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).
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