Principalship in Austria: balancing accountability and improvement

Abstract

The Austrian school system has historically been characterized as highly bureaucratic and strongly regulated. Several policy approaches have been made to counteract the numerous parallel structures and too little congruence in task-orientation and responsibility. A shift towards more school-based innovation has initiated a slow movement towards more decentralization and deregulation, but principals are still confronted with restricted autonomy, which makes it difficult for them to empower their faculty for collective action. The introduction of national testing has led to some incremental changes. However, deep-rooted cultural mechanisms continue to successfully promote decentralization and stability as the most highly valued sources of educational quality. Austria’s participation in international projects has given a lift to mobilizing research potential on school leadership. Recently, the transformation of school governance has become a major focus of educational reform, which has stimulated various investigations to explore and evaluate various national strategies of school governance with respect to their contribution to quality development of the school system. Research focuses on the role of principals as change agents, for example in evidence-based measures such as standardized testing or school inspection as an external evaluation.