Agentic leaders: School principals as street-level managers

School leaders fall into Michael Lipsky's category of street-level bureaucrats, meaning those who implement public policy on the frontlines and have significant discretion in how they do so. However, we know very little about how school principals exercise their discretion in implementing educational policy. Exploring school leaders from a street-level perspective can help both researchers and practitioners gain a better understanding of the political and institutional context in which they operate. Doing so should also provide insights into how they use their discretion to bridge the gap between the policy-as-designed and the policy-as-implemented on the frontlines. By providing empirical examples, we show how the decisions that school principals make based on their discretion have direct and indirect effects on shaping policy outcomes. This understanding, in turn, provides a framework with which to analyze the relationships between the staff, students and parents, thus improving our understanding of educational policy outcomes.