shows the number of articles from our data set that
we categorized under that theme. Returning to our examples, we categorized
24 articles of our data set under “societal culture and context,” as this was their
main emphasis. We found only two articles about the topic of succession.

Center of the Conceptual Organizer

In the center of the conceptual organizer, we placed together articles
related to the principals’ profession; we called this section “leaders’ trajec-
tory.” First, there is a sequence of five stages related to the professional jour-
ney: becoming a principal, training and preparation, roles and leadership
styles, principals’ performance evaluation, and succession. Although not di-
rectly part of the principals’ professional trajectory, principals’ practice is
usually oriented toward achieving certain school outcomes. There were also

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 FLESSA ET AL.

FIG. 5.—Conceptual organizer

10 articles related to principals’ identities and career paths. We graphically

placed these under the stages of the principals’ professional trajectory with
arrows to show that these themes were present in all stages. In total, 68 articles
(out of 109) are included in these seven categories. The core of EDLM re-
search published in comparative education journals is illustrated in the core
of our conceptual organizer.
The category of “becoming a principal” includes articles on motivation
and perceived barriers to becoming a school principal, as well as perceptions
of challenges and problems facing beginning or newly appointed principals.
Articles in the category of “training and preparation” focus mostly in principal
preparation policies and strategies either in single education systems or by

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comparing various education systems within one geographic region or multi-

ple regions. It also includes articles on principals’ perception of training pro-
grams, the effectiveness of mentoring on principal training, support groups for
principals, school administrators’ perceptions of barriers to teacher practi-
cum scheme and also training in specialized aspects such as system thinking,
driving the goals of Education for All, or developing distributed leadership.
Two articles specifically analyze principal’s training programs within wider
context of globalization and new public management.
“Roles and leadership styles” is one of the categories with the largest
number of articles (27). This category comprises 17 articles on the role of school
principals in different aspects of school life such as drastically expanding
enrolment, curriculum reform, professional learning communities (PLCs), use
of data for decision making, democracy and social justice, teacher performance,
reforms in teaching and learning, and education privatization. There are 10 ar-
ticles on leadership styles: how societal culture shapes leadership styles in dif-
ferent countries; approaches to instructional leadership and management;
principal networks; leadership style appropriate to school-based management
(SBM) schools; gender-based leadership stereotypes and styles of women school
principals; and principals’ narcissism and its effect on school leadership.
The category of “principals’ performance evaluation” includes only four
articles, one on professional standards for school principals and three on prin-
cipals’ performance evaluation. There are two articles on principal succession,
one focusing on the effects of principal leadership changes and another on
succession planning and leadership development. Surprising in an era of grow-
ing standardized testing accountability, only two articles address issues of school
leadership and student outcomes.
Finally, there is one category that comprises 10 articles addressing issues
of identity and career path of school principals. One explores how background,
identities, and experiences of school leaders in Jamaica shape their profes-
sional trajectories. The remaining nine categories refer to barriers and chal-
lenges in women principals’ career paths in education systems such as France,
Greece, Hong Kong, South Africa, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Outer Rings of the Conceptual Organizer

As shown in our conceptual organizer, the principal profession categories
are influenced by multiple contextual layers. A first layer is related to the
organizational culture and context of schools, a second layer is related to the
larger social and cultural context countrywide, and finally the most external
layer has to do with global ideas and culture influencing all other layers. These
contextual layers may have multiple levels of influence on the different
stages/aspects of the school principal profession.
The category of “organizational context and culture” includes nine
articles that focus on different forms of decentralised school governance

