International Organizations of Educational Planning, Government Policies and School Management and Leadership

The world is amidst a turbulent era with impacts on all aspects of social life and social systems, including that of education, especially in the so-called recessionary economies, as the Greek one. In the framework of the development of a better type of public administration, major international organizations for the economic growth and prosperity, namely the OECD and the European Union, have provided Greece with guidelines and better policies. Recent government policies in education reflecting these guidelines have created an immense agitation among all educational partners, teachers, students, parents, and local authorities, as the latter seems not to understand the rationale behind them. The government rhetoric—though echoing different political areas every time—always includes the argument of the necessity of a planning process to respond to the volatility in schools’ external environment and to provide an appropriate basis for their internal management and leadership. This paper investigates the role of the international organizations of educational planning in designing governmental educational policies, their impact on the macro-level of recessionary Greece and the role of school management and leadership in coping with problems in Greek schools. Moreover, this paper explores other relational factors of the Greek reality that add to recession and put an extra burden on school praxis, thus making governmental policies and international guidelines difficult to apply and easy to provoke disillusionment to education partners. Finally, the paper discusses the peculiarities of the Greek educational landscape and proposes new paths for research that can facilitate the introduction of structural changes and further development.