A street-level policy entrepreneur's perspective for bridging public policy and school principalship

Limited theoretical attention has been paid to understanding school principals as policy entrepreneurs through frameworks drawn from public policy. Using Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework, we conceptualize policy entrepreneurship as a form of policy enactment in which principals move beyond interpreting and adapting policies to using their discretion to initiate and influence policy processes. We demonstrate that, while school principals may initiate changes using entrepreneurial strategies, realizing these changes requires collaboration with other actors in the educational field. Thus, principals work with parent committees, senior bureaucrats in local governments, and other stakeholders to identify problems, develop solutions, and promote change, while exercising their discretion and navigating political contexts. More specifically, we demonstrate that stream coupling is not confined to senior decision-makers but operates at the micro-level of the school through interactions among principals, parents, and municipal actors. This perspective positions school principals as policy actors who move beyond policy enactment to actively initiating and shaping policy processes through entrepreneurial practices. It also enables scholars to examine how policy enactment may take an entrepreneurial form in practice in centralized yet negotiated governance systems, extending theory beyond extensively studied contexts within educational settings.