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experiences in different countries. Five articles analyze different aspects of

school-based management (SBM) such as contextual factors affecting SBM
implementation, perceptions of different stakeholders, effects on decision-
making processes and challenges linked to principals’ training on SBM. Two
articles discuss the challenges and advantages of community-based partici-
pation for school decision-making processes. One article explores the po-
tential of decentralized school governance in improving social cohesion. Fi-
nally, one article explores the perceptions of school effectiveness among
parents, students, teachers, and principals.
“Societal culture and context” is the other category with the highest
number of articles (24). Most of the articles in this category make a case for
the need to use societal culture as a lens to better understand school lead-
ership practices and point out a limited attention to contextual or cultural
considerations in the current study of leadership in schools. Five conceptual
articles discuss the use of societal culture as an explanatory tool in the field of
educational leadership and propose the use of specific frameworks to inves-
tigate the influence of culture. Some of these articles are introductions to
special issues; there are three special issues that specifically address the in-
fluence of societal culture on school leadership.
The rest of the articles within this category are empirical (19). Within this
group, five articles study issues of school leadership in specific geographical
contexts and settings: rural, Indigenous, violent conflict, postsocialist context,
and fragile states. Seven articles offer cross-cultural analysis comparing dif-
ferent aspects of school leadership between two different countries, within
regions in one country, and between different cultural traditions. The aspects
that are explored are managing change, measurement of school principals’
leadership skills, management practices, and school principals’ behaviors.
Other empirical articles address issues of gender and culture (referring ex-
plicitly to patriarchal culture) in educational management, the effects of Hong
Kong’s change of sovereignty on school administration, and the influence of
different stages of Chinese culture on school leadership. One special issue is
entirely devoted to the study of educational management in China with articles
ranging from management processes in kindergarten and primary level edu-
cation to women’s participation in educational management in one specific
province in China.
Finally, the category “global ideas and culture” contains eight articles.
Four of these articles are conceptual. One of them aims to understand how
global ideas and societal culture interact to influence school leadership at the
local level, another is a study on the impact of Western-centric approaches to
values, the third explores leadership in educational administration in the
Asian context, and the fourth seeks to build an understanding of school
leadership across cultures. There are also three articles that explore knowl-
edge production in educational leadership in different contexts. Finally,

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there is one study describing the characteristics and reality of principalship in

developing countries.
The two last categories of the conceptual organizer—“societal culture and
context” and “global ideas and culture”—might seem to overlap. However, we
saw a clear distinction in our data set. Articles that we categorized as “societal
culture and context” made reference to the culture within a nation-state or
similarly bounded geographical location. On the other hand, articles that we
placed in the category of “global ideas and culture” referred to global ideas
and knowledge production worldwide, or ideas from a large area of the world,
such as “Western” ideas or “the developing world.” In other words, the dif-
ference between both categories is the emphasis on specific geographical
contexts versus a global discourse.

What the Field of Comparative Education Has to Say about School Level Leadership
What picture of school level leadership emerges from a close examination
of the publications from this sample of comparative education journals? A
reader seeking to understand how best to make sense of this set of articles can
look in three directions: at our conceptual organizer, at a comparison of these
articles with previous EDLM frameworks, and at a comparison of these articles
with key topics in educational administration for the past 50 years.

Our Conceptual Organizer

By organizing the articles from out database thematically, we see two
primary emphases: (1) research on the principal’s practice (which includes
roles and styles of school principals) and (2) research examining the role of
societal culture and context play in school leadership. It appears that com-
parative education journals, when they engage with school level administra-
tion at all, are primarily interested in describing the work principals do, and
how contexts affect that work. We see surprisingly little that examines the
impact of school leadership on policy implementation, or on school effec-
tiveness, or on core school-level processes. We see little work about how or why
school level leadership matters.

EDLM Frameworks
The educational administration frameworks we examined in parallel to
our collection of articles from the comparative education journals all em-
phasize in some way or another the learning outcomes, or as Dimmock and
Walker (2000) phrase it, the “core business” (139) of school leadership: cur-
riculum, teaching, and learning. We find a disjuncture between our database
of articles and the EDLM frameworks; only a few articles of our data set fo-
cused on curriculum, teaching, and learning, focusing instead on the pro-
fessional trajectory of school level leaders and on global ideas and culture.
This pattern is noteworthy because EDLM researchers and policy makers have

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 FLESSA ET AL.

popularized the concepts “instructional leadership” and leadership of the

“instructional core” (City et al. 2009) for decades, and this body of research
has “some convincing empirical evidence” (see Bush 2018, 67).

