Abstract
Under globalisation, comparative educational studies have become more relevant. This paper is the first of its kind to compare education and training for principals in Vietnam and the U.S. and will offer among the few systematic studies on school leadership in Vietnam. Utilizing previous research on educational leadership and culture in the U.S. and Vietnam, and survey results from Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2018, I used t-test analyses to test several hypotheses about the differences between principals in the two countries. The findings suggest differences in age, gender, managerial experience, teaching obligation, and obtained levels of education and training between American principals and Vietnamese principals. Principals in the U.S. are younger and less experienced than principals in Vietnam. Level of education and need for professional development programs potentially indicate that American principals receive more thorough training in their education compared to Vietnamese principals. Accordingly, this comparative study provides valuable insights for both countries and contributes to diversifying the literature on educational leadership which the West has long dominated.
Highlights
Educational leadership is well documented in the West
The findings suggest differences in age, gender, managerial experience, teaching obligation, and obtained levels of education and training between American principals and Vietnamese principals
There were 166 American principals and 196 Vietnamese principals who participated in the survey
Summary
Educational leadership is well documented in the West. Publications in the U.S, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia from 1960 to 2018 accounted for 83% of total Scopus-indexed journal articles (Hallinger & Kovačević, 2019). These four countries, only accounted for a small fraction of the world population. There are obvious missing spots on the world map of knowledge about educational leadership, offering rich avenues for researchers. Transnational comparative studies on educational leadership are not new, especially since the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century when the term “globalisation” became commonplace. Comparative studies have gained even more popularity. Producing “knowledge workers” is, one of the main challenges that many countries face (Walker & Dimmock, 2002)
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