Leadership educativa. Prendere sul serio l’etica

The aim of this article is to unfold how the educational policies, that have reconfigured education systems since the ‘80s and globally spreaded in western countries, have focused on leadership as a lever of change. Discourses, paradigms and ‘new’ experts have in fact molded the head teachers’ role as a managerial one, in order to implement in schools technologies methods, tools and even theories and values com-ing from the entrepreneurial and private sectors. Here are presented theories that have sustained these changes and therefore impacted on educational leadership. A conceptual map distinguishes welfarist, man-agerialist and ‘critical’ discourses, as well as the ontological and epis-temological premises underpinning leadership theories. Within this frame, empirical researches on educational leadership, recently con-ducted both at the international and Italian educational fields, are criti-cally discussed in the light of the shifting head teachers profession to-ward a neoliberal ethos.