Over the last few decades, high-stakes accountability has become commonplace in education policy both in the United States and internationally. In this paper, we consider the role of school leaders and “accountability talk” in implementing this shift through a case study of one urban school principal's talk during a period of reform. Consistent with broader policy discourses, the 650 instances of principal rhetoric in 14 elementary school meetings reflected issues of standardization and assessment through rational appeals to logic (logos). However, the principal's “accountability talk” also relied on rhetorical sequences that wove these rational appeals together with moral (ethos) and emotional (pathos) claims, thereby connecting the accountability paradigm to more established discourses associated with the educational profession. We argue that school principal's talk is a primary means through which broader institutional changes and local work practices become coupled together, often in ways that blend apparently competing models of organization. As such, accountability talk should be of both empirical and theoretical interest for scholars studying school leadership and education reform.
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