Educational organizations involve extremely complicated politics of power. Groups with various conflicting interests stand in opposition to one another within a complex number of subsystems. To successfully implement educational reform, favorable circumstances such as timeliness, practical necessity, and mutual cooperation must coincide. After a period of contention and various difficulties, the “Early Childhood and Education Act” (hereinafter referred to as ECEA) finally passed the third reading in the Legislative Yuan on June 29, 2011 and was officially implemented on January 1, 2012. “Kindergartens” and “nurseries,” two types of childcare institutions that had respectively been subject to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of the Interior, were integrated and categorized under the name of “preschools.” Preschools are now under the authority of the Ministry of Education, and are defined as institutions that provide education and care to children aged 2 to 6 years. The first official preschool appraisal after the integration of kindergartens and nurseries was implemented in September 2013. According to Paragraph 4, Article 45 of the ECEA, competent municipal, county (city) authorities must perform inspections of, provide assistance to and conduct evaluation of preschools within their jurisdiction.
This study aims at understanding how, in terms of preschool evaluation, preschool directors may enhance their leadership effectiveness by employing a variety of leadership theories. Upon the compilation and organization of relevant theories as well as the implementation of empirical studies, the researcher intends to explore the re-construction of the evaluation indexes after the integration of kindergartens and nurseries through literature review. The researcher also seeks to understand how preschool directors should enhance their leadership effectiveness and how they should redirect the teaching approaches and administrative management methods of their institutions to better fulfill current standards of evaluation.