Abstract

TORRES, Leonor Lima. Singular leadership in a plural school: the school cultures facing the external evalution process. Rev. Lusófona de Educação [online]. 2013, n.23, pp.51-76. ISSN 1645-7250.

At a time when the school institution reaches levels of cultural and organizational sophistication unprecedented, we witnessed the implementation of a unipersonal leadership, focused on the Director of school / school cluster. However, this new face, emerged from the new public mangement paradigm, confronts with many faces of state schools, increasingly masked by the imposition of a one-dimensional model of leadership. Based on this scenario, we focused our perspective on: i) the characteristics that have come to institutionalize a ideal profile of school leadership; ii) how the unipersonal leadership will (better) serve as a vehicle for expression of a school culture that is intended to reproduce in different schools; iii) how the face (Director) will exert a homogenizing effect, establishing frameworks for interaction and logical organization on the daly of schools. This issues outlined above will be explored using as methodological strategy the critical analysis of the External Evaluation Report of Schools produced during the first evaluation cycle (2006-2011), aims to understand the implicit models of school culture and leadership and their implications for the reconfiguration of the daily school. From a total of 1131 Reports produced, we limited the empirical field to the universe of non-grouped educational establishments (n=335), conducting a document analysis and combining a quantitative approach to objective variables with a qualitative-interpretative focus on the content of the Reports. In generic terms, the results indicate the presence of a management type leadership profile, reverential and receptive, guided more by a logic of accountability (to the state and the market) than by principles for the development of democratic citizenship. The majority of the Reports reveal an image of a school with a techno-bureaucratic nature, which subordinates the values of democratic participation to imperatives of control and the mediation of results. This paradigm of school seems to induce the development of leadership increasingly more stripped of a strategic and political sense, and thus more reproductive of a centrally diffuse school culture. As a result, from the perspective of the current political agenda, it makes complete sense to elect a single-person leader who operates as a vehicle of expression for school culture.

Keywords : school culture; organizational school culture; styles of leadership; democratic school.

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