Beyond Effectiveness: Successful Principal Leadership and School Development Amidst Complex Times in Arizona and the USA

Principals lead schools amidst complex and contested educational times with fluid and rapidly changing challenges related to the pandemic, externalized accountability policies, competition with private schools, increasingly diverse demographics, new and perennial tensions around social inequities, and teacher shortages. In this context, school success is defined by student well-being and equity as well as academic outcomes. In this chapter, we consider how successful principals in the USA lead and manage in these complex contexts. The chapter begins with a description of the contexts school leaders face today in Arizona and the US schools as well as a review of the extant literature on effective and successful school principalship. We then briefly describe the revised theoretical framework and methodology for the ISSPP that we used in our case study. Specifically, the chapter highlights examples of an Arizona school principal whose values-led adaptive leadership amidst the contemporary complexities supported and nourished relationships, school success, and school development. The paper ends with a discussion of the findings in relation to the literature and new framing as well as our conclusions about the ways in which the new ISSPP direction with this example case provides new knowledge about successful schools and leadership.