Quality Principles for Educational Leadership Programs

1.0 Quality Principle I: Evidence of Candidate Learning

The core of TEAC accreditation is the quality of the evidence that the program faculty members provide in support of their claims about their students’ learning and understanding of the professional education curriculum.

TEAC requires that the educational leadership faculty members address the following components of their program in ways that also indicate that they have an accurate and balanced understanding of the academic disciplines that are connected to the program:

1.1 Professional knowledge

While no one doubts that teachers must understand the subject matters they hope to teach, there is less agreement about what specific disciplines educational leaders must study. There is universal consensus, however, that whatever particular topics are studied, they should be sufficient to ensure that districts and schools are led in an ethical manner and succeed in their primary mission of having all students acquire an education that meets national and state curriculum and instructional standards.

Programs in educational leadership are at the graduate level and include an amalgam of the consensus literature in the following subjects: organizational theory and development; human resource management; school finance and law; instructional supervision; educational policy and politics; and data analysis and interpretation.

The program faculty must provide evidence that its candidates understand these subjects and that the program equips its graduates with sufficient knowledge so that they would be able to undertake a number of important tasks in the schools they hope to lead. The graduates must be prepared to create or develop (1) an ethical and productive school culture; (2) an effective instructional program, comprehensive professional staff development plans; (3) a safe and efficient learning environment; (4) a profitable collaboration with families and other community members; (5) the capacity to serve diverse community interests and needs; and (6) the ability to mobilize the community’s resources in support of the school’s goals.

1.2 Strategic decision making

The primary obligation of school leaders is to maintain and enhance an organization that meets the educational needs of the full range of the school’s students and to create an environment in which the district’s and school’s curriculum can be readily learned and understood by all the school’s students. To this end, TEAC requires evidence that the candidates learn how to (1) make decisions fairly and collaboratively, and do so informed by the relevant research and evidence; (2) formulate strategy to achieve the school’s goals; and (3) articulate and communicate an educational vision that is consistent with the school’s mission and the nation’s democratic ideals.

1.3 Caring leadership skills

Above all, educational leaders are expected to lead by acting on their knowledge in a caring and professional manner that results in appropriate levels of achievement for all the school’s pupils.

Caring is a particular kind of relationship between the leader and the staff and students that is defined by the leader’s unconditional acceptance of the staff and students, the leader’s intention to address the staff’s and student’s professional and educational needs, the leader’s competence to meet those needs, and also by the students’ and staff’s recognition that the leader cares.

Although it recognizes that the available measures of caring are not as well developed as other measures of candidate performance, TEAC requires evidence that the program’s graduates are caring.

Cross-cutting themes

The liberal arts are often neglected in educational leadership programs, but because they cut across the program, the faculty must also provide evidence about them, as they would for any other aspects of their case for professional knowledge, strategic decision-making, and caring leadership skill.

Educational leaders are expected to be well-informed persons, and the program should provide evidence that the candidates know and understand subject matters that are expected of educated persons. These include the oral and written rhetorical skills, critical thinking, and the qualitative and quantitative reasoning skills that foster independent learning. They also include knowledge of other perspectives and cultures and the modern technological tools of scholarship and administration.

Learning how to learn

There is a set of intellectual skills, tools, and ideas that enables leaders to learn on their own. The program’s graduates must know how to acquire those other parts of the field that could not be taught in the program, but which the graduates will nevertheless be expected to know and use at some later time.

The whole of the professional knowledge base cannot be covered in the curriculum, some of what is covered may not be true or useful later, and some of what will be needed later would not have been known at the time of the degree program. TEAC requires evidence that the candidates learned how to learn important information on their own, that they can transfer what they have learned to new contexts, and that they have acquired the dispositions and skills for lifelong learning in their field.

Multicultural perspectives and understanding

The liberal arts include knowledge of other cultural perspectives, practices, and traditions. TEAC requires evidence that the candidates for the degree (or certificate program) understand the implications of confirmed scholarship on gender, race, individual differences, social class, and ethnic and cultural perspectives for educational practice.

Technology

Technology, learning how to learn, multicultural perspectives are essential parts of the leader’s professional knowledge and skill. It makes little sense to claim that candidates understand how to organize the school’s schedule, for example, if they do not also know and understand (1) the technological dimensions of scheduling; (2) the implications of the scheduling options for different cultural groups; (3) how to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of scheduling and apply what they have learned in their program to new situations; and (4) how the schedule fi ts with the rest of the school’s purpose, values, mission, and so forth.

The case that the program’s graduates have sufficient professional knowledge, for example, of assessment, would include evidence that they know how to (1) solve assessment problems they were not directly taught (e.g., NCLB disaggregation); (2) learn new areas of assessment (e.g., value-added assessment); (3) evaluate the implications of other cultural practices on assessment (e.g., cheating or face-saving); and (4) use computer programs appropriately in implementing school-wide assessments.

Leaders cannot be said to have acquired leadership skill at the level TEAC envisions if, when they communicate with their faculty, for example, they (1) fail to employ the teaching technologies that are available because they do not understand them; (2) fail to make their point to all the staff because of their lack of knowledge of individual and cultural differences; (3) are unconvincing because they fail to develop professionally on their own or do not know how to apply what they have learned to novel situations.

