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Abstract
During the past two decades, shifting discourses have significantly altered professional expectations for educational leaders. Driven by a globalized reconfiguration of the values defining educational purpose, definitions of effective leadership, processes for evaluating them, and the very boundaries of educational policy have narrowed and distilled. Specifically, policy vocabularies focused around marketization and choice, management and surveillance, and performativity and accountability have permeated federal and state educational policies in the USA. This article considers the inscription of these policy vocabularies within the Obama/Duncan Administration’s Blueprint for Reform: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Blueprint) and Race to the Top (R2T), paying specific attention to the evaluation of public school leaders and determinations of their effectiveness. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, we examined federal and state education policy and highlight how dominant policy discourses have created new parameters for educational leadership along with narrowed conceptualizations of the evaluation of public school principals at state and local levels. Based on our findings, we argue that today, more than ever before, scholars must draw attention to the ways in which the values that traditionally shaped education policy are being displaced by globalized neoliberal discourses.