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Educating Leaders for Tomorrow: A Forum
Breaking the Cartel 
By Richard F. Elmore

THANKS TO Arthur Levine's report. Educating School Leaders (1), it is no longer necessary to belabor the catastrophe that is the education, certification, and licensure of school leaders in the U.S. The cartel - the interlocking and self-perpetuating system of state agencies, cash-for-credit university programs, and hopelessly inadequate local hiring practices - has been exposed once again in all its gory detail, this time from within.
 
The issue now is what should be done about it. I am dubious about universities getting better without first competing for the franchise. Rather, I think we need to rebuild a system of preparation for school leaders. Let me state a few basic design principles that could shape this work.
 
Principle 1. Everything should be anchored in the instructional core of schooling. Traditionally, the status of educational administrators has been defined by their distance from instructional practice. This culture has resulted in a collection of people doing work that is largely irrelevant to the central tasks of schooling, while they are largely unqualified for the work that needs doing. The present accountability demands on schools cannot be addressed except through the direct management of instructional practice. Most educational administrators are unprepared to do this work, except in the most superficial ways.

They are unprepared because 1) they were not selected mainly for their knowledge of instructional practice, 2) they have shielded themselves from learning about the management of instruction by deliberately focusing on other dimensions of the work, and 3) they have been rewarded for doing things other than paying attention to instructional practice.
 
The work of running schools - managing the use of time and money, motivating and supervising people, connecting the school to its clients, meeting performance targets - has meaning only if its effects can be seen in the classroom. Learning how to do this work involves immersion in theory, in the use of evidence, and in the practice of face-to-face relations associated with the organization's work. Some of this can be learned in graduate school. Most of it can be learned only through supervised practice. The current division of labor between education schools, states, and districts does not provide settings for this learning to occur.
 
Principle 2. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. With few exceptions, states have defaulted on their responsibility to regulate administrator preparation programs. Universities cannot resist using educational administration programs as cash cows. Districts typically have nothing resembling a human resource management strategy that would allow them to dictate requirements for prospective school leaders. It is impossible to "fix" the problem of quality in educational administration by fixing one dimension of it.
       
The thin end of the wedge for solving these systemic problems is the improvement of the capacity of school systems to manage their human resources. Districts and schools are the places where the force of accountability is most apparent and where the incentives to improve are greatest. Districts should be allowed to run their own training and certification programs, either alone or in cooperation with other districts. Universities should be relieved of their monopoly on the preparation and certification of administrators. States could then move to license private providers, local districts, and universities with strong connections to practice to enter the market. Alternatively, as Levine's report suggests, states can charter free-standing institutions, like England's National College for School Leadership, that break out of the mold of existing institutions and operate under revocable charters.
       
You break a cartel by disrupting it at its most vulnerable point. Then you revoke its monopoly rights at all other points. 
    
Principle 3. Professions have practices. Educational leadership is a profession without a practice. Real professions control entry by controlling access to the knowledge base that constitutes their practice and by taking responsibility for developing that knowledge base. If educators are not willing to exercise control over entry, based on whether people can demonstrate mastery of a body of knowledge and the practice derived from that knowledge, they will, by default, allow people with little professional knowledge to control their fate. 
       
Neither education professionals nor universities have addressed this problem, except in the case of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Bottom line: if educators want to exercise political influence in the reconstitution of leadership, they will have to begin to act more like professionals. If they don't, plenty of people will gladly tell them what they should be doing. 
Principle 4. Powerful practices require strategies; a list is not a strategy. Educational administration programs are typically characterized by what might charitably be called "list logic": here is a list of courses, take some or all of them, do an internship, and, presto, you're qualified to be an administrator. The field's best-intentioned |effort to develop standards - the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium - is, alas, a list.
       
Strong practices derive not from lists, but from ordered, integrated frameworks that say, for example, what is central and what is peripheral to the knowledge required for the job, where the locus of practice begins, what skills and knowledge are associated with that domain, and what it looks like when the work is being done well. Strong practices stipulate cause-and-effect relationships between practice and its consequences for student learning, and these relationships are falsifiable on the basis of evidence. 
  
The future of educational administration is up for grabs. The question is who will grab it.
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RICHARD F. ELMORE is Gregory Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Mass. He is currently also on the faculty of the Public Education Leadership Project, an executive education program for leaders in large school districts, jointly run by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, and he is co-facilitator of the Connecticut Superintendents' Network, a community of practice for superintendents engaged in the improvement of instruction, sponsored by the Connecticut Center for School Change.
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1. Arthur Levine, Educating School Leaders (Washington, D.C.: The Education Schools Project, March 2005).


From the Phi Delta Kappan, March 2006, Volume 87, Number 7, pp. 517-518. See http://www.pdkintl.org/" OR http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm