Questioning the Core of University-Based Programs for Preparing School Leaders

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There have been many words written about the deficiencies of education programs for school administration. But such critiques have sidestepped what Mr. Murphy considers to be the fatal flaw of these programs: the elevation of academe over the domain of practice. ********** WHAT universities have been doing to prepare educational leaders is, at best, of questionable value and, at worst, harmful. I have come to this conclusion by drawing on three main sources of insight. First, there is the published research on the profession of school administration and the preparation of administrators. My own work in this area and a much more extensive body of work by my colleagues can help us tally a grim catalogue of problems besetting prospective school administrators. Second, I've had the opportunity to work with colleagues in more than 60 university-based and non-university-based preparation programs over the last 15 years as they sought to strengthen their certification and degree programs in school administration. While not all of this work is easily accessible, a number of published pieces are available. Finally, across the last two decades I have spoken--both formally and informally--with hundreds of practicing administrators about their university training. By and large, these conversations have yielded a less than flattering portrait of the work we academics do and the methods we employ. Before I get fully under way, I want to be clear about my motives. This article doesn't come from the camp of the disaffected. Nor is it some veiled effort to disenfranchise university-based educational leadership programs. I am an insider and honored to be a member of the school administration family. On the other hand, it seems to me that at the very core of our profession there are some serious problems, problems that are much deeper and much more foundational than those uncovered by the cottage industry of criticism of administrator preparation. Not surprisingly, I will be arguing that we have made almost no progress in addressing the profound deficiencies that have been deeply woven into our professional tapestry over the past half-century. But my intention is not simply to dismantle preparation as we know it, but to assist in the rebuilding as well. In addition, I need to emphasize that my critique will be of a different level from that of the large body of scholarship that reveals that education programs for school administration leave much to be desired--from recruitment and selection on one end of the continuum to program evaluation on the other. Analysis of this kind has been laid out nicely many times since the formation of the National Commission on Excellence in Educational Administration in the mid-1980s. Nor will I attempt to re-catalogue that work here. My critique is intended to be deeper, to cut to the core of the preparation work itself as it has been embedded in our universities, especially in our research-oriented universities. My central argument is that the foundation of the education offered in departments of school administration is wrongly laid. That is, prospective school leaders have been largely miseducated because universities, especially research universities, have constructed their programs with acquired from the warehouse of academe. In the meantime, they have marginalized practice. Better recruitment, more attention to matters of policy and ethics, and more effective program evaluation--necessary as these and other in preparation programs may be--do not address the central deficiency. Such reforms bring different and often better raw materials to the building site, but they continue to privilege that come from the academic warehouse. Without reframing what education for school leaders is supposed to be, the field will continue to spend massive amounts of energy and its limited resources in pursuit of marginal gains. …