Recent evidence of an emergent evaluative state of leadership preparation in the United States has been widely disseminated, and the effects of assessment driven accountability on preparation programs extensively debated. Less scholarly attention has been paid to the institutional effects of the performance assessment evidentiary demands on university programs undergoing review by national accrediting bodies  The lack of scholarly attention is addressed by presenting a case study examining the institutional dynamics of accreditation review experienced by faculty in one department that offers graduate programs leading to certification for education leaders.  The conceptual framework is established in a discussion of conditions of enactment of the regulative, normative and cognitive facets of the institutional dynamics evident in the implementation ecology of accountability systems.  The case study analysis outlines four phases of development of the essential elements of an assessment system, and describes the questions raised by faculty about performance evidence, the assessment of that evidence, and the nature of measures of program outcome effectiveness.  Classic theories of organizations fail to fully explain the concerns and questions that were raised by faculty. In contrast, Engeström’s (1999) theory of expansive learning grounded in Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), provides insights into faculty responses to questions raised by the criteria for program review established by the accrediting body. Artifacts of expansive learning evident in the development of a performance assessment system can be viewed as reflecting institutionalization of regulative, normative, and cognitive dimensions of the emergent evaluative state of leadership preparation in the U.S.

There is new scholarly interest in the embeddedness of schools in the intersections of social, economic and political forces of communities in which they are located. This focus has particular import for urban centers and regions, but emergent scholarship can be enriched by a deeper geopolitical economic analysis drawn from critical studies of cities and regions. An international body of scholarship on cities and regions, largely ignored by analysts of urban education, turns our attention to the changes in the political geography of the world that has created new geographies of power in the regional worlds of globalization. In this paper I frame the problem of urban educational governance in the contemporary discourse on urbanism as a way of turning analytic attention to conceptualizations of new urbanization processes in the context of globalization of states, and their implications for the governance of education. The problems of urban education governance remain largely unresolved, and I argue should be reinterpreted to reflect new urbanization processes articulated by scholars of contemporary urban development, and the political economy of geography (Brenner, 2004; Harvey, 2001, Lefebvre, 2003; Soja, 2000). I describe the ways in which critical cultural and radical political economic studies of globalizing cities have led to new discourses about processes of urbanization and urban governance. I conclude by considering the implications of conceptions of rescaled state spaces under contemporary globalizing socio economics for framing examinations of education leadership praxis in the rescaled spaced of urban educational governance.