Effective leadership is the necessary ingredient in achieving educational improvement in schools; everything rises and falls on leadership. For School Leaders of Color, this leadership imperative is more difficult than it is for their White counterparts. Concomitantly with this leadership necessity are the social and academic disparities of racism, student poverty, lack of resources, just to name a few. Yet these leaders have courageously accepted their role to disrupt low performance and thus they have created environments where students learn and professors teach. These leaders are "purveyors of change." The purpose of this educational preparation supplemental text is to share stories of these exceptional leaders in the field and in the academy. The experiences shared by the various authors cover four important areas in leadership: Culture & Climate; Student Success; Resilience, Persistence, & Turnaround; and Social Justice. The authors have shared some deeply personal issues and triumphs. These are the stories that resonate more deeply with students and that with these types of stories, the theory to practice bridge is successfully crossed. While many of the chapters include narratives of resilience and triumph in the context of the P-12 education system, the overarching themes and suggestions can be transmuted to any industry.

Witchbroom is a visionary history of a Caribbean Spanish/French Creole family and an island over four centuries - to 20th-century independence. With an innovative tone and content, its carnival tales of crime and passion are told by the narrator Lavren, who is both male and female.

This radical and moving historical novel weaves fact with fiction to reveal "the great deception" exercised by the powerful on a mixed race child born in the late 18th century and brought up in the London home of England's Lord Chief Justice. Dido Belle was the daughter of an African-born slave and the sea-faring nephew of Lord Mansfield. She was freed only on Mansfield's death and became Elizabeth D'Aviniere on her marriage. Scott imagines Elizabeth's adult world where she reflects on her disturbed childhood and fears for her own children's safety at risk from slave catchers. Above all, she yearns for her lost mother. Why did she no longer write? Had she, too, been recaptured? The novel builds to a powerful denouement as the events of Elizabeth's past engage with the traumas of her present.

Derek Walcott, the Nobel prize-winning poet, has said of Leaving by Plane Swimming back Underwater: "A really accomplished writer, Lawrence Scott's last book is a delight.' And novelist Romesh Gunesekera says: "Marvellous voices that grow into a very special world that Lawrence Scott has made his own. These are stories full of charm and surprise.' Scott explores a world of yearnings and memory, of departure and return, underpinned by the disturbing tensions created by religion, race, sexuality and crime. Sensuous and evocative, Scott's prose has a lightness of touch and tone that exhilarates and illuminates. In the midst of everyday lives, he finds the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Effective leadership is the necessary ingredient in achieving educational improvement in schools; everything rises and falls on leadership. For School Leaders of Color, this leadership imperative is more difficult than it is for their White counterparts. Concomitantly with this leadership necessity are the social and academic disparities of racism, student poverty, lack of resources, just to name a few. Yet these leaders have courageously accepted their role to disrupt low performance and thus they have created environments where students learn and professors teach. These leaders are "purveyors of change." The purpose of this educational preparation supplemental text is to share stories of these exceptional leaders in the field and in the academy. The experiences shared by the various authors cover four important areas in leadership: Culture & Climate; Student Success; Resilience, Persistence, & Turnaround; and Social Justice. The authors have shared some deeply personal issues and triumphs. These are the stories that resonate more deeply with students and that with these types of stories, the theory to practice bridge is successfully crossed. While many of the chapters include narratives of resilience and triumph in the context of the P-12 education system, the overarching themes and suggestions can be transmuted to any industry.

Not with a bang, but with a quiet, ten-minute address on Christmas Day, 1991: this is how the Soviet Union met its end. But in the wake of that one deceptively calm moment, conflict and violence soon followed. Some of the emergent new countries began to shed totalitarianism while other sought to revive their own dead empires or were led by ex-Soviet leaders who built equally or even more repressive political machines. Since the late 1980s, Sheets lived and reported from the former USSR and saw firsthand the reverberations of the empire's collapse. "Eight Pieces of Empire" draws readers into the people, politics and day-to-day life, painting a vivid portrait of a tumultuous time.
Sheets' stories about people living through these tectonic shifts of fortune--a trio of female saboteurs in Chechnya, the chaos of newly independent Georgia in the early 1990s, young hustlers eager to strike it rich in the post-Soviet economic vacuum--reveal the underreported and surprising ways in which the ghosts of empire still haunt these lands and the world.