Building a Knowledge Base for Educational Leadership

By Richard F. Elmore

Something important is clearly afoot in the training of educational leaders. For more than a decade, academics and policymakers have been at work developing and implementing standards for the preparation of education leaders through the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium , under the aegis of the Council of Chief State School Officers. Now, these standards have worked their way into the certification systems in most states.

At least a quarter of the states, moreover, have introduced some form of alternative certification for school leaders, permitting routes into leadership roles outside the traditional structures. At the same time, large urban districts, notably Boston, Chicago, and New York City, have initiated their own administrator-preparation programs—either by themselves or in collaboration with third-party providers. Within the past few years, national organizations, based on innovative models of practice and preparation like the Broad Residency in Urban Education and Superintendents Academy programs and New Leaders for New Schools , have moved from start-up ventures to established alternative providers of leadership talent.

And this is not all. The Wallace Foundation has put its considerable resources, financial and institutional, behind a broad-scale effort to improve the capacity of state and local education leaders, working through national academic institutions and state and local education agencies. Representatives of mainstream professional organizations, too, have begun to put their imprimatur on significant reform proposals for systems to prepare educational leaders. Clearly, a window of opportunity has opened around reforms in the...