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The purpose of this paper is to select a theoretical framework for effective school leadership that is connected with research, standards and current practices in the USA, and examine its validity and generalizability cross-culturally.

The paper uses both qualitative and quantitative methods through expert panel evaluation, cognitive interviews, and field testing of the instrument. The author asks: How well does the Learning-Centered Leadership (LCL) framework align with the professional standards and current practices of principals in urban Chinese schools in the opinion of the experts? Is there evidence that its leadership assessment instrument has construct validity in Chinese urban schools based on the re-examination of its content and measurement criteria? And is there evidence that the instrument is yielding consistent results when taken by the intended participants? How effective are the analytic strategies employed by this study in detecting the equivalences and discrepancies in how educational leadership is defined and evaluated, between two vastly different educational systems?

The paper finds evidences that give support to the claim that there is strong cross-cultural alignment on the overarching goal of improving student learning. However, the US framework and assessment will need to be modified to reflect the Chinese reform priorities that emphasize the balance between academic and social learning.

The belief that there are common elements in contemporary international educational policy has brought growing interest in sharing leadership theories and successful models cross-culturally. This paper addresses the challenges in understanding the complexity of cross-cultural translation of theories and applications, and explores viable solutions to meaningful adaptation.

Quality-Oriented Education (su zhi jiao yu) is a national education reform initiative that presents ongoing opportunities and challenges to schools, local bureaus of education, and the overall educational system in China today. This chapter seeks to gain insight into if and how Quality-Oriented Education, 10 years into its enactment, has taken root in practice. We posit that a reform agenda is best manifested through well-aligned and operable standards for school effectiveness. We introduce the policy-driven definition for school effectiveness and an evaluation framework depicting the intended focus of Quality-Oriented Education. Using an iterative and inductive process for content analysis, we compare the policy-driven framework with the coding results of a 2009 national inventory of actual school evaluation schemes in 91 Chinese school districts. Our review points out that the new mission of Quality-Oriented Education advocates educational equity, curriculum reform, and systemic support for school-based management. However, at the operational level, there are great variations in terms of content domain, focus, and function among school evaluation schemes with notable regional differences. Furthermore, schools are still caught between the existing system that measures school performance by achievement and the intended accountability scheme that calls for enhanced student ability. This chapter adds to the empirical foundation for the development of a new framework that not only captures the spirit of the national educational reform but also is informed of the developmental needs of schools in drastically different geo-economical and social conditions.

Tingting Qi's chapter titled, “Moving toward Decentralization? Changing Education Governance in China After 1985,” provides the historical and policy context for the volume. This chapter integrates the post-1978 Chinese educational reforms into the socioeconomic context of China. The special contribution of this chapter is that it explores the complexity of educational decentralization in China through an in-depth analysis of changes in education finance, administration, and curriculum. Qi reviews prior studies, government documents, laws, and regulations related to Chinese education reform since 1978 within the context of education decentralization in China. Qi also demonstrates that China's educational policy reforms are moving China toward “centralized decentralization” because decentralization is driven by a common, centralized national goal of economic modernization. The chapter presents evidence that “centralized decentralization” is a strategic maneuver that maintains centralized control while providing the reform legitimacy of decentralization. By focusing on decentralization as the core of Chinese educational policy reforms, this chapter situates the following chapters within the social, cultural, and political context of post-1978 China.

Chentong Chen is an undergraduate at Nanjing Normal University studying law and English. She has research interests in education policy, education assessment and evaluation, and child development. She is currently working on two research projects: policy issues related to the college entrance exam in China, and theories and practice of preschool assessment in the U.S.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing dialog of whether and how instructional leadership is distinguished conceptually from general leadership notions, such as charisma, and to continue the ongoing psychometric research on the The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) by examining its convergent and divergent validity. The authors hypothesize that the VAL-ED will be highly correlated with another measure of instructional leadership, but will be weakly correlated with more general measures of leadership that are rooted in personality theories. To test the convergent validity the authors implement the Hallinger and Murphy (1985) Instructional Management Behavior of Principals (IMBP) inventory, (Hallinger and Murphy, 1985; Hallinger, 2011). The authors use an instrument for emotional intelligence, Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue) as the divergent measure (Petrides et al., 2007). Results indicate that principals and teachers have different perceptions of leadership concepts.

The sample of schools in this study included 63 schools, 47 elementary, seven middle, and nine high schools from eight districts in six states in the US correlational analyses and regression are implemented.

The three sets of correlations from teacher responses about their principals among the three measures of the VAL-ED, TEIQue, and PIMRS (0.715, 0.686, and 0.642) are similar in size and all quite high. The picture is different for principals’ self-ratings, however. The VAL-ED is more strongly correlated (0.492) with PIMRS than with TEIQue (0.119), providing some evidence for convergent validity between learning-centered leadership and instructional management, and divergent validity when compared with emotional intelligence traits. The correlation between teachers and principals on the VAL-ED is only 0.17.

An interesting finding of this study is that principals can discriminate between instructional leadership measures and emotional traits when self rating, while teachers rate their principals similarly, and do not seem to discriminate between instructional leadership practices, as measured by the VAL-ED or PRIMS, and general traits associated with leadership effectiveness, as measured by the TEIQue. This paper discusses the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for both understanding the limitations of rating scales measuring instructional leadership, and their uses for evaluation purposes. Furthermore, teachers seem to perceive and understand these leadership traits differently than principals suggesting the need for training in how to use and interpret the results.

Educator accountability has placed principal evaluation and assessment at the forefront of reform debates. There is limited research on 360 degree evaluation systems. Rating scales of principals’ instructional leadership, are being used for assessing principals’ strengths and weaknesses in making decisions about tenure, merit pay, and ongoing professional development. Given the significance of these decisions it is important to ensure that principal evaluation instruments are valid.