Comparison with the Main Topics in Educational Administration in the Last 50 Years
We include below a brief reflection of how Wang et al.’s (2017) findings
from the field of educational administration compare to the comparative
education literature we collected. Using automated text data mining with
probabilistic latent topic models, Wang et al. (2017) identified the 19 most
common topics in all articles from journal of the Educational Administration
Quarterly from 1965 to 2014. Our analysis categorizes Wang et al.’s (2017)
19 topics into three groups: ones for which we found no corresponding ar-
ticles in our data set, ones for which we found only one or two articles in our
data set and ones for which we found many articles in our data set.
For four of Wang et al.’s EDLM categories, we found no corresponding
articles in our data set of articles on educational leadership in comparative
education. We found no articles on the topics of “district collective bargain-
ing,” “trust,” “legal perspective and accountability” (but we did find two re-
lated to accountability), or “education finance”.
For six of Wang et al.’s EDLM categories, we found only a few corre-
sponding articles in our data set of articles on educational leadership in
comparative education. We found one article on “school effectiveness” and
only a couple of articles related to leadership styles (not specifically “teaching
and instructional leadership”) and “female leadership”. In terms of “episte-
mology of educational leadership,” we found a couple of articles questioning
Western/Anglophone paradigms.
Similarly to Wang et al. (2017), we also found a higher proportion of our
data set focused on topics of “inequities and social justice,” “organizational
studies,” “international context,” “policy making and government,” “school
leadership preparation and development,” and “teacher recruitment and
retention.”

Discussion

Thus far in this article we have demonstrated that journals in the field
of comparative education have, to date, engaged educational administration
research minimally, even though educational policy makers worldwide are in-
terested in the connection between school leadership, school reform, and
school improvement. To cite one example from the gray literature that may
be familiar to some readers, the OECD published two volumes about im-
proving school leadership in 2008 with the goal of informing ways to improve
school and system results and followed up with tool kits for policy makers and
practitioners (OECD 2008). We see little systematic engagement of this sort

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in the peer-reviewed literature in our sample. It is certainly possible that, as

with Wang et al. (2017), our review of peer-reviewed journals “focused on the
concerns of researchers rather than those of practitioners in educational
leadership” (313). The open question that we discuss below is why this phe-
nomenon is worth trying to understand.
We see this situation primarily as one of missed opportunity: a connection
between the fields of comparative education and educational administration
would likely be mutually beneficial. The growing interest in international, more
contextually based studies of school leadership would benefit from engage-
ment with the theoretical knowledge base from comparative education and
would tackle both technical and philosophical questions. What is worth com-
paring about school leadership? Should scholars be more curious about simi-
larities in school leaders’ behaviors across borders, or the differences? Further-
more, the contextually rich, geographically diverse studies of schooling found
in comparative education could benefit from the deep knowledge of school
level leadership, policy implementation, and organizational development
found in educational administration. Given the global growth of the educa-
tion sector and a shared aspiration for improved schooling outcomes, more
scholarship in comparative education journals on school level leadership
seems warranted.
These 11 English language comparative education journals both reflect
and shape the academic field, and the knowledge base we see here shows min-
imal engagement with school-level administrative processes. One does not
have to be a leadership advocate to conclude that knowing more about how
policies—from curriculum to teacher hiring and support—are implemented
at the school level in very different contexts would be useful for and of in-
terest to comparativists. How important is instructional leadership? Trust?
Teaching versus managerial expertise? Formal versus informal preparation?
School leaders who work autonomously and compete versus school leaders
who are aligned and collaborate? Another way to make this point is to say that
studies of school level leadership—how that work is changing or implicated in
contemporary policies and reforms—can be a window onto the very large-scale,
global trends that some comparativists care deeply about. This point was made
two decades ago by Dimmock and Walker (1998, 2000) who advocated for a
“cross-cultural comparative approach to school leadership and management”
(by which they meant comparisons between countries) and named this new
branch “comparative and international educational leadership and manage-
ment.” We see little evidence that comparative education has taken up this call.
Specifically, the field of comparative education would benefit from
studying school level leadership because it is key to understanding policy
implementation and school improvement. As Bryk et al. have noted, “school
leadership sits in the first position” (2010, 197) and “the school principal . . .
orchestrates the collaborative process of school transformation” (2010,

