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Complexity theory (CT) has had a meteoric rise in management literature and the social sciences. Its fledgling importation into school leadership and management raises several questions and concerns. This article takes one view of CT and argues that, though its key elements have much to offer school leadership and management, caution has to be exercised in accepting CT too readily, as it: (1) is unclear on its own novelty, nature and status; (2) can be regarded as disguised ideology in conflating description and prescription; (3) confuses explanation with prediction; (4) is relativist, undermining its own status; (5) contains problems in its advocacy of self-organization; (6) neglects the ethical and emotional dimensions of leadership and management; and (7) risks exonerating school leaders and managers from reasonable expectations of accountability and responsibility. The article concludes that there are questions to CT at the levels of theory, ontology, deontology and ethics, but that it offers useful challenges for school leadership and management.
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A questionnaire-based methodology for constructing an overall index of school effectiveness is reported, focusing on within-school conditions of schools, which is currently being used in the Free State of South Africa. The article reports the construction and use of a straightforward instrument for measuring the effectiveness of key aspects of the conditions for school effectiveness in the Free State, using a variety of dimensions. It indicates how this instrument can identify where to intervene in improving schools in order to gain the maximum return on investment of time, effort, development activity and support. The instrument provides aggregated and disaggregated data for individual schools, groups of schools and whole districts, both at a single point in time and over time, thereby enabling the most economical and beneficial development to be planned for targeted individual schools and groups of schools. It enables users to identify the key drivers of the internal school conditions for effectiveness, development and change in schools.
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This article suggests that attempts to date to unravel the paradox of the Chinese learner are incomplete and inadequately modeled, and that the complexities of the paradox have not yet been fittingly operationalized or alternative explanations of research data investigated. It contends that attempts either to state or to unravel the paradox are chimerical, as they risk oversimplifying a complex phenomenon, the extent and nature of which are insufficiently understood to date. The article argues that investigating the phenomenon of Chinese learners' strong performance in international measures of achievement requires researchers to operate more rigorously in their search for alternative and multiple explanations of results in terms of causality, sampling, and representing heterogeneity. Several explanations of data on the paradox are presented, and alternative explanations which might be more usefully explored are provided. The article also questions the extent to which research on the Chinese learner, with a search for a unitary set of characteristics, is not, itself, prey to totalizing, collectivist ideologies cast in unrealistic meta-narratives. Recommendations are made for further research.