ABSTRACT
School autonomy reforms are sweeping through the education systems of many Western countries. School autonomy has been promoted as a means to community empowerment, or the opportunity for a participatory and self-determining form of community governance involving partnerships with colleagues, schools and parents. This chapter utilizes a Foucauldian theoretical perspective of education reform as operating through the practices of government and self-government, and the shaping and reshaping of principal subjectivities and therefore leadership. It examines two sets of practices of government and self-government that principals are subject to and actively take up; namely, the governance practices that cultivate the entrepreneurial and performance-focused principal, and the governing modalities that emphasise the value of public education, community and collaboration. The chapter explores two modes of subjection operating in the Independent Public Schools programme: the cultivation of the performance-focused principal through the contract and finances; and the seemingly countervailing emphasis on community and collaboration.
