Distributing Leadership: Sharing Responsibility and Maintaining Accountability

Abstract

Like the previous chapter, this chapter takes a broader view than the rest of the book. In it, I look beyond the USA to see how global discourses and actors are contributing to our understanding of teaching, teachers and education more broadly. Specifically, I look at the global trend of distributed leadership that has been touted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a means for accommodating the increased tasks and responsibilities associated with accountability in schools. This chapter problematises the global campaign for distributed leadership as situated within prevailing accountability discourses that value data-driven orientations of schooling. It draws on multiple sources of data (e.g., key policy documents and reports by the OECD and Australian and US federal governments; teacher leader interview data) to trace the evolution of distributed leadership as a product of contemporary modes of educational governance. I argue that (1) distributed leadership has emerged as a key product of the accountability era, and (2) that hierarchical models of distributed leadership help cultivate systems of loyalty within schools. It is this latter issue that I particularly seek to explore in this chapter and connect to the overall argument of the book. I will bring together data collected at multiple scales and across multiple contexts to show how distributed leadership and system loyalty create silencing effects amongst teachers, as maintaining the status quo becomes a shared responsibility.