MBA in Education Leadership: A Model for Developing an Interdisciplinary Principal Preparation Program.
In 2005, Arthur Levine stated that school leadership programs "lacked rigor, had low admission standards, and offered credentials with limited practical value for overburdened administrators seeking to manage complex budgets, rapid institutional change, and burgeoning use of technology" (Levine, 2005, p. 24) Hess (2012) has argued that the curriculum in school leadership programs looks similar across most universities and needs to be reinvented to reflect more business leadership practices. He asserts that the system of leadership preparation may account for the lack of substantial school reform, because former and current K 12 school leaders who are bound by traditional theories and narratives are training new principals. He suggests urgency to break the mold by "recruiting a deeper, richer, more diverse pool of leadership talent, from inside and outside of schools, and then deliberately training them in a fashion that permits them to learn from peers outside of K 12; exposes them to leadership and management thinking from outside K 12; and integrates thinking on entrepreneurship and unbundling into the very fabric of their preparation" (p. 1).In response to the criticism of traditional educational leadership programs, faculty members from the Schools of Business and Education at a small liberal arts university developed a state of the art, interdisciplinary MBA program in Education Leadership that combined best practices from business and education. The leadership program was based on a "grow your own" model in which districts nominate candidates and become working partners with the university to address district needs. The creation and implementation of the program was achieved through consultation with a large coalition of business faculty, education faculty, school district leaders, principals, teachers, and business professionals. This diverse group took the lead to implement a course of action in order to transform the preparation of aspiring school leaders.Literature ReviewResearch has indicated that effective principals make a difference. The Wallace Foundation identified five core functions of effective school leaders which include shaping a vision of success for all students, creating a climate hospitable to education, cultivating leadership in others, improving instruction, and managing people, data and processes to foster school improvement (Wallace Foundation, 2013) It is estimated that principals represent 25% of the variation in a school's achievement (Seashore Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, Anderson, 2010) because principals are empowered to bring together multiple influences to impact student learning and school success. Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, and Wahlstrom (2004) and Seashore Lewis et al. (2010) completed landmark studies in schools and districts to validate and define the basics of successful principal leadership. These competencies included setting direction, developing people, and redesigning the organization. Such competencies align with core curricular areas in business management programs.As indicated by Levine (2005) the job of the principal is changing rapidly. Organizational leadership and management skills as well as data analysis have moved to the forefront in the high stakes race to continually improve student achievement. Given the rapid growth of innovative public charter schools and more autonomous schools, principals require skills equivalent to those taught in MBA programs such as Lean Six Sigma, data analysis and statistics, micro and macroeconomics, finance, marketing and communications, and strategic analysis. These business courses and skills are often missing from traditional education leadership programs.The MBA in Education Leadership ModelProgram Development ProcessMany existing MBA in Education Leadership degrees consist of a "dual major" in which graduate students receive an MBA and a Masters or Certificate in Education Leadership in which they take separate courses from each of the two respective schools.