The supply of public education leaders is greatly\noutstripping the demand. The demand comes from parents, teachers, and students\u2014that\nis, groups immediately impacted by leadership, or lack thereof. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Don Nielsen, Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute sums up the\ncause of this leadership shortage in his book, Every School<\/em>: \u201cSchool leaders, whether they are principals or\nsuperintendents, are not trained to lead their school\/district. They are\ntrained to manage<\/strong> their\nschool\/district.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a consistent issue across all school levels. Nielsen\nargues, \u201cThe difference is that a leader will look for ways to improve\nperformance, will innovate and will not be satisfied with the status quo<\/em>. Managers, on the other hand,\nare trained to take what they have and make sure it continues to perform (and,\nhopefully, improve).\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nielsen goes on to advocate for a \u201cchange agent,\u201d referring\nto a leader who possesses the drive, knowledge, and skill bring about\nmeaningful change. Change agents have the ability to build strong relationships\non the basis of trust, are patient and persistent, and ask the tough questions\nthat others circumvent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In essence, these public education leaders are CEOs of their\nschools or districts. With the great responsibility that entails, new and more\nrigorous training is needed. Nielsen argues \u201cThey will have to understand\nfinance and budgeting (something not taught today), as they will control their\nschool\u2019s or district\u2019s funds and the allocation of those funds. In addition,\nthey will be responsible for the hiring and evaluation of staff and building an\neffective organization.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n What would this new training look like? Nielsen suggests the\ncreation of \u201cInstitutes for Educational Leadership\u201d which would \u201chave\nextraordinarily high admission standards and would be populated with\ninstructors from business, education and public policy schools as well as\nleaders from business, the military and current school systems.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The best parallel may be United States military leadership training, whose purpose is to produce military leaders with a deep commitment to defending the nation. In this case, however, the institutes would create innovative education leaders\u2014akin to educational entrepreneurs! Nielsen states that to \u201cincentivize these teachers and principals to go back to school, they should remain on the payroll of the state and should not pay tuition while they are being developed into the leaders we need. If desired, these candidates could be treated like applicants to the military academies who sign on [to a post-graduation commitment], prior to attending school.\u201d The objective, as Nielsen puts it, is \u201cto create leaders \u2018by design\u2019 who will create new types of schools for the 21st<\/sup> century.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is worth noting that the military services have three different commissioning sources: academies, Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), and OTS\/OCS (Officer Training or Candidate School). The three sources come with very different price tags and approaches to producing a commissioned officer, which should be considered when assessing the best approach to training education leaders. The bottom line, however, is the status quo is inadequate to today\u2019s needs. We\u2019re in desperate need of new leaders who can transform our under performing schools. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The supply of public education leaders is greatly outstripping the demand. The demand comes from parents, teachers, and students\u2014that is, groups immediately impacted by leadership, or lack thereof. Don Nielsen, Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute sums up the cause of this leadership shortage in his book, Every School: \u201cSchool leaders, whether they are principals or superintendents, are not trained to lead their school\/district. They are trained to manage their school\/district.\u201d This is a consistent issue across all school levels. Nielsen argues, \u201cThe difference is that a leader will look for ways to improve performance, will innovate and will not be satisfied with the status quo. Managers, on the other hand, are trained to take what they have and make sure Read More ›<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":343,"featured_media":2161,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[48,52,60],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1062],"class_list":["post-2160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education-policy","category-educational-leadership","category-higher-education"],"acf":[],"author_names":["Bailey Takacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/343"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2160"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2160"}],"wp:action-assign-author":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discovery.org\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/2160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}