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Some Thoughts on Rethinking the Pre-Service Education of School Leaders

Over the last 20 years, it has been my privilege to engage in a variety of scholarly endeavors in the area of leadership education. I have also had the opportunity to help shape policy initiatives on this critical topic at both the national level and in a significant number of states. Finally, at the street level I have had the honor to manage a department of school administration dedicated to the preparation of quality school leaders, a statewide academy developed to assist administrators already on the job, and a number of review panels whose assignment it was to take stock of preparation programs in a variety of states. As a faculty member, I have also been provided with the time and other resources to make sense of these experiences in the context of the considerable body of work that is being amassed on the topic of leadership education for school administrators. My most recent sweep through all of the above knowledge and analyses leads me to the following two major conclusions about initial preparation programs in the United States. On the upside, a good deal of energy and hard work is being poured into attempts to revitalize preparation programs. On the downside, we are not seeing much in the way of real improvement; that is, most of the change is on the margins. The logical question then is: How can we use the energy afoot to better affect; that is, gain more traction on the program improvement agenda? My conclusion is that unless we redefine the rules of the game for how we engage in preparation development work, we will be quite unlikely to make more sanguine judgments in the future. In fact, if we do not get off the road we have traveled for the last 40 years, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to reach a different destination. In particular, my assessment is that we would be advantaged if we rebuilt and recultured preparation programs, not on traditional scaffolding (e.g., debates about the knowledge base, designing programs for administrative roles, trying to discern what social science discipline will save us), but around a set of powerful design principles. Based on the types of work noted above, my colleagues Martha McCarthy, Hunter Moorman, and I have forged a framework of six such guiding principles that collectively meet the criterion of fostering the reculturing of preparation programs. Foundation-based programs. One of the conclusions of our work in the field is that many departments are silent about what grounds their programs. Our sense is that if the considerable energy flowing into programs is to amount to much, institutions need to begin by addressing the mission or the foundation of the program—of answering the question, not