ABSTRACT
It is no secret that “educational leaders and school administrators find themselves in a continually contentious arena and vie for ways of balancing, directing, controlling, manipulating, managing, and surviving their edgy environments” (Lindle & Mawhinney, 2003, p. 3). Educational leaders must develop a working understanding of politics. Educational politics is commonly characterized as “the study of power, influence, and authority in the allocation of scarce and valued resources at various levels of the education sectors” (Johnson, 2003, p. 51). Considered in glocal perspective, this suggests that a politically competent educational leader is familiar both with various formal and informal processes by which people engage local and national issues and the outcomes and consequences of said processes. Moreover, in relation to educational leaders, political leadership means developing an understanding of how to act as empowered participants in these processes that influence local, national, and international decisions and policies. Mitchell and Boyd (2001) explain this orientation by arguing that globalization “is fundamentally changing the parameters of political deliberation throughout the industrialized world, raising the stakes for education policy and changing the ground rules for its adoption and implementation” (Mitchell & Boyd, 2001, p. 60).
