 | Director, Reginald Leon Green Ed.D. Phone: (901) 678-2593
Fax: (901) 678-1526
E-Mail: rlgreen1@memphis.edu Mail:
Center for Urban School Leadership
College of Education
University of Memphis
4111 South MSU B Street
Memphis, Tennessee 38152-4180 | Welcome to the CUSL American education is faced with perhaps its greatest opportunity, educating all of the children who attend today’s schools. This challenging opportunity has created a demand for excellent schools, ones that are quite different from the traditional schools of the past. American education is being asked to make an unflinching commitment to excellence and equity and to reform itself from top to bottom (Riley, 2002). The schoolhouse and its internal operations are being challenged by a constellation of new social, political, and economic factors, influencing a new wave of educational reform. With this new wave, the call for schools of excellence has grown louder, and the linkage between these schools and their leadership has grown stronger. The general public, state educational agencies, and politicians are demanding excellent schools and greater accountability from individuals who lead them. School leaders are being encouraged to move beyond their stabilizing posture to generative thinking, providing vision, direction, guidance, and support for instructional change and school improvement. In essence, educational leadership is being reconceptualized, and the role of the school leader is being redefined. Leadership for Today’s Schools Traditionally, school leaders have been top-down administrators with charisma, expected to develop rapport with the public, schedule students and faculty, maintain buildings, discipline students, create budgets, and provide buses to transport students to and from school, leaving instructional activities to classroom teachers. While these are necessary and important tasks, they are classified under the heading of administrative management, rather than leadership. Leaders of today’s schools are being asked to assume a different set of functions that requires sensitivity and cooperation above charisma, individual empowerment above institutions, and inclusive and bottom-up decision making over top-down management (Neuman and Simmons, 2000). They must be willing to become “lead learners,” highly capable of building strong cultures that foster collegiality among faculty members who provide services to individuals with diverse backgrounds. Also, they support experimentation, influence the creation of a vision that is shared by all stakeholders, and encourage the type of reflective thinking and collaboration that fosters commitment to vision attainment (Lashway, 1999, Dufour, 2002, & Riley, 2002). This expansion of responsibility requires the educational leader to assume accountability for finding new solutions to the challenges of addressing the needs of all students, while fostering the distribution of leadership to every facet of the school. The focus has shifted from the school leaders being held accountable for school improvement in general to being accountable for the success of each student, leaving no child behind. It is more than displaying a disposition; it is reinforcing the statement, “all students can learn,” and it is developing the type of school community where learning for all children becomes a reality (Fullan, 2001). While these suggested changes in educational leadership are arguably needed, it is not clear that traditional university educational course work prepares individuals for these challenges (National Policy Board for Educational Administration, 2002). On the whole, in recent decades, administrators prepared by traditional university programs have fared poorly (Mathews, 2001). They frequently serve more as a mechanism to boost teacher pay, rather than provide effective school leaders (Erlandson, 1997). Traditional programs offer participants little exposure to practice, and they are not afforded the experience necessary to address the challenges posed in today’s school. The emphasis has been on procedures, rather than performance, which allowed credentials to insulate practitioners from accountability (Hess, 2003). The type of leadership needed in today’s schools requires a reinvention of the leadership prototype that we have grown to respect in the principalship. We need to re-think the way we prepare leaders for today’s schools. In response to these new expectations, professors at The University of Memphis in the College of Education in partnership with Memphis City Schools have reconceptualized school leadership. From a synthesis of the results of twenty-five years of research on schooling and leadership in schools, the Center for Urban School Leadership (CUSL) was created. Through this Center, a new approach to leadership preparation and implementation has been operationalized. Center for Urban School Leadership The Center for Urban School Leadership offers a series of program components that fully embrace the new direction in leadership preparation advocated by contemporary research. Using a non-traditional approach, aspiring school leaders and practitioners are afforded experiential activities in the areas of instruction, curriculum, interpersonal relations, and research-based school managerial practices. They also receive mentoring, guidance, and support services that continue once they are placed in a school leadership role. This new and innovative approach reflects changes in society and in schools. It transforms into practice what leaders of today’s schools need to know and be able to do to enhance student achievement, leaving no child behind. Programs
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