COMMENTARY

Principal Preparation: Moving Beyond Assessment

By Ann Hassenpflug

Increasingly, principal-preparation programs are getting the national scrutiny that has been focused on teacher education for some time.

Today, many principal-training programs run by public and private higher education institutions have been modified to align them with national standards from the Educational Leadership Constituent Council, or ELCC. To receive national recognition from ELCC as part of the college of education accreditation process, faculties have revised their principal-training programs to include assessments that require graduate students to engage in specific activities scored according to rubrics.

Educational administration faculty members have spent immense amounts of time and effort (without extra compensation or reduced teaching and research loads) to design and implement common principalship assessments. One problem with this: The intense focus on tests has caused other important program components to be neglected—despite a lack of data confirming that the new assessments actually make any difference in a future principal’s leadership ability.

Instead of continuing to tinker with assessments in principal-preparation programs, it is time to look at other pieces of the process to determine if the necessary questions are being asked about the preparation process, which includes the selection (or, more often, self-selection) of candidates, the pedagogy and delivery methods used in the courses, the knowledge base and skills addressed in the educational administration courses, and the qualifications of the faculty.

Currently, most programs in educational administration impose few restrictions on who can enter them. For instance, although most of these students are teachers, being a teacher is not a requirement to take principalship courses. And, while having a teaching license is often required to obtain a principal license, alternative-licensure programs may offer a way around even that requirement. At many institutions, students need only a minimum 2.5 undergraduate grade point average for admission, and they need not provide any evidence that they have demonstrated above-average teaching, that they have reading-comprehension skills necessary for serious graduate work, and that they have above-average oral- and written-communication skills. Finally, neither creativity nor imagination is a requirement for admission.

"Instead of continuing to tinker with assessments in principal-preparation programs, it is time to look at other pieces of the process."

The recruitment of a cohort from one school district or limited geographical region creates yet another set of problems. Because the students who stay together for all of their coursework become a tight unit socially and intellectually, they are often unwilling to consider recommendations for best practice when it differs from their shared personal experiences or opinions.

The instructional techniques used in principal-preparation programs should be appropriate for producing graduates who have the cognitive skills; problem-identifying abilities; decisionmaking, communication, and interpersonal skills; and creativity necessary for school leadership.

Where is the research that demonstrates that ...

Ann Hassenpflug is a professor in the college of education at the University of Akron, in Ohio.

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