Purpose: This article investigates how school leaders make sense of social justice and democracy in their practice in two settings, a high-stakes testing and accountability context, the San Francisco Bay Area, California, and a low-stakes testing and accountability context, Norway. It demonstrates how leaders view relationships among education, democracy, and social justice, when located in a neoliberal democracy with a minimalist welfare state or in a social democracy with a robust welfare state. Design and Evidence: Through a comparative design, we analyze qualitative data from two international principal exchanges designed to capture outsiders’ impressions of schools in each context. Participants included alumni from an American and a Norwegian university’s principal preparation programs. Through preobservation and postobservation interviews and focus groups, we explore observations by practitioners, who acted as coconstructors in the research. Findings and Implications: The article presents three findings: (1) While principals in both systems conceptualized equity similarly, their conceptions of democracy were aligned with the type of democracy in which they were embedded; (2) Schools’ norms, climate, structures, and leadership, as well as students’ daily lives, reflected the values implicit in their respective political contexts; (3) Principals perceived elements of their macro- and micro-level settings to enable or constrain their ability to craft democratic, socially just schools. These findings help scholars move beyond discourse about the need for leaders to advocate for equity, to deeper understandings about conditions that shape democratic schools, such as values about collectivism, welfarism, and the common good—tenets of a socially just civic society.

目的：本文研究学校领导如何在两种情况下实践中如何理解社会正义和民主，一种是高风险测试和问责制背景下，加利福尼亚州旧金山湾区，另一种是低风险测试和问责制背景下，挪威。 。它展示了当领导者处于具有最低福利国家的新自由主义民主国家或拥有健全福利国家的社会民主国家时，领导人如何看待教育，民主与社会正义之间的关系。设计和证据：通过比较设计，我们分析了来自两个国际主要交易所的定性数据，旨在捕捉外界在每种情况下对学校的印象。参加者包括来自美国和挪威大学主要预科课程的校友。通过观察前和观察后访谈以及焦点小组，我们探索了从业者的观察力，他们是研究的共同构建者。研究结果和意义：这篇文章提出了三个发现：（1）虽然两个系统的负责人在概念上都对平等进行了概念化，但他们的民主观念与它们所嵌入的民主类型保持一致；（2）学校的规范，气候，结构和领导能力以及学生的日常生活，反映了各自政治环境中隐含的价值观；（3）校长认为他们的宏观和微观环境的要素能够或限制他们制造民主的，社会公正的学校的能力。这些发现帮助学者们超越了关于领导者倡导公平的讨论，更深入地了解了形成民主流派的条件，例如关于集体主义，福利主义和共同福利的价值观-社会公正的公民社会的宗旨。