Handbook of Research on the Education of School Leaders

Michelle D. Young, Gary M. Crow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317531890
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Handbook of Research on the Education of School Leaders brings together empirical research on leadership preparation and development to provide a comprehensive overview and synthesis of what we know about preparing school leaders today. With contributions from the field's foremost scholars, this new edition investigates the methodological foundations of leadership preparation research, reviews the pedagogical and curricular features of preparation programs, and presents valuable insights into the demographic, economic, and political factors affecting school leaders. This volume both mirrors the first edition's macro-level approach to leadership preparation and presents the most up-to-date research in the field. Updates to this edition cover recent state and federal government efforts to improve leadership in education, new challenges for the field, and significant gaps and critical questions for framing, researching, evaluating, and improving the education of school leaders. Sponsored by the University Council of Educational Administration (UCEA), this handbook is an essential resource for students and scholars of educational leadership, as well as practitioners, policymakers, and other educators interested in professional leadership.

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Introduction

Michelle D. Young and Gary M. Crow

Research on the preparation of educational leadership is an important and growing area of inquiry. This wasn’t the case a decade ago, when we were working with scholars in the United States and abroad to plan and develop the first set of research handbooks on the education of school leaders (Lumby, Crow, & Pashiardis, 2008; Young, Crow, Murphy, & Ogawa, 2009). The empirical research base on leadership preparation and development continues to grow, providing scholars with a better understanding of how to improve the preparation experiences of educational leaders.

As in the first edition of the Research Handbook, this volume offers a macro-level perspective on the leadership preparation research base. The handbook was designed to pick up where the last handbook left off, charting research that has emerged since 2008, exploring several areas not included in the previous handbook, and identifying significant gaps and unanswered questions. Most of the chapters inform readers about what is known about a specific area of leadership preparation (e.g., pedagogy), highlight the nature of the research base (e.g., research type, depth of empirical evidence), and identify research questions that are critical to address as we move forward. As such, the Handbook maps the landscape of leadership preparation research, providing both a cohesive empirical assessment of the knowledge base and an essential tool for charting future work.

In this introduction to the Handbook, we begin with concerns that have been raised both within and outside of educational leadership preparation programs about leadership preparation and the role that research has played thus far in addressing or informing those concerns. We then overview a number of societal factors impacting leadership preparation that raise new challenges and questions for both preparation and research on preparation. Subsequently, we review some of the major change initiatives that have influenced both preparation and research on leadership preparation. These include the revision of national standards, developments concerning program evaluation and improvement, and initiatives to improve leadership preparation. Finally, we review some of the key findings from the first edition of the Handbook and then foreshadow each of the chapters included in this handbook.

Critiques

Never has it been more important to have well-prepared educational leaders who understand teaching and learning; who are able to support their school staff, student bodies, and school communities; and who are willing to question structures and norms in their efforts to meet the needs of those they lead. Unfortunately, the field’s interest in developing high-quality programs, grounded in the research captured in this volume, is surpassed in some circles by critique and disdain (Levine, 2005).

Critiques of leadership preparation tend to focus on almost every feature and practice of preparation, including how students are recruited and selected into programs, who teaches them, and what they are taught and how (Murphy, Young, Crow, & Ogawa, 2009). The general perception concerning the recruitment and selection of leadership candidates is that it is both informal and haphazard, leading to cohorts that include candidates who self-select into programs (Creighton, 2002; Young, Petersen, & Short, 2002). It is argued that the lack of intentional recruitment and selection has resulted in the enrollment of many students in leadership preparation programs who have little or no interest in becoming school leaders. Critics argue that this not only perpetuates a system of education that fails to target resources to those intending to become educational leaders, but also pulls students away from coursework that is more relevant to their own career goals and may distort the instruction taking place within leadership programs to meet the needs of those with no real interest in leadership (Murphy et al., 2009). As demonstrated by Browne-Ferrigno and Muth (2009) in the first edition of this Handbook, however, research on the recruitment and selection of preparation program participants has been so limited for so long that it would have been difficult to specify what procedures or decision rules, if any, were actually driving recruitment and selection. This lack of information raises important questions, not only about what practices are used, but also about the validity of critiques.

