Only for school heroes? A qualitative study of Argentine school principals under structural constraints

This article examines school leadership under structural constraints in Argentina. Drawing primarily on 128 semistructured interviews with primary and secondary principals, and using regulatory analysis and official statistics for contextual triangulation, it analyzes how principals lead when distributed leadership is limited by hierarchical governance, concentrated accountability, weak inter-institutional support, scarce organizational time, and fragile collaborative structures. The findings show hybrid configurations in which collaboration, informal teacher leadership, and relational support coexist with individualized responsibility and institutional solitude. The article distinguishes educational infrastructure, understood as the broader institutional environment of leadership, from structural constraints, understood as restrictive conditions experienced by principals as relatively fixed limits on action. It argues that heroic leadership is not an individual trait or moral exception, but a structural effect of systems that depend on principals to compensate for regulatory, organizational, and relational deficits.