Closely related to the discourse on “Didactic and Curriculum” (Hopmann, Klafki, Krapp & Riquarts, 1995; Gundem & Hopmann, 1998; Hopmann, 2015) is the idea of school leadership as gap management. Very simply, if you look at the curriculum tradition, it has always been built around very high expectations of what local curriculum leadership was supposed to mean. Up to the seventies and eighties, the idea that curriculum was funded and locally determined by school leaders was dominant in most of the Anglo-Saxon world (this becomes obvious, for example, in Tyler’s Principles, 1949). Yet since the late seventies, this tradition has been challenged not least as a consequence of reforms like “A Nation at Risk”, the accountability movement and the introduction of state-based standard testing. This mixing of transformations turns local leadership away from curriculum leadership in the traditional comprehensive sense. In this context, school leaders are accountable for implementing curricula they did not set up themselves, or did not develop with their teachers. In state-based systems, on the other hand, the locally applied curriculum is a matter for the individual teachers and not the school. The bridging element here is didactics as a tool for teachers to define their work within the national framework. However, leadership in this context had nothing to do with didactics on behalf of the teachers, but became administrative. This type of gap management did not change fundamentally until the late nineteen eighties and also led to the situation that to this day leadership issues have never played a significant role in the most prominent theories of didactics. International developments like the results of large-scale assessments of PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS, but also the related recommendations of supranational policy organisations like the OECD, have led to pressure and stress concerning assessment. In Austria for example, this is the basis of argumentation for reforms like the implementation of national testing, standardised school leaving examinations, competence-based instruction and an inclusive and comprehensive school setting. So now comes the empirical question: what happens to gap management in these contexts? With the aid of the example of Austrian school leaders we investigate how school leaders deal with these new challenges. The paper will address conceptual issues as well as empirical findings illustrating this question based on a recent government-funded research project in Lower Austria.

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