A vast body of literature has examined shared decision-making in schools presenting collaboration as the solution to the variety of issues that confront our schools. Frequently positive research findings are marked by a one-big-happy-family stance while negative findings are explained in terms of faulty implementation and participant resistance. While many researchers have concerned themselves with ever-finer tuning of process, democratic collaboration been discounted and disregarded. This research examined the feelings of participants in collaborative situations and found that educators in classrooms practice their own ethics and morality in distinctly democratic communities countering imposed collaboration with forms of their own. Three distinct types of collaboration were found: formal, informal and alternative. Additionally, findings confirmed that collaboration, shared leadership and teams, initially envisioned as vehicles of greater input and shared expertise have become prototypes of hidden control in the schools studied, suggesting increasing pressure toward greater homogeneity, centralized control and a less democratic education. This is a finding that hopefully will encourage and support further research developing non-authoritarian leadership practices and strategies of teacher training to resist such authoritarian intrusions.