This article reflects on the role of the school principal in Ibero-America. The manuscript is part of the problem definition phase of a larger research project on the exercise of pedagogical leadership by school principals, which aimed to analyze pedagogical leadership practices and their challenges. A search of scientific literature was conducted in academic databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Redalyc using the phrases “educational leadership,” “school leadership,” “pedagogical leadership,” and “school principal leadership,” which were typed in Spanish, English and Portuguese using the boolean operator OR. The results were limited to works published between 2017 and 2024 in Ibero-America. The content of the selected articles was examined with the qualitative analysis software Atlas.ti 7.0. From the inductive analysis, three main categories or challenges faced by school principals in the region emerged within the context of a managerialist model that restricts pedagogical leadership: administrative workload, weaknesses in training, and professional isolation. These challenges are evident in recent studies on leadership and school management in Ibero-America, despite some efforts by certain countries and universities to address the issue. The main theses of these studies were contrasted with the critical perspectives of authors such as Apple (1979) and Hargreaves (2005), whose arguments remain relevant 45 and 21 years later, respectively.