The content of educational leadership preparation is another common target for critics. Of foremost concern are the separation of the classroom learning from practical application and the perceived fragmentary nature of the curriculum (Cooper & Boyd, 1987; Hess & Kelly, 2005; Peterson & Finn, 1985; Young et al., 2002). With regard to content, there is concern that preparation content does not reflect the realities of the workplace, lacks intentionality, and consists of whatever educational leadership faculty consider to be relevant, rather than being mapped to standards or aligned to an overarching plan or goal. Osterman and Hafner’s (2009) chapter provided badly needed insight into trends in preparation and revealed that many programs had taken these critiques seriously in their program design and planning efforts. Byrne-Jiménez, Gooden, and Tucker provide further insight into the content of leadership preparation in Chapter 8.

Finally, at the heart of many critiques is the notion that there are far too many programs, producing far too many degrees (Baker, Orr, & Young, 2007). The total number of programs is difficult to estimate accurately, but most agree that the production of educational leader candidates outpaces the need. Unfortunately, there is a significant tendency among critics to paint all leadership preparation programs with the same critical brush. Rather than working to differentiate quality preparation programs from those that provide subpar preparation experiences, the tendency is to throw the entire enterprise under the bus.

Although the above critiques of leadership preparation are not the only areas of concern, they capture the most common and perhaps the most important areas. As research on leadership preparation continues to develop, we hope that researchers in the field will be in a position to provide guidance for program practices; that preparation program developers will effectively utilize research findings; and that, over time, research will demonstrate the existence of fewer areas of concern within the field.

Societal Factors

As noted in Chapter 3, the context in which leaders work and in which leadership preparation takes place is rapidly shifting. Among the significant contextual factors are demographic, economic, and political changes; globalization; technological advances; and the shifts in governmental control of public education. In this section, we highlight some of the implications of these changes for leadership preparation. Several of these issues are taken up in more detail in subsequent chapters.

The demographics of the United States are constantly shifting, and these shifts have important implications for the work of school leaders. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (Snyder & Dillow, 2007), over 60% of the nation’s public school students live in the South and West, with enrollments projected to grow in these areas while declining in other regions. Similarly, it is projected that the urbanization of the United States will continue, resulting in increases in the percentage of students attending schools in urban areas.

The racial composition of public schools, nationally and especially in certain states, is changing rapidly. In the states of Hawaii, Texas, California, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Louisiana, students of color comprise a majority of the student population (Center on Education Policy, 2006). The same is true in the nation’s largest school systems (Snyder & Dillow, 2007). Moreover, over 20% of U.S. students, which is approximately 13 million children, live in poverty (Children’s Defense Fund, 2004). More than a third qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, with African American and Latino students making up the majority of eligible students.

The most significant demographic change is represented by the increasing Latino student population, which is projected to comprise over 25% of the nation’s school-age population by 2020. Additionally, U.S. schools are becoming increasingly linguistically diverse. In fact, there was a 65% increase in English language learners over the decade between 1994 and 2004. In 2004, 10% of all public school students were English language learners. Furthermore, about 1/5 of all school-age children in the United States have parents who are immigrants, and of those children 75% were born in the United States. It is projected that immigration to the United States among populations with school-age children will continue to increase over the next decade and that many of the immigrating families will be refugees, making it essential that educational leaders be prepared to meet the diverse educational, language, and social needs of these families and students, as well as to ensure they are able to effectively engage in the educational process. Doing so will require leaders to stretch their skill sets and for leadership preparation programs to rethink their programs in significant ways.

Despite changing demographics, researchers have been slow to take up the implications for how leaders should be prepared to support all children well. While a growing number of scholars have argued that changes are indeed needed in how leaders are prepared, many of whom also have engaged in program redesign with diversity and social justice in mind, to date there have been no systematic investigations of whether leaders have acquired the skills necessary to enable them to better serve racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse student populations (Osterman & Hafner, 2009). Furthermore, little research has been conducted in recent years on the development of leaders to serve students with disabilities, and while recent studies have revealed the lack of focus within leadership preparation on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, questioning, and gender issues (O’Malley & Capper, 2015; Young, Marshall, & Edwards, in press), we are aware of few if any studies that explore the design, implementation, or impact of preparation within these areas.

