The Changing Face of Leadership Preparation - leadership preparation programme standards for school administrators

School Administrator, Nov, 2001 by Joseph Murphy

Hope in the power of six standards to produce administrators fit for contemporary schoolhouse challenges

The problem with educational leadership preparation programs today is that they are driven by neither education nor leadership.

At a fundamental level, school administration is being reshaped by forces in the environment that, regardless of the internal health of the profession, demand that we rethink the business of school leadership.

Programs that prepare our school leaders are evolving to address the fact that the economic, social and political environments surrounding schools are undergoing dramatic changes. The emergence of the global economy, the changing face of society and a heightened interest in the political world with market solutions to the nation's problems have important implications for our schools and for the education of the superintendents and principals who lead them.

Under Fire

A good deal of internal soul searching also has anchored calls for the reform of school administration. These concerns are centered on the knowledge base supporting the profession and the methods and procedures used to educate school leaders.

On the first front, critics have attacked school administrator preparation programs for focusing on the academic dimensions of the profession to the near exclusion of actual practice. They also have lambasted programs for ignoring the ethical and moral dimensions of the job.

Analysts have assailed preparation programs for superintendents for their nearly exclusive focus on management issues and academic disciplines such as sociology and psychology and an almost total absence of anything to do with education. One would expect preparation programs to promote an understanding of our best knowledge about learning, knowledge of curriculum standards, and knowledge of whole school improvement, for example.

Turning to the methods used to educate school leaders, nearly every program component has been found wanting in the past decade. Quality leaders are not actively recruited and selection standards are low. Program content is often irrelevant, connected neither to the central mission of schooling nor to the practice of leadership. Instruction is dull and the faculty members are only marginally more knowledgeable than their students. Standards of performance are often conspicuous by their absence.

Repouring the Base

It is probably fair to argue that the foundations of educational administration, if not actually being repoured, are undergoing important changes. Particularly noteworthy have been the efforts to reshape the definition of school administration as a profession and to redefine educational administration as an area of study.

On the first issue, some agreement exists that the conception of the school administrator's role is being reconstructed around central ideals of leadership. At the most basic level, this has meant a movement away from a century-long preoccupation with management ideology and with the dominant metaphor of superintendent as manager.

During the first half of the 20th century, business had exerted considerable influence over preparation programs for school administrators. Pre-service education for school executives stressed the technical and mechanical aspects of administration, specific and immediate tasks and the practical dimensions of the job. Preparation was highly technical; little thought was given to the theoretical underpinnings of the work of superintendents and principals.

The predominant trend between 1950 and 1985 was the infusion of content from the social sciences into preparation programs. The infrastructure for this activity was the expansion of the conceptual and theoretical knowledge base of the profession through the development of a science of administration. This was a movement intended to produce a foundation of scientifically supported knowledge in educational administration in place of the seat-of-the-pants literature already in place. It also represented a trend away from technique-oriented substance based upon practical experience and toward theory-oriented substance based on disciplines outside education.

Reculturing the Field

Today, education leadership is being recast with materials from the intellectual and moral domains of the profession. A key element of this emerging vision is a deeper understanding of the centrality of learning, teaching and school improvement within the role of the school administrator--a shift in focus from educational administration as management to educational administration primarily concerned with teaching and learning.

Although other qualities of this new school administrator are less clear, the literature does provide clues about what they might be:

* an understanding of caring and humanistic concerns as a key to effective leadership;

* knowledge of the transformational and change dynamics of the superintendency;

* an appreciation of the collegial and collaborative foundations of school administration; and

* an emphasis on the ethical and reflective dimensions of leadership.