Birth pains: emerging school leadership policies in eight school systems of Latin America

School leadership has a core position within education policy worldwide. Comparative research in this area has been mainly focused on developed countries and has tended to neglect the situation of developing nations, including Latin American countries. Considering the above, this article presents the current status of school leadership policies in eight systems of Latin America: Argentina, Ceará/Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Dominican Republic and Peru. The results highlight that, while in the majority of these systems measures aimed in this direction have been implemented, school leadership policies are still at an early stage, with several problems, contradictions, and lack of internal and external coherence. The article ends with a discussion about the tensions embedded on the translation of the Anglo-Saxon discourse of school leadership to the particular context of Latin America and suggests the need to rethink a regional local–response to the goal of promoting principal leadership.