Background: The quest for a “knowledge base” in educational administration resulting in the construction of national standards for preparing school leaders has brought with it an unexpected downside. Purpose: It is argued that instead of raising the bar for preparing educational leaders, the standards have lowered them, first by embracing only a limited set of the actual responsibilities of school leaders, resulting in programmatic reductionism, and permitting the licensing of school leaders at sites outside the purview of the university, by definition a form of deprofessionalization. The standards also assume the existence of a static knowledge base tied to a static social system. Current skill sets contained in the standards are in their essence antichange and antidemocratic. Conclusions: The major assumption that must be questioned is the notion or requirement of a stable knowledge base that is a political necessity in accreditation and licensing practices but the hallmark of a dead field of studies empirically.
As a field, educational administration has long been permeated by views that ignore human interiority in favor of impersonal structures and forces at work in schools. Contemporary concerns with moral leadership have served to reveal the limitations of behaviorism in dealing with the topic because morality is determined by inner beliefs and values. Abundant film and video archives offer a rich and inexpensive repository of depictions of leaders from a variety of occupations and ages and can restore to the study of leadership the balance between inner perspective and the impact on followers. The advantages of film/video as a powerful teaching tool are presented along with a discussion of their use in graduate curricula. A partial list of 10 useful films portraying multicultural leaders, male and female, is described for possible use in the graduate classroom.
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