This article examines the rapidly shifting relationship between teachers and the state and efforts to re-model teacher identities within the wider context of public sector modernization and the New Public Management. The construction and development of officially authorized and normative discursive practices relating to leadership and the accompanying potential for the socio-ideological control of teachers are examined within a shifting social, cultural and political environments. Our interruption as critical leadership researchers is through a focus upon identity theory and how it reveals the ways in which normative discursive leadership practices operate and act as a form of identity work inscribing upon and working their way into the professional lives of teachers. (Contains 2 notes.)