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Cookie-Cutter Leaders for Cookie-Cutter Schools: The Teleology of Standardization and the De-Legitimization of the University in Educational Leadership Preparation

The effort to upgrade preparation standards for educational leaders is a world wide phenomenon (Gronn, 2002). In the United States, lacking an equivalent of a national ministry of education as in other countries, that thrust has taken many forms over the past decade but has primarily involved national professional administrative associations as well as state departments of education. The culmination of this movement has become centered in national accrediting bodies for schools of education, specifically NCATE (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education) and the National Policy Board of Educational Administration (NPBEA) and a sub-unit called ELCC (Educational Leadership Constituent Council). As NCATE, NPBEA, and the ELCC exercise the policing function on university and college programs which prepare educational leaders, the makeup of the standards, their assumptions, and results become critically important. This article argues that this movement embodies the teleology of standardization whose principle objective is to remove the university and college as the primary site for the preparation of educational leaders through ruthless homogenization of university curricula and the debasement of the role of theory. That movement is consistent with the coming drive for alternative certification for profit. When the playing field has been politically leveled, anyone can license educational leaders.