Editorial

Citation

Ross Thomas, A. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 48 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jea.2010.07448baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Educational Administration, Volume 48, Issue 2

Emerald awards

As this issue goes to press (December 2009) the Editor and members of the Editorial Advisory Board are engaged in determining winners of several awards offered by our publisher, Emerald. The first of these, and the longest-standing, is the W.G. Walker Outstanding Paper Award. This will be made to the author(s) of the article published in Volume 47, 2009, deemed by EAB members to be the most outstanding contribution to our field. As Editor, and with guidance from some EAB members, I have circulated a ballot paper on which are short-listed eight articles. Board members have been asked to indicate and rank those they consider to be the best three papers published. Authors whose papers have been nominated will shortly be advised of such. A decision on the award will be made by the end of January 2010 and details will appear in a subsequent issue of the Journal. Board members whose work has been published in the Journal are ineligible for the award.

All Editors of the many journals in the Emerald portfolio are invited to nominate an outstanding special issue that they published in 2009. This I plan to do – the Journal published two exceptional special or thematic issues during the year. Two new awards will also attract my attention. The first of these is for an outstanding doctoral dissertation in our field and completed within the past year. A total of 15 nominations have been received and the ranking of these excellent contributions is proving far from simple. I have also nominated an article published in Vol. 47 for the newly-established Social Impact Award.

Details of these new awards will also appear in a later issue of the Journal.

Reviewers

Members of the Editorial Advisory Board contribute to the evaluation of manuscripts submitted to the Journal. As has been mentioned previously, submissions are evaluated by three readers who, in virtually all cases, are drawn from three different countries. To assist in this major and onerous task many others prominent in our field are requested to act as evaluators. It has been particularly rewarding for me to record the generosity and promptness of these readers who have contributed to the Journal’s operation. As a gesture of appreciation and thanks I include elsewhere in this issue a listing of those who have in recent times acted as evaluators.

This issue

Six articles are published in this issue of the Journal. The contributing authors are located in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Israel and the USA.

In the first article Canadian authors Langlois and Lapointe report on a three-year action-research project that followed the development of a training program based on ethics as a reflective critical capacity and on Starratt’s three-dimensional model. The results of the study suggest promising additions to training programs for future educational leaders.

Shapira-Lishchinsky and Rosenblatt next report on data collected from over 1000 Israeli teachers in order to examine the relationships between school climates and teacher absences. Results suggest that principals may reduce absences by creating an ethical school climate focused on caring and clear and just rules and procedures.

The Australian federal government’s increasing intervention in schooling since the 1980s has provided the incentive for the third article in this issue. Cranston, Kimber, Mulford, Reid and Keating have completed an extensive analysis of documentation to reveal that, during this time, the ambit of schooling has narrowed to that which gives primacy of purpose to highlighting economic orientations (social efficiency) and private purposes (social mobility). Of concern to the authors is the concomitant shift away from public purposes (democratic equality).

A small sample of school districts in the USA provided the basis for the following article by Brazer, Rich and Ross. The authors’ study examined closely the decision-making processes of district superintendents. Although they worked with committees in many different ways all decisions made tended to be those the superintendents had favoured. Furthermore, once decisions were made collaboration ceased as the implementation phase followed.

Primary schools in Cyprus provided the sources of data for the next study reported by Kythreotis, Pashiardis and Kyriakides. The authors examined the models of direct and indirect effects of principals’ leadership styles on students’ academic achievement in Greek Language and Mathematics. Some support was found for the former model in which academic gains were found to be related to five school-level factors including the principal’s human resource leadership style. Three dimensions of learning culture were also found to significantly influence student achievement in each subject.

The final article has been contributed by Zhong and Ehrich and provides insights into two dimensions of leadership used by two “exemplary” female principals in mainland China. Although of very limited sample size the article does succeed in illuminating school leadership practices in the light of critical contextual factors such as contemporary and traditional Chinese culture and each school’s organizational context.

Seven book reviews complete this issue.

A. Ross Thomas