Admissions

The field of educational administration has long been criticized for the ways in which men and women are prepared for school leadership positions. In 1960, the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) characterized the preparation of superintendents and principals as a “dismal montage.” Later in the 1970s, researchers described university preparation programs as “dysfunctional structural incrementalism.”

Effective educational leadership programs consist both of program experiences and the quality of entering candidates. The selection of candidates is fully as critical as the preparation program itself. A review of the empirical research related to candidate recruitment and selection reveals (a) a scarcity of comprehensive studies and (b) the utilization of excessively small samples.

The National Policy Board for Educational Administration (NPBEA) published Improving the Preparation of School Administrators in 1989, a bulletin emphasizing the need to strengthen the procedures [Page 28]used to identify and select students into educational administration programs, and recommended raising standards of administrator preparation programs to ensure candidates have effective analytical ability and administrative potential and have demonstrated successful teaching.

There is some evidence that a more proactive stance to the recruitment and selection of potential school leaders in the nation's university preparation programs has taken place over the last decade. Most of the research up to 2000 resulted from small sample sizes and relied on data from department chairs and deans. More recent studies have expanded to study more of the over 500 university preparation programs.

More recent studies found that the majority of universities still rely primarily on Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores, letters of recommendation, and grade point averages in the recruitment and selection of candidates. Evidence of the use of strategies focused on analytical ability, high administrative potential, and demonstrated success in teaching is minimal at best.

The problem relates to how we select prospective school administrators for our university preparation programs. Recent research has identified the criteria weighted most heavily in the selection of candidates as GREs scores. And are these requirements sufficiently high to attract the brightest and most capable candidates to our programs? Data published by the Graduate Record Examination Guide reveal that students entering educational administration programs from 1996 to 1999 attained scores ranking third from the bottom when compared with 41 graduate fields. Compared with seven specific education majors, education administration ranked second from the bottom in verbal reasoning, third from the bottom in quantitative reasoning, and second from the bottom in analytical reasoning.

The present use of GRE scores, undergraduate grade point averages, and letters of recommendation for the selection of candidates for school administration in isolation are not in question—they have their place—but when they are the sole basis for selection, they are and have been found to be only partially effective.

The lack of rigorous selection procedures has several potentially negative effects:

• Weak selection procedures lower the quality of instruction offered, since courses and instruction are often geared to the background and intelligence of the students
• Easy entry diminishes the status of education administration programs in the eyes of the public
• The candidates themselves realize that anyone can get the credential if he or she keeps paying for credits
• Low standards of admission permit and encourage enrollment of candidates interested only in a master's degree in education with little intent of vigorously pursuing an administration position

Increasing the level of selection will likely result in a higher quality of administrator prepared by institutions of higher education (IHEs), thus providing better principals and superintendents for the nation's schools. Many studies point to the importance of quality leaders, and support exists for the stance that no amount of significant education reform or restructuring will occur without strong effective leadership. The prediction that as many as 50% of school administrators in the nation will leave their positions in the next decade due to retirement and career change translates to the potential of replacing approximately half of the education leaders in our country in a relatively short period of time. Emphasizing that strong effective leaders throughout the nation have a direct effect on student achievement and organizational change, the impact on and potential for implementing major educational reform is immense. If such a large number of school administrators is replaced in the next decade, a window of opportunity exists to radically improve the quality of education.

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