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203). Leithwood et al. (2019, 2) conclude that “while moderate in size, [the]
leadership effect is vital to the success of most school improvement efforts.”
Sell (2016) has argued that comparative education’s main orientation is
melioristic: most of its research seeks to improve education. She writes, “the
highest frequency of pragmatic articles overall (73%) . . . is unsurprising given
its explicit connection to the melioristic (specifically, development-related)
aim of CIE” (Sell 2016, 54). Given that comparative education so rarely
researches school level leadership, it is missing a key piece to understanding
policy implementation and school improvement. Understanding the implicit
and explicit theories of action behind any school reform, and examining the
ways they influence administrators’ day-to-day work, both seem like topics
solidly at home in comparative education.
But why should EDLM scholars care about topics neglected by this adja-
cent field? Why not just publish international work in the EDLM journals?
Although there is a growing call for more international and comparative
perspectives in EDLM, it is not necessarily the case that scholars trained in
educational administration will inherently have the skill set necessary to build
a comparative knowledge base. At the risk of sounding naïve, we believe it likely
that researchers who locate their work in comparative education likely have the
methodological and theoretical grounding to do high quality comparisons.
Pashiardis and Johansson (2016) have argued that “it is increasingly ob-
vious that more research concerning the needs of educational leaders within a
specific cultural context is definitely necessary in order to prepare successful
and effective school leaders” (12). Harris et al. (2016) have likewise cautioned
against blind policy borrowing from one country to another, noting that what
counts as successful leadership will always be “culturally and contextually de-
fined” (8). Part of the challenge developing these contextual understandings
is the fact that, as Bush (2014) has argued, “the literature on educational lead-
ership and management is dominated by authors from the United States, United
Kingdom, and Australia” (787), meaning local perspectives on educational ad-
ministration are underrepresented for most of the globe. As Harris and Jones
(2015) put it, “authentic comparative studies are imperative, if the voices of those
working in very different countries, contexts and diverse educational settings
are to be heard and most importantly, recognized” (316). Are not the com-
parative education journals best positioned to publish those “authentic com-
parative studies”? The field of comparative education seems like the right place
to turn for a more contextually rich study of school leadership because one of
comparative education’s driving purposes is providing deep contextual knowl-
edge. Sell (2016) conducted a review of all of the articles published in four main
comparative education journals, with the aim for exploring trends in the pur-
poses of comparative education research. She finds that across the four main
journals, and over the 2000–2012 time period, “context” is the most significant
category. She concludes that “providing deep contextual knowledge of a specific

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topic is the most common research purpose across the four studied CIE jour-
nals—over 79% of articles are members in this category” (54–55).
Comparativists are experts in context; EDLM scholars are experts in ed-
ucational management at the school level. We see little theoretical, episte-
mological, or empirical justification for the distance between the two scholarly
traditions suggested by the limited attention to EDLM found in comparative
education journals. To date, EDLM researchers and journals have shown
more interest in comparative work than the comparativists in EDLM, sug-
gesting that a greater portion of the bridging work to be done lies with the field
of comparative education. Part of that work is to articulate a research agenda.
How school leaders operate in schools remains, in many ways, a “black
box,” where processes and practices of leadership and management, and
their impacts, are assumed to exist but are understudied. As Busemeyer and
Trampusch (2011) write, “one way to open these black boxes could be to an-
alyze in more detail the governance of education systems in a comparative
perspective, i.e., the way public policies impact on the distribution of authority
and power within educational institutions and how, in turn, this distribution
of power feeds back into educational policy making” (433). We envision a
comparative research agenda driven by questions as yet underexplored by the
database of articles we have discussed.
Using Wang et al. (2017), we identified several gaps in the EDLM litera-
ture in comparative educational journals. These gaps are an obvious addi-
tional place to start with a research agenda: the role of trust in leadership,
more work on leadership and accountability, the relationships between school
administrators and organized labor/teachers unions, and the relationship be-
tween school leadership and school effectiveness.
Our finding 5 showed that there is little baseline knowledge of EDLM in
these comparative education journals for most of the world, beyond East Asia,
Europe, and North America. Therefore, foundational to expanding compa-
rative education’s grasp of EDLM must be an expansion beyond these regions
to establish a baseline understanding in the research literature of what school
leadership is for; who school leaders are; how they do their work; and how, if at
all, any of that work matters. Some globally relevant questions that could
shape a more expansive research agenda include:

