EVALUATING LEADERSHIP PREPARATION PROGRAMS

Alignment with ELCC standards and national research on leader effects

The Evaluation Taskforce designed its follow up survey of graduates and alumni to enable individual programs to use the results for multiple purposes, including meeting national and state program accreditation evaluation research expectations. To that end, the survey provides ELCC-related feedback in several critical areas:

• The extent to which graduates’ internship meets the criteria outlined in ELCC standard #7
  
• The extent to which graduates’ learned leadership knowledge and skills as aligned to the ELCC standards 1-6 (and several sub-standards, specifically)
  
• The school leadership career advancement outcomes of graduates
  
• The extent to which graduates’ leadership practices are aligned with the ELCC standards
  
•  The extent to which graduates’ school improvement work is aligned with the ELCC standards.

The Evaluation Taskforce did not strive to make the survey 100% comprehensive in alignment with all ELCC standards and substandards, but to align with the most essential features and ones that could be most aptly measured through survey feedback. The methodological reasons for this choice are that some ELCC sub-standards are not easy to measure and there is significant overlap among some sub-standards. Inclusion of all sub-standards would make the survey too long and unwieldy, reducing completion rates and answer quality. Most important, our research showed that programs that are strong in some areas are also strong in other areas. This confirmed for us the importance of sampling from among the ELCC standards across the survey measures, rather than striving for 100% coverage.

In addition, the Evaluation Taskforce recommends that programs use the graduate/alumni survey feedback as one of several evaluation sources for accreditation purposes.

The Evaluation Taskforce also aligned the survey questions with new and existing research on leader knowledge, practices and school improvement work [see for example, (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004; Waters, Marzano, & McNulty, 2003)]. As new research becomes available, taskforce members review the quality of critical measures that might be incorporated. For example, based on more recent work, the taskforce added measures on parental involvement in schools and more items on the use of data in school improvement and leadership work. By aligning the survey research with existing leadership research, the Evaluation Taskforce strives to build on a foundation of prior research, and to be able to test out already proven relationships between leadership practice and school improvement work and extend this line of research to include leadership preparation.