Abstract

Latin America is one of the regions in the world rarely visited by research on school leadership. Very little is still known about the people that take on the leadership roles, and even less about how they develop their leadership practices, what their educational and professional motivations are, or how their efforts translate into school improvement (Flessa et al., 2018; Aravena & Hallinger, 2018). Paradoxically, this does not mean education policies on this matter in the region are stagnant. On the contrary, more and more measures and initiatives are being proposed in different countries aiming at leveraging the potential for change of school principals in the hopes of improving educational quality (Weinstein et al., 2014; Weinstein & Hernández, 2014). Promotion of “school principals’ factor” by education authorities is not based on a systematic knowledge nor on an intellectual analysis of the specific social and cultural conditions where this key role is performed (Oplatka, 2019). As such, there is an evident risk of foreign policies being replicated without considering the local context, a situation Steiner-Khamsi (2004) aptly termed “policy borrowing”. This paper aims to show some elements of the education scenario in Latin America, so that these can be considered when trying to understand school leadership in this particular context.