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Levels of cultural understanding can be applied to leadership and research. Intracultural understanding is self-contained within one culture. Cross-cultural understanding extends from one culture to another. Intercultural understanding recognizes implications for one's own culture. Metacultural understanding extends beyond one's own and others’ culture to create entirely new meanings. This study examines an educational administration program in Mexico using researchers from a multicultural team. School directors and those in higher education participated in focus groups to examine the preparation Mexican leaders receive, the challenges they face, and the implications for preparation programs. These issues are significant in Mexico, and have implications for the United States and other countries.

This critical sociocultural view of accountability illuminates heretofore hidden, obscured, or neglected aspects of accountability—its meanings, intended and unintended consequences, and the processes by which it was institutionalized. This perspective exhumes the social and cultural processes—power, democracy, policy making, schooling, and language games—implicated in contemporary notions of accountability. Our unique positioning allows us to critically examine the “Texas model” of accountability from the inside, with implications for other regimes of accountability presently in place or being considered elsewhere.

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