Education Week - November 4, 2015 - 14

Ed. Leadership Programs Tap Business World for Training
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Marie D. De Jesus for Education Week

row Wilson MBA Fellowship in
Education Leadership, which seeks
to infuse the education leadership
training model with business principles. The Woodrow Wilson program, which targets educators,
is in place at six universities in
Indiana and Milwaukee, where it
has partnered with the Milwaukee
School of Engineering's business
program, and New Mexico.
"I wouldn't say the business
schools have it figured out, but
what they have been doing for the
last 50-plus years is putting a laserlike focus on leadership," Buntrock
said. "Because they have spent so
much time focusing on leadership
itself, there is a lot that we can
learn from them."
Buntrock said interest in this way
of training principals and other
school leaders is growing with the
recognition "that we have to do
something drastically different with
regard to how we are preparing our
education leaders."

Some Skepticism
The principal's job has expanded
dramatically in recent years. Along
with supporting teachers and helping students achieve at the highest
levels, school leaders have to know
how to market their schools in the
complex and ever-changing education landscape that now consists
of neighborhood schools, charter
schools, and schools of choice. They
must also analyze complex data
sets generated by the large number
of assessments and other accountability measures now required in
schools. Moreover, they need to
know how to understand budgets
and justify spending.
In addition to the Rice and Woodrow Wilson fellowships, new entrants into this approach to principal preparation include the Bright
New Leaders for Ohio Schools based
at the Fisher College of Business at
The Ohio State University. That
program, which is open to both educators and non-educators, is geared
toward training school leaders to
turn around low-performing, highpoverty schools.
But the growth of these programs
is accompanied by some skepticism,
particularly by those who worry
they may not adequately focus on
instructional leadership: the skills
and expertise principals need to ensure that good teaching and meaningful student learning are taking
place in their schools.
While some leadership skills are
transferable, context is also important, said James E. Berry, the executive director of the National Council
of Professors of Educational Administration.
"I tell my students that the
value-added for education leadership is this focus on instruction, on
pedagogy, learning theory, understanding child development, and
applying it appropriately in the
classroom," he said.
Further, Berry said, education
leadership preparation programs

Houston Principal Tiffany Chenier, a graduate of a business-oriented program, talks with granddaughter Zahmyriah Glenn at McNamara Elementary School.

were always rooted in business
practices. Management is not the
issue, he said, it's principals with
strong instructional leadership
skills that are still lacking.
Unless the programs "drill down"
into helping principals become better instructional leaders, "I think
they are missing the real training
component," he said.

'Competitive Market'
Jacqueline Wilson, an assistant
professor at the school of education
at the University of Delaware, said
the question is whether the curricula in such programs are aligned
with national standards for school
leaders.
"It's not one or the other, it's a
combination," she said, noting that
recently approved national educational standards for school leaders
include a balance "of both management and instructional leadership."
"You are in a competitive market," she said. "You do have to be
entrepreneurial. You want the best
students to come to your school.
But, at the end of the day, ...your
primary responsibility as a principal is the achievement of the children in your school."
The Rice program rigorously
screens its applicants and admits
those with stellar instructional
credentials, Hodge said. And while
the program does not cover pedagogy as in-depth as traditional
education schools, students are exposed to how to develop those key
academic skill sets through partnerships with visiting professors,
superintendents, and other experts. (Rice does not have a school
of education.)

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 4, 2015 | www.edweek.org

"The leaders who are coming in
have had some baseline of instructional experience, and they have a
sense of what good instruction looks
like," Hodge said.
Further, she said, the program is
based on the needs of the districts
and charter management organizations it partners with, which already
spend a lot of money on developing
their staff's instructional expertise.
Rice's program consists of two
tracks. In one, aspiring principals-
including teachers, teacher-leaders,
and assistant principals-enter the
MBA program while simultaneously
pursuing principal certification.
The second track is a business
fellowship that primarily serves
sitting principals. Students in that
program participate in a summer
intensive fellowship and attend
sessions during the year in areas
such as communications, marketing
strategies, and negotiations.
Since the program started in
2008, nearly 224 school leaders have been trained to work in
Houston-area schools, including
the Cypress-Fairbanks, Alief, and
Fort Bend districts. About 76 percent of MBAs are in leadership
positions in district and charter
schools, Hodge said.
While there are no data showing
a direct correlation between training in the Rice programs and student success-principals' influence
on classroom learning is indirect-
officials track other factors to try to
tease out the program's impact.
In surveys, 64 percent of participants who responded said they
were well prepared to raise student achievement on their campus, while 2.4 percent disagreed.
Sixty-nine percent said they were

well-prepared to successfully
manage operations on campus,
while about 5 percent were undecided. Nearly 77 percent strongly
agreed that the program helped
them to become a more effective
school leader.
An analysis from the Education
Resource Group, a Texas-based
data-analysis firm, showed that
schools led by students who graduated from Rice's programs did
better than expected, given their
student populations, in areas like
meeting state standards, graduation rates, and college- and careerreadiness, according to data provided by the program.

Real-World Application
Mark Speier, a Spanish teacher at
Hogg Middle School in the Houston
district who is currently in the MBA
program, said the mental agility
the program required was the most
challenging-and one of the things
he loves most about it.
"It stretches my mental capacity
so far beyond what I do on a normal
day in school," he said. "That, to me,
is invaluable. It takes me outside of
my comfort zone."
"It's like an incubator," he added,
during a break in a data analytics
class. "I feel safe to make mistakes
so that when I go into the real
world, I know what not to do."
Business professors say the
classes are taught at the same level,
regardless of whether the students
in the seats work in a school or at
an energy company.
Tiffany Chenier, the principal
of McNamara Elementary School,
graduated from the fellowship program in 2014. After 10 years as a

principal, Chenier said she applied
because she wanted to deepen her
impact on students.
One of her challenges was making McNamara an attractive option among a growing array of
choices for families. While the
student population at McNamara
largely held steady with the opening of charter schools nearby and
the option for students to attend
other neighborhood schools, Chenier noticed that the students who
were leaving were the higher-performing ones.
It was during the fellowship that
she came up with the idea to allow
the 5th grade teachers to pilot a
blended-learning initiative in an
attempt to increase student engagement and hold on to high-performing students.
"A lot of research that we heard
said that you won't necessarily see
an impact in the first year," Chenier
said. "Our kids grew by leaps and
bounds when you look at the data."
Chenier said the program helped
her look beyond the constant emphasis on test scores and did a better job of capturing the principal's
role in innovation than her master's
degree program in educational administration.
"My takeaway," she said, "was
that my role was to make a difference as the leader on campus and
to make that difference based on
the needs of your campus, to take a
risk, to do something different."
Coverage of leadership, expanded learning
time, and arts learning is supported
in part by a grant from The Wallace
Foundation, at www.wallacefoundation.
org. Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

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Education Week - November 4, 2015

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