Leadership and School Success in Disadvantaged Contexts:The principals' perspective

Leadership is a key element of school success and is mainly based on establishing common goals, developing a sense of educational community, redesigning the school's organizational structure, and managing the instructional program. These factors arc especially important in disadvantaged environments, since building shared values and cultures is even more challenging and requires a greater commitment. This paper analyzes how principals in such environments perceive how their schools function, what the level of commitment from their community is, and what their sources of satisfaction are when they perform their managerial duties. To compile information, we prepared an ad-hoc questionnaire to examine the tendencies and significant differences between the perceptions of principals in disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged contexts in the province of Tarragona (Spain). We also interviewed principals in disadvantaged contexts (n=18) in order to gain their insight into the challenges to school success and equity. Our results show that principals, especially those in disadvantaged backgrounds, have a gender bias (i.e. most are women), that their concept of success is closely related to identity inclusion, and that they have high expectations that go beyond the traditional assistance-based approach. Their professional training leads these principals to consider themselves more capable of solving conflicts but they perceive a low commitment to school success from pupils, pupils' families, and even teachers. In this context, redefining the roles of all stakeholders in the educational community should be the main focus in disadvantaged backgrounds.