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How Superintendents Might Be Trained for Management Roles

There are few if any supporters of current superintendent preparation programs. A reason being there are sofew stand alone programs. Most preparation programs consolidate the superintendent credential into doctoral course programrequirements. Strangely, to criticize superintendent credentialing is to criticize doctoral programs! This has created a situationwhere superintendent preparation has been“pushed”out of the way for academics.

This paper will not debate the appropriateness or inappropriateness of existing quasi-programs orthe few stand-alone providing services to a small handful of aspiring superintendents. They serve a miniscule number of the year2000 new superintendents (Glass, 2002). Superintendents themselves have over the years evaluated their preparation programs to be“good.”Interestingly, this positive evaluation is also held by“superintendent leaders”in the profession (Glass, 2002).

A key question is what agencies or institutions might best provide superintendent training to managetax payer supported school districts. Historically, this has been largely the role of graduate programs in educationaladministration, housed in institutions of higher education. A modicum of pre and post employment training has been provided byprofessional associations, state agencies, and the occasional district. Perhaps the primary expectation held by the professionhas been for higher education programs to provide important content knowledge. The skill training necessary for actual day to day workis left to chance or loosely organized.

Preparation program content for principals and superintendents has been and is still dominated bycertification and licensing requirements. What is required for licensing and certification is what is taught. An example is thatuntil the 1980’s most states required a school facility planning class. Today, only one or two states require the class and mosteducational administration programs no longer require or teach it. This is despite the need to replace aging infrastructure in amajority of the nation’s school districts.

One possible course of action to guarantee superintendent managerial expertise may be to restructure presentcertification requirements. Considering the critical nature of management, a separate or extended certification might be providedby a specialized university preparation track that is supplemented by direct state agency involvement. University programs should notcontinue to be isolated from local districts and the state agency in licensing superintendents.

This restructured certificate or license should be sized for large, medium, and small districts. It seemsincongruent to certify a superintendent-manager for responsibility to manage a budget ranging from one million to one billion dollars.Present superintendent certification assumes a superintendent is qualified for any size of district. This assumption may have beenappropriate 50 years ago but not in today’s complex world of public education.

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Source:  OpenStax, Educational administration: the roles of leadership and management. OpenStax CNX. Jul 25, 2007 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10441/1.1
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