National Report Targets School Leadership Preparations Programs
Contact: Kay Hyatt, (207) 581-2761
(Professors Gordon Donaldson and Richard Ackerman are available for comment on the preparation, work and challenges of K-12 educational administrators.)
Many of the themes in the hard-hitting critique of the nation’s school administrator preparation institutions issued this week are age-old debates about what educational leadership is and should do, according to University of Maine faculty members in the field. While they disagree with the report’s broad-brush indictments, they acknowledge that it is right in targeting underperforming, static programs and recall that it was similar criticism that led to the revamping of UMaine’s Educational Leadership program.
“We began working 15 years ago to address the shortcomings in administrator preparation that this report is bringing to light, says Professor Gordon Donaldson. Our approach is focused on leadership competencies — those skills and knowledge areas that successful school leaders use to move their schools toward greater success with every child. They are the heart of leadership preparation at the University of Maine, and they will continue to change as new challenges arise.”
Associate Professor Richard Ackerman points out that the importance and power of communal work, collective learning and relationship building emphasized in the graduate program, especially in the cohort offering, are values that aren’t measured in the new report. Both Donaldson and Ackerman have researched and written extensively about the preparation of effective leaders.
“Our program supports leaders of all kinds for schools — teacher leaders, administrators, even citizen leaders. We try to give them ways to understand the many perspectives they will encounter in schools and skills to use in working with those constituencies,” says Ackerman.
The UMaine Educational Leadership model is aligned to “put people near the action, in the moment, and to adapt to learning in action, according to the professors. They point out that real learning occurs in real-life situations, which is why the program gets people into schools quickly to practice situations instead of demonstrating what they have learned in an internship at the end of their studies. Particularly through group work, they say, students learn how to faciliate, and they learn that effective leaders are reflective leaders who know how to evaluate and criticize themselves, seek feedback and to be self-corrective.
“Educators in our graduate programs learn in their current jobs in schools. They take on leadership and they focus on understanding and sharpening skills and knowledge that work right there, in their schools, ” says Donaldson.
UMaine’s Educational Leadership program offers three degree options in K-12 administration — Master’s, Certificate of Advanced Study, and the Doctorate. A cohort option, available in all programs, allows students to progress collaboratively through coursework and other program experiences. In 2000, the program established the innovative Maine School Leadership Network, a two-year school-based leadership development program for teachers, principals and other educators, designed to help schools identify and “grow” their own leaders. Approximately 80 educators statewide have completed this alternative professional development approach, focusing on improving student learning and building leadership. The best components of the program have been incorporated into the program’s Master’s and CAS degree offerings.
The national study, Educating School Leaders, by Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College-Columbia University, is the first in a series of policy reports stemming from a four-year study of America’s education schools. Future reports will focus on educating teachers, researchers and scholars.
According to Levine, administrator preparation was selected for the initial report because the quality of leadership in the nation’s schools has never been more important or challenging. “Today, principals and superintendents have the job not only of managing our schools, but also of leading them through an era of profound social change that has required fundamental rethinking of what schools do and how they do it,” he writes. “This is an assignment few sitting school administrators have been prepared to undertake.”
Levine also notes the unrealistic expectations and escalating criticism of education schools and demands for their accountability over the past decade, as they have been faulted for intractable social problems they did not create and cannot solve. No other professional school is held similarly responsible, he says, giving the example that schools of agriculture are not faulted for the decline of the family farm, or schools of government for municipal bankruptcies. However, he describes — but doesn’t identify — institutions with lackadaisical school administrator preparation programs, low standards, irrelevant curricula and weak faculties who have low expectations of students.