1.3 K-12 leadership and the educational administration curriculum  (Page 9/14)

Highly skilled and able administrators are crucial if educational success is to be attained no matter whotrains or where training occurs. The issue of training is no the question. The issue in question is how to train highly skilled andable administrators given present conditions and our professional will to address problems of practice. If university-basedpreparation is inadequate, then we should support efforts to open the market and create competition, provided that the competition isas effective as what now exists. Generally, our harshest critics follow criticism with statements admonishing schools of educationand educational administration programs to take the lead in improving leadership training. It is a criticism that is old,frequently repeated, and tiresome. The programs now in existence are the best we have and Universities are not keeping the goodstudents from applying. It is time to take the best we have and design in the quality that is demanded.

Educational Administration: The Next Iteration

What professors of educational administration should consider in program development is a curriculum based on theconditions which now exist in schools and those that will exist in the future. Achilles (2005) describes the known problems inpreparation programs, problems that date back fifty years, and suggests that one can be assured that future programs will be anextension of the past. This is an acknowledgement that educational administration has built a deep foundation around its own theory ofpreparation which is clear and evident in every discussion about preparation.

The strongest contemporary call for a re-examination of the field began with the publication of Leadersfor America’s Schools, a Report of the National Commission on Excellence in Educational Administration (1987). The reportoutlined a number of recommendations that were made with the stated desire to restructure “the national understanding of therequirements for educational leadership of the future” (p. xvii). What has been called for by many who are critical of leadershippreparation is some combination of a rethinking of the interrelated components that make up a program of study? Generally, thesecomponents were outlined by Murphy (1992) as issues in need of new perspectives:

1. Recruitment and Selection
2. Program Content
3. Delivery System
4. Standards of Performance
5. Certification and Employment (p. 79-108)

Haller, Brent and McNamara (1997) claimed that educational leadership pre-service training “had little or noinfluence on the attributes that characterize effective schools” (p. 222). Further, they spurred a debate, and then a response, tothe challenge that confronted educational administration programs. “We believe the burden of proof now rests with those who wouldclaim that existing pre-service programs have the effects they presumed to have or that tinkering with delivery systems is allthat is required to ensure those effects are forthcoming” (p. 227).

Murphy (1992) wrote that preparation programs during the first half of the twentieth century focused on teachinga discrete knowledge base which “consisted of rough-hewn principles of practice couched in terms of prescriptions” and that the secondhalf of the century saw a focus on applying the knowledge of social science to the applied world of educational administration (p.140). Murphy claimed that the focus on discrete knowledge acquisition around a defined knowledge base did not, and does not,represent what practitioners needed to know and be able to do in order to be successful as practicing educational leaders. It is indeveloping a theory of educational administration preparation that some theory building and parameters are outlined for alleducational administration preparation programs.