Complete Coverage

Getting Serious About Preparation

For decades, preservice training for principals looked something like this: While working as teachers, they took occasional courses at an education school on such topics as school finance, law, and educational theory. After a few years, they completed a culminating field assignment, which might have involved shadowing their own principals. Then candidates applied for jobs in administratration.

That scattershot approach increasingly is giving way to dramatically different forms of principal preparation. The focus is less on creating efficient managers than on preparing individuals who can lead a school to higher student achievement.

Would-be principals now go through their courses of study in a predetermined order, and in cohorts with others in the same program. Seminars build upon one another to produce candidates who know how to analyze instruction, create learning opportunities for teachers, and strategize about how to move a school forward based on data. Field experiences start early and involve the actual exercise of leadership in a school building. And districts are taking on a larger role in shaping school leadership, from who gets admitted to training programs to how they...