3.3 Preparing, developing, and credentialing k-12 school leaders:

Introduction

Leadership in school organizations matters–just as it does in most private or public enterprise. Educational administration is not just a bureaucratic function and a left over convention of post-modern management theory; rather, it is an evolving professional discipline with distinct elements of practice linked to the outcomes of education, i.e. student learning. Recent bodies of research and meta-analyses of that research identify specific ways in which leadership in K-12 education can be linked with student achievement at both the school and district levels (Marzano, Waters, and Mc Nulty, 2005&Marzano&Waters, 2007). As the field engages with the evidence that leadership not only matters, but constitutes a professional practice (Elmore, 2000), state and federal policy makers are beginning to respond. The recognition of leadership as a distinct and important element of educational reform and adaptation has become a highly noted and actively addressed issue in K-12 education renewal and reform work at the state, university, and local levels.

This focus has led to a rethinking of traditional means and processes for recruiting, training, developing, and supporting school leaders for K-12 careers in educational administration. It has also led to a rethinking about leadership as an essential element of a vital educational system and the link between organizational outcomes and leadership capacity distributed across roles and responsibilities in K-12 organizations (Lambert, 2003). This paper examines how changing assumptions about K-12 educational leadership are playing out in state level policies and practices shaping the training, development, and credentialing of K-12 school leaders. New trends are emerging in K-12 administrator certification and endorsement systems nationwide, and these trends have implications for those institutions that provide both initial training and ongoing professional development for school leaders. Significantly, many of these trends focus upon improving the quality of educational administration training at the pre-service level at the university and include post-university professional development throughout one’s career as a practicing school administrator.