This paper examines the political dimensions of school principals’ work after the decentralization movement with an aim to evaluate the political impact of the reform on education. Starting from the late 1990s, decentralization has become the major theme of political reform in Taiwan. The political reform had great impact on education arena, especially the work of the educational administrators. Because mayors now become the leaders of local educational governance, their interests in education thus have great impact on the management of local education. This would also affect the work of school principals and superintendents. Faced with the professional expectations and political challenges, the job of educational administrators are much harder now than it were before. This paper chooses the school principals as the focus of the analysis. In sum, the paper will accomplish the following tasks: 1. Analyzing the roles of school principals in city governance after the decentralization movement. 2. Examining the political environments of the school principals. 3. Provide suggestions for school principals and local education governance. Local power structure often affect the development of local education greatly (Spring, 1997, McCarty and Ramsey, 1971). Three models of local educational governance was provided, which include the professional model, the democratic model, and the political model based on case studies on the local education governance in the U.S. and Taiwan (Wang, 2006). In the professional model, the professional community takes the lead in controlling the personnel, financial, and educational decisions. Mayors are mainly left out in most of the decisions in education. This was the case in Taiwan before the late 1990s. In the democratic model, citizens take lead in determine issues related to education. The professional agents, such as the superintendents, are delegated with the responsibility of running local education guided by the board of education. Mayors and the city machine are detached from local school management. The management of the majority of U.S. school district is a good example of this. In the political model, mayors are assigned with the responsibility of running local education. Financial, personnel, and educational decisions are made in the mayors’ office. However, new models of local educational governance are found in European countries. For example, in the U.K., the education system is now becoming a centralized system pretending to be decentralized. Despite the fact that school councils now run individual schools and school management resembles the democratic model mentioned above, the central government makes important decisions such as curriculum and teacher qualification in education. It is therefore not so “democratic” as it claims. Another new model was found in Finland. In Helsinki, the mayor appoints the superintendent for Helsinki. However, once the superintendent is appointed, he or she becomes independent from the mayor becasue their terms of service do not overlap competely. In a way, the Finish model of local educational governance resembles the mixture of professional models and political models. It is not clear how different models of local education governance affect the work of the school principals. Taiwan will be used as the case for analyzing the political model on principals' work.

The data for answering the research questions are mainly collected through interviews. School principals from eight cities in Taiwan are chosen through reputational sampling and snowball sampling. Those who were recommended to be knowledeable of the research issues were chosen and contacted for semi-structured interviews. Key interviews questions include (1)their changing relationships with other school principals, poltical eites in the communities, superintendents, interest groups, city councilors, and mayors; (2) their perceptions of the political dimensions of their work and the possible impact on their professional work and education. A total of 80 school prinipals were interviewed. All the interviews were then transcibed and analyzed based on the research questions.

Findings from Taiwan's study shows that mayoral control over education did politicize the work of the superinttendents. School resources are often used as the political resources of the mayors. Of course, the mayor can also mobilize his/her political power for improving education. The pros and cons of mayoral control over education are discussed. It would be hard to determine the role of the school principals for different models of local educational governance all at once. The authors would like to use Taiwan’s example for addressing the impact of political model on the role of school principals. Hopefully it can bring in more collaboration among different European countries to examine how different models of local educational governance are shaped and affect the role of school principals. Such findings are important for redesigning the system of local education governance for the betterment of education. It would be also helpful for extending the theoretical foundations for designing systems of educational governance.