Education Leadership and the COVID-19 Crisis

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Background

Frontiers in Education is seeking to mobilize research in response to the current pandemic. Highly contagious, the 2019 coronavirus disease is a global health emergency of unprecedented proportions. The ongoing loss of life globally as well as the virus’s ability to spread rapidly through communities, has generated a need for significant changes in the way the education community operates, educates and delivers services to students and families.

Since January 2020, a robust body of research has been emerging from medical disciplines such as virology, immunology, epidemiology, microbiology, bioinformatics, radiology, and phylogeny. Unfortunately, there is little to no scholarly work emerging from non-medical disciplines. In response, this Research Topic seeks to facilitate rapid research mobilization in the field of education leadership and policy.

Responses to the pandemic within the international education community have varied from heroic to problematic, as educators, leaders, administrators and education policy workers navigate shifting information, priorities, resources, and political and economic concerns. As education leaders have responded to the current crisis, many challenges and obstacles to providing essential educational services have emerged. Additionally, questions have been raised about whether and how students and schools can meet education policy expectations, how schools can provide adequate support for students, particularly those with special educational and mental health needs, and how education leaders, including, but not limited to: principals, headteachers, superintendents, teacher leaders and so on can collaborate and coordinate with government, non-profit and other stakeholders to meet student needs. Along those same lines, many universities are providing substantial support to schools, districts and emerging leaders, sharing resources, advice and support as practitioners search for answers and ideas for how to proceed. In this special issue we hope to capture and provide an opportunity for analysis and critique of these and other challenges, responses, successes, mis-steps, ironies, and policies which have developed or transformed as the Corona Virus spread across the globe.

Given the vast attention to and interest in the pandemic and the need for thorough analysis of its implications for education leadership, this Research Topic aims to address a number of relevant issues surrounding COVID-19 and to stimulate novel investigations and theoretical perspectives on how leaders and leadership is affected by the COVID-19 emergency. We intend for this article collection to be both a resource to help the education community think about and respond to this critical situation.

We seek a wide range of submissions that address education leadership from areas including, but not limited to:

• School Leadership
• District Leadership
• Teacher Leadership
• Decision making
• Human Resources
• Policy and legal ethics
• Sociology, race and ethnicity studies
• Politics of Education
• Social and emotional health
• Public Health
• Media/Social media studies
• Cultural studies
• Strategic risk and crisis communication
• Communication ethics
• PK12-University Partnerships

We encourage paper types including, but not limited to: original research, opinion pieces, hypothesis and theory articles, perspective papers, and case studies.

***Due to the exceptional nature of the COVID-19 situation, Frontiers is waiving all article publishing charges for COVID-19 related research.***

Keywords: Education Leadership, Principal, School Leadership, Superintendent, District Leadership, Teacher Leadership, Education Policy, Coronavirus, COVID-19

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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