Social and economics education aims at creating the necessary conditions for social and economic progress. Such objectives may be either reached directly by providing the students the tools necessary for a constructive approach to society, or indirectly, by creating the structures that would facilitate student learning.

The Boston University – City of Chelsea partnership is the story of the success of managerial and educational skills in action.

In 1988 Chelsea was a failing school district, possibly the worst in Massachusetts, and this situation led to the bold implementation of a turnaround strategy that removed from the existing school board and gave to Boston University the direct responsibility for the management of the school district.

The result is, now, one of the few districts that achieve the adequate yearly progress required by the NCLB to access Title 1 Federal Funds.

The article explores the legal structure of the Chelsea – Boston University partnership, the governance strategy created by Boston university and the critical resources at its disposal, and the obtained results.

The term New Public Management (NPM) is used to describe managerial reforms in the public sector, which have taken place within the last twenty years.  NPM has been established as an international trend, even spreading to the European continent where political, administrative and institutional systems are different from the Anglo-Saxon countries where NPM originated.
This paper analyzes the substance of NPM with a specific focus on the educational sector, analyzing and comparing its evolutionary steps.
Within the educational sector NPM cannot be considered a uniform, monolithic block, but be characterized by evolutionary steps originating with managerial, business-like practices (managerialism), moving towards the introduction of q.-market models (marketization) and finishing with public governance, the most recent paradigm. 
This paper considers the necessity of bringing the scientific discussion and educational reform into the new paradigm, which is increasingly closer to schools’ nature and organizational culture.
Scholastic leadership has to respond to a model of network management where collaboration and persuasion take the place of the hierarchy not only in relationship to outside stakeholders, but also in managing schools human resources.
On these bases follow Italian empirical evidence on the emerging paradigm of school management and leadership.