A License to Lead?

Copy and paste from:  American Enterprise Institute

The full report in PDF form is available there.

 "This agenda is not an attack on educational leadership--it is a commitment to professionalize it."

 

 

Introduction

As the nation's schools struggle to meet the needs of ill-served children, rise to the challenge of the No Child Left  Behind Act, and adjust to a world of accountability and growing competition, educational leaders face unprecedented challenges. Yet we retain a system of recruitment, preparation, and induction that does not recruit the leaders we need, does not prepare them for their positions, does not reward them on par with their responsibilities, and locks out candidates with vital knowledge and experience.

American schools suffer from a lack of effective leaders and sensible leadership models at both the school and the district levels. In 2002, Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), said, "The pool of good [superintendent] candidates is shallow. Five years ago, the pool was fairly shallow, and I thought it was as bad as it could get. I was not nearly pessimistic enough. It's gotten worse." A recent national survey of superintendents found that fewer than 40 percent were happy with their principals' ability to make tough decisions, delegate responsibility to staff, involve teachers in developing policies and priorities, or spend money efficiently. When filling a principal position, 60 percent of superintendents agreed they have had to "take what you can get." Concerns about rickety recruitment systems and leadership quality are coupled with shortages in many states. The problem, however, is not a lack of warm bodies; It is a need for individuals with the skills, training, and knowledge to lead 21st century schools and school systems.

Today, 47 states license principals and 43 license superintendents before deeming them eligible to apply for a position. These states have mandated costly and onerous preparation regimens for which even an exhaustive search can uncover no evidence documenting their contribution to improved student learning. Typically, principal licensure requires three or more years of K-12 teaching experience, completion of an approved degree program in educational administration, and an internship. In several states, candidates are also required to pass the State Leaders Licensure Assessment, an exam designed to ensure they hold professionally sanctioned values and attitudes. Superintendent licensure involves similar requirements, though states are often more lenient about how candidates fulfill them. In theory, most states offer alternative licensure routes or are able to issue waivers, but--aside from a handful of high-profile superintendencies--these are rarely used in practice.

Current reform efforts largely fall into one of two opposing camps: raising barriers to entry or recruiting a smattering of high-profile "superstar leaders" from careers outside of education. However, neither approach addresses the long-term challenge of deepening the talent pool, enhancing accountability, and providing sustained support to talented practitioners in the field and to those who would join them.

In the world of 21st century schooling, leaders must be able to leverage accountability and revolutionary technology, devise performance-based evaluation systems, reengineer outdated management structures, recruit and cultivate nontraditional staff, drive decisions with data, build professional cultures, and ensure that every child is served. It is not clear that teaching experience or educational administration coursework prepares candidates for these challenges. On the whole, traditional administrators have fared poorly in recent decades, even as private sector and nonprofit managers have made great strides in addressing similar tasks.

Answering the educational leadership crisis requires reform that will attract and develop leaders equal to the challenge. In lieu of the existing regimen of restrictions and regulations--one punctured by occasional and awkward loopholes--it is time to adopt a straightforward three-point standard. Leadership candidates ought to be required to:

• hold a B.A. or B.S. degree from an accredited college or university and pass a rigorous criminal background check;
• demonstrate to the potential employer experience sufficient to exhibit essential knowledge, temperament, and skills for the position; and
• demonstrate mastery of essential technical knowledge and skills, to the extent that policmakers can pinpoint and agree on concrete and identifiable skills without personal command of which an administrator is incapable of effective leadership (in areas of education law, special education, etc.).

Appropriately, points two and three will have different implications for school-level and district-level leadership. However, while the principalship of a small school and the superintendency of a large district pose fundamentally different challenges, the framework for finding and cultivating quality leaders remains consistent. These changes must happen in tandem with a New Leadership Agenda to:

• reconceptualize leadership so that we no longer imagine that each leader must embody the entire range of knowledge and skills the organization requires;
• produce performance-oriented criteria for recruiting and hiring leaders;
• develop reliable systems to monitor leadership performance and hold leaders accountable; and
• provide support systems and ongoing professional development.

These steps are similar to teacher licensure reforms that I and others have previously proposed to address teacher quality and shortage concerns. In the case of education leadership, however, these steps alone are not enough. In the case of teachers, the basic challenge is providing a competent, self-sufficient professional to every classroom in the nation. Because practitioners generally operate independently in self-contained classrooms, it is appropriate to use an assessment that ensures each candidate has mastered essential knowledge. And teachers are charged with clear responsibilities that can be readily assessed through student outcomes. Leaders, on the other hand, operate as part of a leadership team and have more amorphous responsibilities. Because leadership roles need not be fixed in the way that teaching roles are, it is rarely necessary that each administrator embody a particular skill or piece of knowledge--only that members of a leadership team together, as a team, possess requisite skills and knowledge. Whereas concern for teacher quality implies that each professional must be an island of competence, efforts to promote quality leadership are bound by no such constraint.

This New Leadership Agenda would benefit both school leaders and students. Greater competition would force school systems to pay a fair rate for managerial talent and create new opportunities for educational leaders to command the kind of professional support and respect enjoyed by their counterparts in other sectors.

Additionally, the New Leadership Agenda would increase flexibility and open doors for new approaches to distributing educational leadership. Richard Elmore of the Harvard Graduate School of Education points out that leadership can be "distributed" throughout schools and systems in ways that tap into diverse expertise. However, that kind of flexible thinking is too often stunted by the regulations and restrictions of current arrangements. Central to reforming licensure is the need to rethink the roles of administrators more generally. Administrators who have only a limited ability to shape their staffs, to reward and sanction personnel, or to allocate resources are constrained in their ability to serve their students and cannot be held fully responsible for organizational outcomes. Truly professionalizing educational leadership requires granting them the same tools and responsibilities enjoyed by leaders in other vital fields. Finally, increased flexibility in job descriptions and authority must be accompanied by increased flexibility in compensation, making it easier to reward and retain quality leaders.

This agenda is not an attack on educational leadership--it is a commitment to professionalize it. The first to benefit from these changes will be the tens of thousands of talented and hard-working principals and superintendents grown frustrated with narrow job descriptions, an inability to assemble a coherent management team, a lack of support and respect, and ambiguous expectations. Moreover, urging that we overhaul state licensure systems is not meant to suggest that all or even most districts must immediately hire nontraditional candidates or restructure leadership. Districts where existing arrangements are working should feel no compulsion to change. Instead, rather than mandate change, the New Leadership Agenda permits new approaches in those schools and school systems that want more flexibility to achieve their educational goals.

This paper proceeds in two parts. First, it analyzes the current licensure system, including its history, costs, and the presumptions it rests on. The shortcomings of current reform strategies, such as seeking only nontraditional candidates or further raising the bar to licensure, are also discussed in this section. The second part describes the New Leadership Agenda and the related challenges and opportunities in greater detail.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.