Equity-Driven School Leadership

Dear Colleagues,

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are being felt on hundreds of millions of students, especially on those from the most vulnerable schools and communities, aggravating prior social and learning difficulties. School leaders feel challenged like never before. They play a critical role in responding to the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on strengthening ties within the whole educational community and, at the same time, assuming an equity-driven leadership, in order to mitigate the impacts of the pandemics on the quality of students’ learning. The situation is even more demanding in schools that are located in economically and socially challenged territories, marked by poverty and social exclusion. In these territories, violence, indiscipline, school dropout, and failure are more prone to exist, and emergency remote teaching is very difficult to implement, which forces school leaders to go beyond their limits in trying to imagine creative alternatives not to leave anyone behind. In fact, the emergency situation created by the pandemic demanded emergency leadership measures. However, school leaders’ responsibility towards the development of equity-driven schools must go beyond the pandemic crisis.

The post-pandemic times will bring a huge responsibility along: the responsibility of learning from the experience undergone and putting that knowledge to the service of schools’ development and ultimately, to the service of every student. For equity-driven schools to emerge, we must not go back to tendentially obsolete organizational and pedagogic models that were leaving many students behind far before the pandemic.

It is a scientifically proved fact that leadership is second only to classroom teaching in its impact on student learning. Therefore, we assume that we can learn a lot from the experiences of school leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic, because the closure of schools has highlighted social inequalities in such a way that they had to develop an emergency equity-driven leadership, experiencing and evaluating new educational responses.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to share and systematize knowledge on equity-driven school leadership practices, not only during the pandemic crisis but in a general way, so as to help schools adapt to the current and forthcoming social demands, providing every student with high quality large scope learning that enables them to thrive in an unforeseeable future.

Dr. Ilídia Cabral
Leading Guest Editor
Dr. José Matias Alves
Dr. Diana Mesquita
Assistant Guest Editors

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• school leadership
• educational innovation
• equity and inclusion