Educational Administration Research in Comparative Education, 1995–2018

For the past several decades there has been a solid research and policy consensus that school level leadership is an important lever for school improvement and is an integral component of the policy implementation process. Although broadly concerned with both improvement and policy implementation, the field of comparative education has engaged questions of school level leadership and administration in peer reviewed research unevenly at best. This article is a systematic review of the articles published about school level leadership and administration in 11 comparative education journals from 1995 to 2018. A conceptual organizer developed inductively from analysis of 109 articles is described. This organizer reveals the emphases and omissions of these journals’ engagement of the topic. We conclude by identifying avenues for and benefits to linking comparative education and educational administration research traditions more explicitly, in part by using our conceptual organizer as a potential starting point.