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This scoping review of the international literature published over the last 50 years in educational leadership and management journals provides a thematic exploration of factors influencing pathways at the pre-entry stage of a principal's career. Findings from a thematic analysis of 68 publications show that attention to prospective principals increased after the year 2000 and this was driven by four main concerns: underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities, principal supply and demand, the principalship as a school improvement lever, and the expansion of leadership posts in schools. Selected articles addressed three dimensions of the pathways before a person is first appointed to this post: (a) micro (individual's agency), (b) meso (preparation of prospective principals), and (c) macro (policies shaping access to the post). Across time and countries, pathways to the principalship are resourced by individuals' professional orientations and by contextual factors, formal pre-service preparation may be desirable but not always available or required, and policies frame a conceptualisation of the principalship that shapes the two previous dimensions. The internationalization of research on pathways to the principalship has brought to the forefront normative assumptions that should be critically challenged when considering how to recruit, develop, and support prospective school principals.

A great deal of knowledge has been accumulated on how educational effectiveness and improvement come to be. However, the issue of how these processes behave once they have been achieved has remained relatively unexplored. In this paper, we report on the findings of a multiple case study that delved into the factors and processes explaining different levels of sustainability of educational effectiveness for schools previously identified and studied as highly effective and located in low-income areas. We show that effectiveness is a fragile attainment that is affected by a variety of external and internal processes. Transformations in the local context (demographic changes and the dynamics of the school market), and educational policies and programs are key external factors. In the internal realm, the role of school administrators, principals, and leadership teams, the organization of pedagogical work, and the school culture modulate the sustainability of educational effectiveness in the long term.

To what extent school improvement processes can be initiated and sustained from the outside has been a relevant question for policy-makers seeking to increase quality in education. Since 2008, the Chilean Government is strongly promoting the use of external technical support (ETS) services to support school improvement processes, as part of the Student Priority Voucher programme, a compensatory policy that provides significant additional resource to schools serving the poorest 40% of students. Participating schools and ETS providers negotiate services and prices in a market-like dynamic. In this paper, we describe the Chilean ETS policy, discuss the ETS policy implementation, review the empirical evidence about the effects of ETS services in schools, and critically analyse the ETS policy as an instrument for school improvement. We argue that experts who are knowledgeable in the field of education have the potential to effectively support schools in need of improvement. However, brokers and external consultants providing school support in Chile within a market-oriented framework typically lack the characteristics associated with positive effects; this raises the critical issue of developing professional capacities within schools to produce genuine and sustainable improvement processes.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the socioeconomic status (SES) school segregation in Chile, whose educational system is regarded as an extreme case of a market-oriented education. The study estimated the magnitude and evolution of the SES segregation of schools at both national and local levels, and it studied the relationship between some local educational market dynamics and the observed magnitude of SES school segregation at municipal level. The main findings were: first, the magnitude of the SES segregation of both low-SES and high-SES students in Chile was very high (Duncan Index ranged from 0.50 to 0.60 in 2008); second, during the last decade, SES school segregation tended to slightly increase in Chile, especially in high schools (both public and private schools); third, private schools--including voucher schools--were more segregated than public schools for both low-SES and high-SES students; and finally, some market dynamics operating in the Chilean education (like privatization, school choice, and fee-paying) accounted for a relevant proportion of the observed variation in SES school segregation at municipal level. These findings are analyzed from an educational policy perspective in which the link between SES school segregation and market-oriented mechanisms in education plays a fundamental role.