Failures in school and school failures: lessons for leadership and management

This special issue is focused on the interplay between failure, learning and improvement
in the educational context. This involves framing failure as an important school resource,
emphasizing the identification of failure in the school context as a necessary condition for
strategic improvement in planning and leadership practices in schools. The articles in this
special issue will address the question of “How and why do school resources, organizational
structures, and processes in various social areas engender school failure?” A major pitfall of
school organizations is that they may detect and correct failures but do not look into the root
causes of these failures or identify the new behaviors needed to prevent their reoccurrence.
Although scholars have suggested that failure prevention and management should be
integrated to generate enhanced performance outcomes, the specific ways to achieve such
integration in school settings remain under-explored.
The objective of this special issue is to map the many facets of failure in schools in a way
that can help researchers and practitioners to identify, study and build successful schools
that also fail at times. Accordingly, applying various perspectives in defining and framing
failure in schools, the contents of this issue will seek to illustrate the multiple facets of failure
by acknowledging and investigating the role of failure in schools and the lessons that can be
taken from these failures for school managers so as to build organizational capacity in
various school contexts.