3.3 Preparing, developing, and credentialing k-12 school leaders:  (Page 4/10)

A pre-service emphasis in training through university programs in educational administration (typically at the Master’s degree level) was never considered the comprehensive answer for preparing and continuing the professional development of school leaders. With a national baby boom bubble of retirees in the first decade of the twenty-first century from K-12 administration came unprecedented rates of turnover in building and district level leadership positions. This turnover, and an increasing desire to reform education through the board room, created opportunities for political agendas favoring the recruitment of school leaders from business, military, and other fields. The field of educational administration was confronted with the challenge of adapting a knowledge base for aspiring educational leaders who came from both truncated career paths within education and from alternative degree and experience backgrounds outside education.

As the ratio of experienced to inexperienced school administrators and educators tipped, the ranks of school leaders became more diverse and the more traditional systems of internships, mentoring, and coaching on the job began to falter. This, coupled with pressure for change in how school leaders performed their roles, created a void in the ways and means for the profession to continue maturing beyond the foundation laid down by university preparation programs. School leaders emerged from their university degree preparation only partly prepared to assume their new roles in K-12 administration and with significant need for ongoing focused professional development to deal with the demands of their jobs. The jobs were becoming more complex and the stakes for meeting those challenges driven by new state and federal accountability systems. University preparation programs could only reach so far into school leaders’ actual performance and were on their own to apply a body of knowledge, theory, and practice in a constant state of flux.

Changing the paradigm of preparation

The need for training educators for lifetime roles as educational leaders has, thus, evolved beyond an emphasis on merely preparing educators to assume roles in school administration to one of transmitting an evolving and maturing knowledge base in educational administration practice. This required a model and process for preparation and ongoing development that began with a solid foundation of research backed knowledge skills, competencies, and dispositions (Waters&Grubb, 2004) and builds on that foundation in ways that enhance the performance of educational leaders over a career. Educational leaders, however, were assuming roles in schools that did not always conform to the traditional educational administration curriculum. School administration and leadership were no longer uniformly defined sets of responsibilities designed for a stable context; rather, they were an amalgam of dynamic and rapidly changing roles for a system under stress and under significant pressure for fundamental change. As a result, there were two main areas that the field of educational administration began to address to improve educational leadership training.