• Although the levels of education and preparation for the job vary enor-
mously, the figure of “schoolteacher” and the core responsibilities of “teach-
ing” are recognizably similar across contexts. Is the same true for “principal”
(or “head” or “leader”)?
• How are the core administrative tasks at the school level accomplished,
and by whom? Across the world, small schools, particularly in rural areas,
function without any specially titled administrator. Who are “school lead-
ers” in such contexts?

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 FLESSA ET AL.

• Policy makers globally have invested in the principalship as a tool to de-

liver a range of policy goals. Is that investment equally rewarded in all
parts of the globe? What explains the variations in the potential of school
level leadership to deliver preferred policies? How do school leaders re-
spond to national, local, and nongovernmental (NGO) education initia-
tives and priorities, such as testing/accountability?
• School administration is a career path. What incentives, regulations, and
assumptions shape that career path in different contexts, and with what
impacts on individuals or schools or systems? What combination of formal
and informal learning opportunities prepare school leaders for the job?
What processes shape the recruitment and retention of school leaders? In
her introduction to a book about preparation and development of school
leaders in Africa, Moorosi (2020) has noted “preparatory training is not a
universal phenomenon . . . in some contexts no training is provided or is
provided long after incumbents have taken office, in which case the ret-
rospective training becomes part of induction and/or ongoing profes-
sional development. In such contexts, research ought to be asking different
questions that aim to unearth, understand, and develop the actual practices
that school leaders go through to develop skills, knowledge, and dispo-
sitions that given them the confidence to lead and manage schools” (2).
• The growth of private schooling, especially but not limited to the Global
South, is driven by a range of factors including assumptions about market-
driven responsiveness. Are school leaders in different sectors doing similar
jobs or different jobs, when in one sector they are agents of the state and
in another managers of a business? Adjacent to this work would be an ex-
amination of the ways that school leadership emerges in centralized versus
decentralized educational policy contexts.
• In a context of growing migration and rapid demographic change, how
are school leaders’ roles changing or evolving? What does “culturally re-
sponsive school leadership” (Khalifa, Gooden, and Davis 2016) look like
in different and changing contexts worldwide? Under what conditions
does school leadership facilitate community empowerment and self-
determination, and when is it an obstacle?
• To what degree does an examination of school level leaders’ work enable
researchers to understand the relationship between social change and
school change?

Conclusion

The prevalence of bibliographic reviews of comparative education schol-

arship suggests that the field engages in an active and ongoing process of self-
definition. Our review of the EDLM literature contributes to that scholarship by
seeking to understand the scope, depth, and conceptual boundaries of research
on school level leadership embarked upon within the field of comparative

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education. As researchers committed to the still-nascent field of “comparative

international educational leadership and administration” we have made a
normative argument that more attention to school leadership would be to the
benefit of both sides of the EDLM/comparative education divide. There is
comparative work being done; we just did not find much of it in the com-
parative education journals. But a gap in the literature is not in itself an ar-
gument that research is needed.
Our concern at its most basic is that if articles published in comparative
education journals represent the field’s priorities, then, at the moment, these
priorities do not include EDLM. Comparative education scholars who care
about the school level seem to have neglected to build a robust body of work
that examines, explains, and investigates the role that administrators play in
the very school level dynamics they prioritize in their research. What is left
behind is an incomplete picture of how schools work (or don’t work), as well
as what policy levers are best positioned to make change. Absent a conceptual
organizer to illustrate how school administration assists in or obstructs school
level dynamics that improve teaching and learning, for example, or how ad-
ministrators build bridges or buffer the school’s priorities from those of gov-
ernment or community, researchers may be left either with nothing to say
about administration at all or something so broad (“leadership matters”) as to be
completely unhelpful.
Painting a more complete picture will require more than a list of recom-
mendations from self-interested EDLM scholars like ourselves. We all respond to
incentives, and the incentives necessary for building a body of work in com-
parative educational administration include: researchers who will be rewarded
by their departments for doing this kind of work, comparative education journals
interested in publishing this work, peers to assess the quality and importance of
this work, and students interested in being mentored into this work in courses
and programs. Cross-national gray literature increasingly suggests that policy
makers are interested in contextually informed research on the topic of school
leadership. Comparative education’s responsiveness to this policy window, and
the scholarly field’s relevance in these discussions, appears limited; therefore,
so too is its ability to influence the direction new leadership initiatives will
take.

