ABSTRACT
To address the economic and political contexts of school leader preparation, we reviewed research literature, media accounts, and policy reports related to educational leadership preparation. We required such sources due to the scarcity of empirical evidence concerning political or economic effects on leadership preparation programs, although we could find some speculation about contextual influences (e.g., Cibulka, 2009, McCarthy, 2015). Primarily, we focused on sources published after the global recession and postpublication of the first edition of this Handbook of Research on the Education of School Leaders (Young, Crow, Murphy, & Ogawa, 2009). Where appropriate, we contextualized recent literature on the economic and political contexts of schooling and the work of school leaders with seminal works on such trends and their origins. To focus the scope of our literature sources and analyses, we formulated two essential questions:
• What are the opportunities and investments in education and their implications for leadership preparation (i.e., the question of economic context)?
