NAVIGATING FACTORS AFFECTING PERFORMANCE OF CONTEMPORARY EDUCATORS THROUGH THE LENS OF SECONDARY SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS

Educational Leadership

Globally, education systems face intensifying demands to raise teacher performance amidst complex socio-political, institutional, and moral landscapes. Yet dominant policy models continue to reduce performance to technocratic metrics and standardized compliance, erasing the lived, relational, and ethical dimensions of teaching. This study interrogates how school leaders in the Philippine public education system construct and operationalize educator performance through culturally situated governance practices. Anchored in Foucault’s theory of governmentality, Ball’s ethical subjectivity, and Southern frameworks of relational authority, the study employs a qualitative, discourse-driven thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with secondary school administrators. Rather than relying on top-down metrics, leaders articulated a moralized and affective model of performance grounded in distributed empowerment, character reform, visual modeling, collaborative inquiry, and reflective planning. The findings foreground performance as a socially embedded, ethically mediated, and politically negotiated construct—far more expansive than dominant models suggest. Theoretically, this research challenges the global managerialist drift in education administration by foregrounding relational governance and affective accountability. It contributes to ongoing debates in political discourse theory and post-authoritarian studies by illustrating how soft power, moral persuasion, and intimate leadership practices mediate institutional order in contexts marked by democratic fragility. Practically, the study offers a localized educator performance framework that affirms cultural specificity, professional agency, and community-driven capacity-building. As global education reforms risk further colonizing professional identity, this work calls for radical attention to context, care, and the ethical architectures of leadership.

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