Margaret Grogan

This groundbreaking book presents a new way of looking at leadership that is anchored in research on women leaders in education. The authors examine how successful women in education lead and offer suggestions and ideas for developing and honing these exemplary leadership practices. Women and Educational Leadership shows how the qualities that characterize women's approaches to leadership differ from traditional approaches?whether the traditional leader is a woman or a man. The authors reveal that women leaders are more collaborative by nature and demonstrate a commitment to social justice. They tend to bring an instructional focus to leadership, include spiritual dimensions in their work, and strive for balance between the personal and professional. This important book offers a new model of leadership that shifts away from the traditional heroic notion of leadership to the collective account of leadership that focuses on leadership for a specific purpose—like social justice. The authors include illustrative examples of leaders who have brought diverse groups to work toward common ground. They also show how leadership is a way to facilitate and support the work of organizational members. The ideas and suggestions presented throughout the book can help the next generation fulfill the promise of a new tradition of leadership. Women and Educational Leadership is part of the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education series.

Most published research on the superintendency has failed to examine the voices of female superintendents. Today, white males make up approximately 85% of superintendents, rendering female responses to the superintendency almost nonexistent. Women Leading School Systems, commissioned by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), provides a historical overview of women in top leadership positions. This study examines what drives some female educators to accept the challenge of becoming a superintendent and what drives others to remain in middle management. The authors also profile a number of women who spend their lives at the top of the school system. This comprehensive book is the only national study entirely dedicated to women's leadership.

Few school superintendents in the United States are women, although many women have leadership positions in schools. This book is a feminist poststructuralist account of women aspiring to the superintendency in K-12 public school systems in the United States. It deals with issues of power, gender, and leadership and provides a framework for understanding the contemporary context of the superintendency. The superintendency offers the most powerful and prestigious positions in K–12 public school systems. Few superintendents of these systems in the United States are women, although the majority of teachers are women and many women have leadership positions in schools. There are also increasing numbers of women in administrative preparation programs at institutions of higher education. This study of 27 highly qualified women in top-level administrative positions in public education was designed to find out what it is like to be a woman aspiring to the executive leadership position. Research questions included: Why are there so few women superintendents when so many are qualified? What are the routes to the superintendency? What is the context of educational administration in the public school? What kinds of leaders are women who aspire to the superintendency? The research was also informed by a femininst advocacy of social change to discover how and under what conditions a more equitable distribution of superintendencies is likely to occur. A feminist poststructural framework provided the theoretical basis for the analysis of the data.