This paper argues that it is timely for educational researchers in Asia, and Singapore in particular, to generate cultural- and empirical-knowledge bases in school leadership that will speak to the specific interests of Asian students, educators and practitioners. As economic and social development across Asia gathers momentum, the more advanced Asian systems of education, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, will increasingly have the resources and expertise to launch significant research programmes in school leadership and organisational change, thereby challenging the persistent and present dominance of Anglo-American perspectives. The paper reports a planned large scale research programme for school leadership and organisational change in Singapore. Support for such a programme from all three major stakeholders - the Ministry of Education (MOE), the National Institute of Education (NIE) and school leaders and teachers - is conditional on the research programme leading to school improvement and better student outcomes. The paper sketches the politico-cultural-economic conditions of Singapore in which such an agenda has been formed; describes the main features of the research programme; and then relates its features to a possible broader Asian and international research agenda in school leadership. The planned Singapore programme has congruence with a future international research agenda advocated by scholars for the field of educational leadership.
[Copyright of School Leadership & Management is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2011.606271]

The impact of parental involvement on school management has been recognized by many education professionals and policy-makers. Thus parental involvement in school education becomes one of the prime focuses in the current education reform movement in Hong Kong. Particularly, specific guidelines and policies for involving parents at various levels of children's education have been spelled out in many governmental policy documents. This article reports on an interpretive study that explores the micro-politics of parental involvement in school education in two primary schools in Hong Kong. By analyzing the interviews with 14 parents, eight teachers and two principals, together with the field-notes of participant observations in two case study schools, three propositions of power relations between parents and teaching professionals emerge. The findings indicate that in the process of encouraging parents' participation in school education, teaching professionals demonstrated ethnocentric attitudes towards parents; the notion of "parents as resources" were for pragmatic purposes; and the conception of "parents-as-school-governors" was of policy rhetoric in the process of implementation of home-school cooperation.
[Copyright of Educational Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2013.868786]