Chapter 10: Teachers As Leaders: Accountability Era School Leadership and the Limits of Democratic Participations

The purpose of this chapter is to question the extent to which “democratic” ideals are made possible given new, neoliberal configurations of K–12 educational leadership. Set against the backdrop of a quasi-market schema that grounds leadership in managerial values and techniques, we use this chapter to question how neoliberalism is influencing the constraint and/or advancement of democratic possibilities for building/district leadership. Both in terms of function and structure, K–12 educational leadership has been refashioned to meet new policy demands that are grounded in market logics. In this market-based leadership schema, school principals function more like private sector managers who are forced to accomplish unprecedented levels of data collection and reporting. To accommodate the load, schools are breaking from the traditional, single-leader structure, to adopt more distributed forms of leadership where teachers are recruited to help absorb the additional tasks. The notion of teachers as leaders has been lauded by politicians as more democratically just and empowering of teachers. We use Reed’s (1907) definition of the “democratic ideal” to argue that new policy initiatives (e.g., Teach to Lead) and related practices (e.g., teacher leadership) do not necessarily lead to more democratically-oriented forms of K–12 leadership.