Out with the old: university-based school administration programs are incoherent, undercapitalized, and disconnected from the districts where graduates are most likely to seek employment. There is much to be learned from the way business and the military train their leaders - forum

Education Next, Fall, 2003 by Marc Tucker

* Preaching general principles will not work. Create cases that are engaging, authentic, and designed to get the main points across. Use simulations to elicit participants' ideas about what to do in specific kinds of situations and evaluate their approaches, coaching them to a higher level of competence. Use action projects to get them to apply what they are learning to important problems in their district.

* Think very carefully about what instructional leadership means. Everyone says that should be the heart of the principal's job, but few we talked with could articulate what the phrase means to them. By instructional leadership, we mean the principal's capacity to: 1) offer a vision for instruction that will inspire the faculty; 2) analyze student performance data and make sound judgments as to which areas of the curriculum need attention; 3) make good judgments about the quality of the teaching in a classroom based on analysis of student work; 4) recognize the elements of sound standards-based classroom organization and practice; 5) provide strong coaching to teachers on all of the foregoing; 6) evaluate whether instructional systems in the school are properly aligned; and 7) determine the quality and fitness of instructional materials.

The National Institutes curriculum is designed to be delivered over two years, first by our staff to leadership teams from the school districts with which we work and then by the leadership team to its principals. The instruction is delivered during three weeks in the summer and in two additional three-day sessions each year, one in the fall and the other in the spring. About 20 percent of the instruction is delivered via the Internet; the rest is delivered face-to-face. In this way, we can use the web to convey the thoughts of leading experts and to use some of the best and most engaging instructional methods, while at the same time using the flexibility afforded by the face-to-face instruction to incorporate material that is specific to the district that employs the principals being trained.

The same curriculum could easily be used to train aspiring principals if it were augmented with a properly designed internship. Indeed, we think that candidates for the principalship would be very unlikely to pass the kind of performance-based licensing requirements that we have in mind without such training. But because we have limited resources and think that the most urgent need is to retrain currently serving principals to do a far better job of raising the performance of students in their schools, the National Center on Education and the Economy chose to start with that group. And because we think it is a waste of time to train school executives in school districts that do not have a reasonable strategy for raising student performance and are still operating in the old way, we decided to partner with school districts and states that have a clear, viable strategy for raising student performance and are looking for ways to train principals to implement that strategy.