School Leadership Succession and the Challenges of Change
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Throughout the Western world, the fallout from the standards/standardization agenda has resulted in potential leaders questioning educational leadership as a career path. Moreover, the aging of the baby boom generation has created a shortage of qualified principals in many educational jurisdictions. Policy makers have responded to these twin pressures by initiating major programs to identify, recruit, and prepare future leaders. Leadership succession, whether planned or unplanned, has become an accelerated and cumulative process that is including people of increasing levels of inexperience. Succession is now a chronic process rather than an episodic crisis. Purpose: This article argues that succession is not the key issue. What is crucial is the degree of autonomy that principals can exercise on behalf of their school community. Findings: During the 30 years of the Change Over Time? study (described elsewhere), we have seen this autonomy eroded to the point that leaders have become managers of systems’ agendas rather than serving their schools and students. Staff members have become cynical about both leaders and leadership succession in the face of cumulative and accelerated succession and perceived changes in their principals’ roles and obligations—increasing the degree of resistance to change. Only when young people begin to see that leadership roles in schools once again make a difference to students learning not just test scores, then quality leaders will emerge and effective succession planning policies developed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it