School leadership in Latin America: research and policy trends

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of school leadership research and policy trends in Latin America. The storyline of our chapter is as follows: globally there is a shared understanding that leadership matters for school improvement, and school leadership development is an important system responsibility. However, outside the Global North the school leadership research base is nascent and uneven. This means that although much school leadership research concludes that context matters, in many regions of the Global South international/borrowed policies and leadership frameworks dominate. In this paper we highlight the following tension in Latin America specifically: there are two trends that are true simultaneously, namely that the knowledge base is thin and uneven across countries and/but there is growing interest in school leadership among researchers and policymakers in who leaders are, what they do and with what impact, and how systems recruit, support, and evaluate them. This chapter is based on our work originally published in a first-of-its-kind Special Issue on Latin America of Educational Management Administration and Leadership (Flessa et al., 2018). That review covered 2000–2016. As we prepared this chapter, we returned to the scholarly databases to see if our original conclusions would hold in the face of new research published between 2016 and 2021. We believe that they do.