And they cannot be said to have acquired leadership skill at a sufficient level if they do not know how to distinguish essential educational issues from the peripheral, ethical administrative practices from the unethical ones, knowledge from opinion, administrative prerogative from effective delegation, and the unique leadership responsibilities of schooling in a democratic society from schooling in a non-democratic one.

2.0 Quality Principle II: Valid Assessment of Leader Learning

TEAC expects program faculty to provide a rationale that shows that the assessment techniques it uses are reasonable and credible. However the program faculty members assess what their candidates have learned, TEAC requires the program to provide evidence that the inferences made from the assessment system meet the accepted research standards for reliability and validity.

This means that faculty members must rule out competing and rival inferences for their evidence of candidate learning, and establish a point at which the evidence for their inference is sufficient, clear, and consistent, and below which the evidence for their inference is insufficient or inconsistent. To do this, the faculty needs to undertake inquiry on the following two aspects of the assessment of candidate learning.

2.1 Rationale for the links

TEAC requires that the faculty members have a rationale for its assessments that shows that the links between assessments and (1) the program goal, (2) the faculty claims made about candidate learning, and (3) the program’s features11 are reasonable and credible.

The faculty members who claim, for example, that their program prepares instructional leaders would need to make a case that their ways of assessing instructional leadership are reasonable and logical; they would need to explain how their assessments are related conceptually to the program requirements and to their claims about what the candidates know, and why the inferences they make about the graduates are credible.

Before the faculty members conclude that their assessments show that the graduates learn how to be instructional leaders, they would need to rule out that their graduates had merely memorized or parroted their instructional leadership responses; endorsed administrative practices that thwarted pupil learning; or failed to anticipate the unintended negative consequences of an otherwise acceptable administrative decision.

2.2 Evidence of valid assessment

The faculty must satisfy itself and TEAC that its rationale and the inferences from its assessments are also empirically credible and supported with local evidence about the trustworthiness, reliability, and validity of the assessment method the faculty employed.

3.0 Quality Principle III: Institutional Learning

TEAC expects that a faculty’s decisions about its programs are based on evidence, and that the program has a quality control system that (1) yields reliable evidence about the program’s practices and results, and (2) influences policies and decision making.

Quality Principle III is about the system of inquiry, review, and quality control by which the faculty secures the evidence and informed opinion needed to initiate or improve program quality. TEAC expects that the faculty will systematically and continuously improve the quality of its educational leadership program and provide evidence about the following.

3.1 Program decisions and planning based on evidence

TEAC requires evidence that the information derived from faculty’s quality control monitoring and inquiry has a role in the improvement of the program. Quality control entails an investigation of any local factors that are associated with, and implicated in, candidate learning and assessment of that learning.

3.2 Influential quality control system

Although any number of factors and components of the program may affect program quality, TEAC does require the program faculty to address at least seven components, most of which seem to have a plausible association with candidate learning and program quality. These seven dimensions are based upon the U.S. Department of Education’s requirement that any accreditor recognized by the Secretary as a reliable gatekeeper for federal funding must have standards for seven dimensions of program capacity: curriculum, faculty, resources, facilities, accurate publications, student support services, and student feedback.

4.0 Standards of Capacity for Program Quality

TEAC defines a quality program as one that has credible evidence that it satisfies the three quality principles. However, TEAC also requires the program faculty to provide evidence that it has the capacity— curriculum, faculty, resources, facilities, publications, student support services, and policies—to support student learning and program quality. This evidence should be independent of student learning and based on some traditional input features of capacity. (See the full description of the standards for capacity.)

The program faculty can make the case that it has sufficient capacity for quality in any way that meets scholarly standards of evidence; however, TEAC requires that the faculty cover the following basic three points in making its case.

Quality control

The faculty must show that it monitors systematically the quality of the curriculum, faculty, facilities, resources, candidate support services, publications, and that the system is sensitive and responds to candidate comment and complaint. This is just another way of saying that the faculty adheres to Quality Principle III.

Evidence of commitment

The faculty must also show evidence that the institution is committed to the program. Commitment is most conveniently seen in the evidence of parity of the program with the institution. The program must at least have the normative capacity of the institution’s academic programs with regard to the quality of the curriculum, faculty, facilities, resources, candidate support services, publications, and features it shares with the institution’s other programs.

Unique capacity

The faculty must also monitor whatever unique capacity is needed for program quality (e.g., an administrative internship). Because the field has no firm consensus about any standard for unique capacity other than it be sufficient to insure that the program’s graduates are competent, caring, and qualified, these capacity standards are inevitably a matter for further inquiry and hypothesis testing.

TEAC and state standards

TEAC’s principles and standards are compatible with the standards promulgated by many states and professional educational organizations, for example, the six standards of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) and the seven standards of the National Policy Board for Educational Administration (NPBEA). The program faculty members are free to adopt these standards and to organize the Brief around them, as they are an equivalent and permissible way to satisfy the content of Quality Principle I.