Collaboration among multiple stakeholders is an integral part of growing expectations (i.e., grant funders, reform packages, accountability standards) for school turnaround in the U.S. Accountability pressures for increasing academic achievement, however, may in some cases, diminish the democratic forms of collaboration without more scrutiny and educational leadership attention. How principals in successful schools have developed their organizations into participatory democratic communities has also been a key interest among researchers associated with the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) across 16 countries. Principal leadership for school turnaround across varying national contexts (e.g. Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, England, Norway, Sweden) emphasized principal orientations to distribute leadership and encourage open and reflective dialogue, critical analysis, and collaborative decision-making (e.g., Day, 2009; Drysdale et al., 2009; Møller and Vedøy, 2009; Moos et al., 2005). More recently, studies of school turnaround within high-need or high-poverty school communities experiencing changing demographics or with significant proportions of ethnic minorities have noted principal attention to collaboration and collaborative networks in culturally sensitive or relevant ways (e.g., involvement in school decision making, active community life; Mulford et al., 2008; Murakami-Ramalho et al. 2010; Pashiardis et al., 2011).

Missing in ISSPP case studies, however, is deeper analysis of the democratic collaborative processes and dynamics enacted by participants, including the principal, which enabled and sustained the turnaround. More understanding of principal influence of democratic collaboration is especially vital in high-need and increasingly diverse school-communities where the principal does not share the same ethnic identity and cultural background. Therefore, the focus of this study is to examine the democratic nature of collaboration and the role of the principal in one “successful” Southern Arizona elementary school within a high-poverty, changing demographic, and border context in (U.S.-Mexico) the U.S. Southwest that dramatically improved in state standardized student academic achievement test scores (i.e., reading, mathematics) over a minimum of 3 years and where the principal has been retained more than five years.

Examination of how participants narrate the democratic processes of collaboration and the contribution of principal leadership is informed by Furman’s (2004) ethic of community.  Furman’s (2004) framework transfers the locus of moral agency for educational change from the solitary or dominant visionary heroic leader to the responsibility of a community as a whole. As moral agents, leadership is distributed among stakeholders who are committed to a set of communal processes that encourage deeply democratic deliberation and collaboration: 1) processes for knowing, understanding, and valuing (i.e., respect individual worth and dignity, cultural diversity, deep intentional listening, suspending personal judgments); 2) processes for full participation and inquiry (open inquiry, inclusive spaces, democratic exchange); and 3) processes for working toward the common good (e.g., communicating effectively, working in teams, participant like-mindedness). Collaboration for change depends on the vitality and strength of trusting relationships forged by a set of commitments, skills, and dispositions that allow these to processes to emerge. Collaboration in an ethic of community enables participants to become change agents disposed toward purposeful plans of action based upon commonly held moral footings.  

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