Appendix

TABLE A1
COMPARISON OF CER BIBLIOGRAPHIES (2010–14)

2014 2013 2012 2011 2010

Levels and types of education:
Early childhood and primary education 222 144 104 85 104
Secondary and youth education 103 65 65 69 70
Technical-vocational education, community college and workplace 71 49 75 35 52
learning

Comparative Education Review 441

Table A1 (Continued )

2014 2013 2012 2011 2010

Higher and continuing professional education 404 215 463 363 243
Adult education, adult literacy, and lifelong learning 59 111 48
Adult, rural, literacy, nonformal, lifelong, and popular education: 55 58
Teacher education and training 215 189 156 169 82
Special education 77 39 63 60 50
Immigrant, migrant and refugee education 65 108 29 63 48
Student mobility: 41 30
English as a second or foreign language 58 55
Professional concerns and methods:
Comparative education: theories and studies 181 86 147
Professional concerns and methods. comparative education 106 69
Theory and research methods 68 10 22
Curriculum and instruction (and assessment, before 2012) 173 144 118 78 107
Educational leadership 82 60 53 48 32
Educational planning, development, and international assistance 122 40 58 45 17
Internationalization and study abroad 73 33 46
Internationalizing the curriculum and institution 19
Study abroad and international students 51
Evaluation and policy analysis 119 86 19 30 24
Testing and assessment 89 61
Educational technology and online learning 104 97 172 136 71
Thematic foci in education:
Education and language 226 45
Education and religion 65 35 52 51
Education for sustainable development 36 58 22 28 35
Education, health, and disability 33 51
Educational economics and finance 63 40
Ethnicity, race, and class 82 88 48 27 49
Gender and sexuality 121 145 105 81 95
History and philosophy of education 22
Human rights and citizenship education (before children, 16 43 70 76 33
citizenship, and human rights)
Multicultural and Indigenous education 101
Indigenous education 43 23 27 17
Multicultural and multilingual education 138 237 67 75
Rural education 17
General 17 31 14
World regions:
Australia and the Pacific Basin 37 23 20 21 27
Central, South, and Southeast Asia 39 30 29 39
East Asia 61 27 55 102
Europe 77 112 175
Europe and Russia 28
Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine 11 75
Europe, North America, and Russia 119
Latin America and the Caribbean 13 20 20 20 34
Africa 46 35 31 75
Mediterranean, Balkans, Trans-Caucasus, Middle East, 37 63 39
and North Africa
Middle East and North Africa 24 14
Sub-Saharan Africa 71
NOTE.—CER bibliographies did not maintain consistent categories every year. For example, the category “Student
mobility” was only included in years 2011 and 2012. For other years, there was only the category “Immigrant, mi-
grant and refugee education.” Therefore, in our table we show separate numbers only for “student mobility” in 2011
and 2012. We did not change the names of the categories or merge categories ourselves, only listed them to present
them visually together.
SOURCES.—“CIES Bibliography 2010,” Comparative Education Review 55, no. S3 (2011): S1–S140, https://doi.org
/10.1086/660998; “CIES Bibliography 2011,” Comparative Education Review 56, no. S3 (2012): S1–S139, https://doi.org
/10.1086/666512; “CIES Bibliography 2012,” Comparative Education Review 57, no. S2 (2013): S1–S162, https://doi.org/10.1086
/670266; “CIES Bibliography 2013,” Comparative Education Review 58, no. S3 (2014): S1–S165, https://doi.org/10.1086/677294;
“CIES Bibliography 2014,” Comparative Education Review 59, no. S4 (2015): S1–S228, https://doi.org/10.1086/684093.
 EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH IN COMPARATIVE EDUCATION, 1995–2018

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