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Accountability policies have become commonplace in many countries, used by governments as a strategy for holding school staff responsible for student achievement. Urban schools in particular have felt the pressure of these accountability policies.  This paper examines the school administrative response to accountability policy, describing how policy becomes embedded in work practice in schools through the social tactics and rhetorical moves employed by school leaders.  School leaders have to manage in the middle between policymakers who demand compliance with their accountability policies and their teaching staff who they rely on to meet the demands pressed by these policies.   Our research question:  How do urban school leaders – principals, assistant principals, and teacher leaders – work at convincing teachers to heed and respond to government accountability policies that often threaten their professional autonomy? 

Our empirical work is framed by a sense-making perspective (Weick, 1995) on policy implementation and by work on social interaction in sociology. From a sense-making perspective, people not only interpret, but also author their environment noticing some cues and not others (Weick, 1995). Arguing that what is crucial is not simply that school staff choose to respond to policy but what they understand themselves to be responding to and how they opt to respond, scholars increasingly use interpretive frames to investigate how human sense-making influences policy implementation (Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, 2007; Ball, 2006; Coburn, 2005; 2006; Spillane et al., 2006). Grounded in, and extending, this literature, our work is informed by three core sociological constructs: framing, footing, and social tactics. With respect to framing, a common metaphor is the picture frame that signals what to emphasize and deemphasize by demarcating for the viewer what is inside and outside the frame, what is foreground and background (Bateson, 1972).  Framing is also about formula:  Bateson adds to the picture frame analogy the metaphor of mathematical set theory to think about the formula aspect of framing—like set theory, framing provides logic for categorization, and proposes logical relationships among categories.  Thus, framing emerges both as a method of organization (Goffman, 1974) and “a set of dynamic, negotiated, and often contested processes” involved in the production of meaning (Benford & Snow, 2000). Footing connects conceptually to framing as people position themselves—through speech—in relation to one another and to types of discourse, thereby organizing social interaction in particular ways (Goffman, 1981).   Finally, the notion of social skill (Fligstein, 2001) further specifies micro-foundations of social interaction; that is, what actors do—the tactics they deploy—to induce cooperation from others. Tactics include appeal to authority, agenda-setting, capitalizing on ambiguities and uncertainties to seize or clarify, making what’s possible, what’s preferable, more brokering than blustering, press for more than they are likely to get, hard to read and not self-interested, joining groups to reorder preferences, many balls in the air to ensure some wins, get others to believe they are in control, and create alliances and outliers. 

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