Chapter 13: An Enduring Myth: Turnaround Leadership Is Identity Neutral

In our society, leadership is often presented in heroic terms (Kempster, Higgs, & Wuerz, 2014; Regine & Lewin, 2003). Within this narrative, leaders are meant to be innovative, charismatic, and strong. They are meant to save the day through force of will and personality, and weakness and equivocation are not tolerated. A quick flip on of the television to the current election news cycle gives a strong example of the continued power of these narratives in how leadership is constructed and understood.

As a microcosm of our larger society, these narratives are also present in education, and for school leaders specifically. Despite research to suggest that quiet rather than heroic leadership (Badaracco, 2001) and shared or collaborative forms of leadership are, over time, more successful in fostering continuous improvement (Heck & Hallinger, 2009; Leithwood, Mas- call, & Strauss, 2009; Louis, Detzke, & Wahlstrom, 2010), principals often continue to receive messages from policymakers, teachers, parents and the community writ large that heroic and autocratic approaches are best (May- rowetz, Murphy, Louis, & Smylie, 2007). Moreover, and important for our purposes here, this rhetoric is also reflected, if not magnified, in the current rhetoric of turnaround leadership (Day, 2014; Dolan, 2014). As Peck and Reitzug (2014) point out in their work exploring the many paradoxes of turnaround policy, “The federal government’s turnaround policy places the principal in an almost iconic position as the individual fundamentally responsible for school success or failure” (p. 27).