The contradictions of high‐stakes accountability ‘success’: a case study of focused leadership and performance agency

This article seeks to advance the discussion of the availability of contemporary notions of school leadership for school leaders working within high‐stakes accountability reform environment that produce discourses of urgency and legitimize practices of performance that implicitly favour centralized, neo‐Tayloristic managerial approaches. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in a school community largely populated by Latino and immigrant youth, I portray a school replete with discourses of urgency and practices of performance which emphasize control and tight coupling. I suggest that an anti‐pluralistic, assimilationist and subtractive stance towards the schools’ bilingual education programme implicitly gained credence and undercut the school community’s commitment to a culture and language as an asset orientation. In this context the school leadership and community felt constrained in their earnest commitment to democratic and pluralistic notions of school leadership. As such, this article provides a case on which to map and theorize how tightly coupled administration and control orientations of leadership flourish in a performance‐oriented context.