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Educational Policy
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The Politics of Distributing Leadership

Reconsidering Leadership Distribution in Two Texas Elementary Schools

Brendan D. Maxcy

University of Missouri-Columbia, maxcyb{at}missouri.edu

Thu Su’o’ng Thi. Nguyen

University of Texas-Austin, tstnguyen{at}mail.utexas.edu

Recent work on distributed leadership extends an ongoing critique of conventional "heroic" leader portrayals. This article examines work in this area seeking implications for democratic school governance. With material from case studies of two Texas schools, it considers frameworks presented by Spillane, Halverson, and Diamond and by Firestone and Heller. Invoking critical perspectives, it problematizes a conventional managerial slant in the frameworks. The frameworks direct attention to a wider distribution of leadership than is often portrayed. Unfortunately, the frameworks attend primarily to administrative concerns, namely the steering of local actors and channeling of local activity and are largely silent about the politics of distributed leadership. Reconsidering the nature and dynamics of leadership in the two cases, we find broader notions of performance and attention to more deliberative community-building activity reveal the importance of distributed leadership in engendering responsiveness to and reciprocal accountability with local stakeholders.

Key Words: politics of education • distributed leadership • school-community relations • performance accountability • participatory governance • bilingual/bicultural education

Educational Policy, Vol. 20, No. 1, 163-196 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0895904805285375
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