While Mr. Hess does not advocate the universal adoption of any single philosophy of management, he feels quite strongly that preparation programs for school leaders are doing their students a disservice by not exposing them to the ideas of the most influential thinkers in management and business.

What should be done about leadership preparation in America's colleges of education? I am skeptical that schools of education are equipped to produce the leaders that we need and am on record as advocating the elimination of most licensure requirements for educational leaders, endorsing the proliferation of nontraditional providers, and welcoming the advent of nontraditional candidates.[1]

Nonetheless, for this forum, I was asked to discuss what schools of education might do. I want to focus on one critical component of preparation: what candidates are actually taught. Whatever the architecture of their preparation, the content of instruction and the texts candidates read will help determine whether as graduates they will be equipped to be creative, effective, and accountable leaders in a new world of educational leadership.

Today, school and district leadership is increasingly characterized by accountability, responsibility for teacher quality, utilization of data and research, and the ability to compete in an environment of public school choice. These new roles require a keen sense of how to use accountability as a management tool; a willingness to challenge conventions; the ability to lead a team and motivate, mentor, and manage personnel; and a familiarity with the small business skills demanded by site-based budgeting and public school choice. Unfortunately, educational background, prior classroom experiences, and long-term immersion in schooling do little to prepare teachers for these duties.

Moreover, the evidence suggests that preparation programs for school leaders are themselves dropping the ball. In 2005, I co-authored two studies that examined the content of principal preparation and found limited attention paid to the challenges of 21st-century educational leadership.[2]

Syllabi and readings collected from 210 courses in a national sample of principal preparation programs showed that just 2% of instructional weeks addressed accountability as a lever for management or school improvement and just 11% made any mention of data or empirical evidence. Teacher hiring and recruitment were addressed in less than 2% of course weeks, and termination and compensation together were not even mentioned in most programs. There was much instruction on rote personnel management but little on the use of data to evaluate or develop faculty members.[3]

An analysis of the content of the assigned reading yielded similar results. Work by the 50 most influential living management thinkers (as identified in the 2003 Thinkers Fifty survey of management professionals) accounted for just 1.6% of the 1,851 assigned readings. Influential management thinkers such as Clay Christensen, Jim Collins, Warren Bennis, and Peter Drucker (all named in the Thinkers Fifty) were almost entirely absent.[4]

Educational leadership preparation places a premium on culture and coaching, while failing to prepare graduates to confront mediocrity or make hard choices about faculty, budgets, and programs. Take the case of personnel management. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch --one of the Thinkers Fifty--has called for routinely purging low performers. At GE, Welch made it a point to eliminate the least productive 10% of the work force every year, explaining, "Making these judgments is not easy...but...this is how great organizations are built. Year after year, differentiation raises the bar higher and higher." [5] This perspective was absent in the course units and texts we examined. The point is not to endorse Welch's advice but to recognize that his philosophy of personnel management is worthy of serious consideration.

Jim Collins argues in his best-selling Built to Last, "Visionary companies are not exactly comfortable places...visionary companies thrive on discontent. They understand that contentment leads to complacency, which inevitably leads to decline."[6] The tone Collins adopts here is very different from that typical of popular education school texts like Shaping School Culture: The Heart of Leadership, in which the authors declare that schools should seek to be "optimistic, socially caring and supportive."[7]

Is one position or the other obviously right? No. Is it possible to reconcile these views? Of course. The aim, however, should not be to seek consensus or new orthodoxies but to recognize that management is an imperfect art, practiced successfully in multiple ways and drawing upon diverse skills. Today, a vital swath of thinking regarding assumptions, approaches, tactics, and tools is too often missing from the learning experience of educational leaders.

In general, programs ought to take pains to broaden the spectrum of ideas that students encounter, embracing readings and insights from beyond the education community. In particular, reformers would be well advised to:

• Adopt as core readings thought-provoking texts from the contemporary management canon, such as Good to Great, by Jim Collins; The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clay Christensen; Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman; and Innovation and Entrepreneurship, by Peter Drucker.
• Increase the use of case studies that examine management in private-and public sector contexts beyond K-12 schooling.
• Address subjects like compensation and budgeting, even if local leaders currently enjoy only limited operational flexibility, in order to stretch candidates' sense of the possible and encourage them to think creatively about how to solve problems.
• Use professors with a range of experience and disciplinary backgrounds who can expose students to managerial philosophies, strategies, and tactics from outside of the schoolhouse.
• Cultivate internships and cooperative efforts that introduce candidates to dynamic managerial environments outside the world of education.

When reforming the preparation of school leaders, we shouldn't romanticize the uniqueness of "schoolhouse leadership" or the teachings of management gurus, nor should we expect "scientific research" to reveal previously unsuspected recipes for uber-management. Ultimately, programs should ensure that candidates grapple with diverse approaches to management and learn to question accepted conventions. This is the kind of preparation well suited for 21st-century educational leaders.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI.

Notes

1. Frederick M. Hess, A License to Lead? (Washington, D.C.: Progressive Policy Institute, 2003); and idem, Common Sense School Reform (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

2. Frederick M. Hess and Andrew Kelly, Learning to Lead: What Gets Taught in Principal Preparation Programs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance, 2005); and idem, Textbook Leadership? An Analysis of Leading Books Used in Principal Preparation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance, 2005).

3. Hess and Kelly, Learning to Lead.

4. Ibid.

5. Jack Welch, Jack: Straight from the Gut (New York: Warner Books, 2001), p. 158.

6. Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 186-87.

7. Terrence E. Deal and Kent D. Peterson, Shaping School Culture: The Heart of Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999), p. 8.