In addition to U.S. demographic shifts, education is increasingly functioning as part of a global society and economy, where ideas, knowledge, practices, technologies, and values are transferring across national lines at a quickening pace (Lumby, Walker, Bryant, Bush, & Bjork, 2009). Accountability and trends to privatize education, for example, are often viewed as global phenomena. Importantly, educational leadership, what it means to be an effective leader, and notions of how best to prepare leaders are also influenced by globalization, though some would argue that the United States has not done enough to prepare leaders to participate in the global landscape. In addition to learning about schooling and leadership in other countries and understanding how to provide guidance to teachers and students for effective engagement as global citizens, it is argued that leaders would benefit from developing connections with leaders from other countries and sharing innovative practices.

Technological advances have revolutionized communication and the exchange of information. As Dexter, Richardson, and Nash argue in Chapter 9, technology offers significant opportunities for education. At this time, approximately 99% of public schools have established Internet connections, and an increasing number of schools are adopting one-to-one programs where every student is provided a laptop or tablet. Such developments, as Dexter and her colleagues argue, have significant implications for the preparation and practice of educational leaders, from instructional leadership to student safety and effective communication.

Change Initiatives

In light of the critiques of leadership preparation, changing demographics and the growing number of contextual factors impacting the practice of educational leaders, and the importance of quality preparation, some organizations have initiated or increased their support of change initiatives for educational leadership preparation. In this section, we focus primarily on initiatives that have transpired since 2005, where the first edition of the Handbook left off. We include efforts by the National Policy Board for Educational Administration (NPBEA) to revise national leadership standards, efforts by organizations like The Wallace Foundation and the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) to support quality preparation and practice, efforts by state and federal governments to do the same, and the publication of a variety of reform books and reports on preparation.

National Standards

Leadership standards play an integral role in informing and guiding the development, continuous improvement, and evaluation of all aspects of school leadership practice throughout the career continuum. Standards became firmly established in educational leadership beginning in the mid-1990s, when 24 states and major professional associations developed the first set of standards for educational leaders: the Interstate School Leadership Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) standards. Approved by NPBEA in 1996, the ISLLC standards have been adopted or adapted by over 40 states. These standards were revised in 2008 and again in 2015, the latter effort resulting in a change of name to the Practice Standards for Educational Leaders.

Leading the 2015 revision, the Council of Chief State School Officers and NPBEA, with funding from The Wallace Foundation, facilitated a national standards revision and development effort involving more than 70 principals, superintendents, state education departments’ staff, education professors, researchers, and other stakeholders. These organizations focused on three sets of standards in particular: the ISLLC standards, the standards used for the preparation of educational leaders (i.e., the Educational Leadership Constituent Council [ELCC] standards), and standards for principal supervisors.

Since the early 2000s, the ELCC standards have informed the work of educational leadership preparation, playing an important role in setting commonly agreed-upon expectations for effective leadership and providing a conceptual framework that guides preparation, practice, and policy (Young & Mawhinney, 2012). Scholars (Jackson & Kelley, 2002; Murphy, 2005) have conducted research on the influence of the standards. One such analysis, conducted by Murphy, Moorman, and McCarthy (2008), examined 54 university preparation programs in six states. They noted the centralization of control as some states began requiring universities to center and build their preparation programs on a set of national standards. Similarly, using a mixed-method examination of faculty members’ perspectives on standards, Machado and Cline (2010) found that educational administration programs were aligned either directly or indirectly with ELCC standards, including the ELCC standard on the internship. Whereas the ISLLC standards offered guidance for a host of policy efforts at the national, state, and local levels that inform practice, the ELCC program standards provided specific direction for preparation programs and were used for program review and accreditation of building- and district-level leadership preparation programs.

The revision of the national practice standards in 2015 resulted in a need to revamp the preparation standards as well, an effort that is currently underway and led by UCEA. Similar to ISLLC, the ELCC standards are also in the process of being renamed the National Educational Leadership Preparation Standards (Young, 2015). These standards are used by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• SECTION 1 Historical, Political, Economic, and Global Influences
• SECTION 2 Program Features
• SECTION 3 Evaluation
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index