ABSTRACT
The work of educational leaders is often propelled by high stakes accountability frameworks within an entrepreneurial culture. Large parts of the field have devolved into the datafication of schooling, in which training the next generation of workers has become the proxy for social justice. Relentlessly driven to close achievement gaps in performative systems, the moral purpose of school leadership is subsumed by elaborate fantasies that mask the incongruencies and problematic intersections among the democratic aims of education and social mobility. Mechanisms, like standardized tests, frame schooling as competitive system, in which external accountability measures are instruments of the social good. Under the guise of inclusion, neoliberal policies are the wolf in sheep's clothing, compelling leaders to internalize feelings of guilt and shame when bad test scores are strategically severed from the wider social context.
