This article is based on a case study to explore a model of teacher governance and illustrate the distinct challenges of entrepreneurship in public education. In the Sedona Charter School, each classroom principal educator serves as instructional leader and resource leader. Principal educators adjust curricula, hire their teachers, determine salaries (including their own), and purchase classroom materials within the constraints of state funding. By conventional measures of market, financial, and performance accountability, the school succeeds, suggesting that this model can be replicated. Yet the school founders severed their relationship with the school and lobbied state authorities to close it, since, in their view, it violated its charter (process accountability). This case suggests that most innovative entrepreneurs may have difficulty adjusting to educational realities and must themselves be held accountable by parents and state authorities. The study further suggests that, as educational principals, parents and state regulators are more influenced by performance and financial accountability than by process accountability.
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