Do school principals need university training?

This essay was originally published on the website The Chalkboard Review on January 20, 2021. Sometime in 2022 the website was purchased by new owners who, without notifying me, removed all of my published essays. Given that the website operator has failed to respond to my inquiries about this removal, I can only conclude that my essays were deleted because of the philosophical or policy content. Therefore I am reposting these essays here.

The editors of Chalkboard Review recently prompted a thoughtful online discussion in a Tweet suggesting that, “Being a principal shouldn’t require a separate & unique master’s degree. Any master’s in education should more than qualify you to obtain a public license.”

As a professor of education administration who trains aspiring principals through advanced, university-based credentialing programs, I have some perspective on this topic. Unlike many of my colleagues in higher education, I actually agree that there is nothing special about earning a master’s degree that makes a principal – or even a teacher – more effective. If that training can be delivered with equal quality in a different environment – say in a district-based professional development program – the market should certainly be open to them.

But even though I welcome that kind of competition, I still believe universities have a uniquely valuable role to play in teacher and principal professional development – if they can arise to the challenge. If not, we can and should be replaced by better, more affordable, and more personalized alternatives.

In 2018, my own state of Kentucky dropped its long-standing requirement that teachers earn a master’s degree by their tenth year of service to maintain their license. Kentucky was one of the few states that still maintained such a requirement, and the change was greeted with derision by many educators who erroneously thought the move represented a “devaluing” of teachers and their training. The change was almost certainly going to have a negative, if small, impact on my university, which offers a number of graduate education programs at the master’s level and which has always benefitted financially from this regulation.

But I publicly supported the change to drop the master’s requirement, mainly because multiple research studies across several states have repeatedly demonstrated there is no measurable relationship between teachers earning an advanced degree and their impact on student learning. As I argued at the time:

High quality master's degree programs can be a good source of professional development, can help teachers add new credentials and certification areas, and can serve as a useful mechanism for networking with other educators. Research suggests (unsurprisingly) that teachers who earn advanced degrees are more likely to stay in the teaching profession, which is a net positive in that it places limits on costly teacher turnover. And, teachers can earn substantially more money in doing so, even after they pay off the cost of their degree. These are all good reasons for teachers to think about earning a master's degree. But they are insufficient to justify requiring every teacher to do so in a one-size-fits-all state mandate.

            Like in most states, Kentucky school districts continue to offer salary incentives for educators to earn advanced degrees, largely for the reasons just discussed. But this still begs the question as to whether such credentials (which may or may not be “degrees” in the traditional sense) should only be provided by universities, and whether such a requirement is needed for school principals.

            Some Twitter comments on this topic suggested an MBA or any other master’s degree should suffice for principal training, and on this count, I respectfully disagree. While the principal program where I teach does cover material on leadership theory, strategic planning, and other topics that would overlap with an MBA, we also address a range of technical topics that are largely unique to the role of school principals, including various aspects of school law, finance, student and adult pedagogy, facilities management, special education administration, etc.

            My own program has recently been through a thorough redesign, as we were one of seven universities across the USA identified for support by the Wallace Foundation to rethink principal training for the 21^st century. Our new program features a mix of online and face-to-face learning, a cohort model, district-based mentors for every principal candidate, and a greatly expanded focus on clinical experiences that give aspiring administrators access to the kinds of real leadership challenges they will face on the job. Most courses are co-taught by a university faculty member and a practicing school principal, superintendent, or district administrator who can contextualize every topic we discuss based on his/her daily experiences in the role.

            If we can keep the price reasonable (a huge challenge), I would put our principal training program up against any competitor, whether offered by another university or a school district, cooperative, or other outside agency. Could such a competitor offer a principal training program of similar quality? Yes, I think that is possible and they should be welcome to do so where there is a demand. Such alternatives might well be more affordable and flexible for their participants, given the enormous bureaucratic constraints and massive overhead costs associated with university programs. And I would say the same for initial teacher training programs as well.

            Nevertheless, I think two uniquely valuable things will be lost from the education landscape if universities no longer play a role in teacher and principal training. First, university professors are ideally better positioned to ground educators’ training in meaningful theory and research. Theory often gets dismissed in the field of practice as being irrelevant or too idealistic, but that is only because it has been presented to them poorly, or as disconnected from the real problems educators face every day. Education scholars who are actively engaged in conducting applied research rooted in the context of their local schools have a gift to offer their practitioner colleagues. My own collaborative work on developing instructional coaching models to help school principals deepen their self-reflection and effectiveness aspires to be this kind of scholarship.

            But universities have a second potential gift to offer aspiring teachers and school principals. Because they have a certain organizational distance and independence from the schools and district they serve, professors are better positioned to offer a critical perspective on the field of practice, helping their students think in innovative ways and challenge the status quo. Trainers who are themselves employees of the same districts or cooperatives as their clients may lack the capacity or the desire to question current education fads or long-standing, taken-for-granted assumptions that make up the very fiber of school and district culture. And the sad history of perpetually stagnant student achievement makes clear that fresh and innovative policies and practices are sorely needed in K-12 education.

            Of course, I am describing an ideal university, where professors are deeply connected to the field of practice, pursue meaningful scholarship, and are themselves innovative thinkers. Sadly, we know that is not the case in many universities, where faculty may no longer conduct substantive research (if they ever did) or care about partnerships with schools and districts and sometimes actually reinforce the education establishment’s rigidly-unchanging and frequently self-serving status quo.

            But this is the role university educator preparation programs might still play (and sometimes do), and the uniquely valuable contribution they can provide, if they are ready for the challenge. The odds are long, as higher education is possibly more recalcitrant and change resistant than even K-12 schools. And if they fail to make themselves more relevant, affordable, flexible, and ground-breaking, university programs deserve to be replaced by higher-quality competitors. But for the sake of future generations of educators who can benefit from what they might still offer, I hope it is not too late.