A Look Backward and Forward at MPEA:
Forty Years of Leaders of Leadership and Counting

Thank you for the opportunity to reflect a bit...that is a good gig for a former history teacher! I will preface everything I say with this statement: “Based on what I remember and how I viewed it, this is what happened...!”

It’s amazing what longevity will get you...an invitation to an old professor to talk to a group of other professors...WOW...what fun we have in life. After 33yrs at Mizzou and some 45 years in the profession I have that “Emeritus” status, which means...you get to keep your email account so ... so the University can email you regularly and ask for donations. Emeritus means you are being rewarded for service of some sort...usually service for having lived long enough to be rewarded for service!

Happy Birthday to MPEA! MPEA is now about 40 years old...in people time, it’s a relatively young adult...at least to an old gray haired retired professor, it’s a young adult. To anyone other than an old professor, MPEA is now middle aged, and may well be facing that dreaded middle-age crisis. If you will give me the privilege of some editorial license and a few personal stories, I will try to take you back through those 40 years...hopefully in an interesting manner.

My task is to reminisce about the MPEA and about school leadership in Missouri. In reality, those two have gone to the Prom hand in hand much more than most people will ever realize. But before I build that argument, let me take you back to the winter of 1977- 78...probably January or February. All I remember about this trip to St. Louis was that it was cold outside and hotter than an oven inside Adolph Unruh’s office at St. Louis University. MPEA was, to a large degree created by a set of bookend professors with a bit of help from another professor in the middle. It was Dr. Adolph Unruh on the east side and Dr. Ed Bailey on the west side...with MU’s Neil Aslin in the middle. I remember the first time I met Dr. Unruh...it was for an MPEA project meeting...the project was not memorable but the SLU campus and Dr. Unruh were. It was my first few months at Mizzou and I jumped into a state car with Rich Hatley and we headed to St. Louis. I went rather begrudgingly...I just had it pegged as a potentially boring day..and it generally was from my perspective. We arrived at SLU mid-morning...it was my first visit to that great university. And we meandered up some old stairs to a small office (typical professor’s office of books, etc.) and sat down at a small table, proportionate in size to the room...everything always seems small and cramped in professors’ offices, and began to visit with Dr. Unruh. He was, at that time, quite a well known professor, with a degree from Wisconsin in 1937 (I looked it up), a former professor at Washington U., then Dean at UMSL, then Chair of Educational Administration at SLU. He was probably about my age at the time...and thus seemed like an old guy to a 30 year old Assistant Professor. He was polite and he and Dr. Hatley and I worked for a while on the unmemorable task. And I left unimpressed with the task and work of the Association. But you have to realize that I was generally unimpressed initially with a lot of what was happening in leader preparation at that time. And when I arrived at MU, I was coming from a principalship in an outstanding school system and I arrived with a bit of a chip on my shoulder and the perspective of a maverick...everything in our department and across the state in higher education seemed so traditional and all the leaders seem to be the “establishment.” And do remember that I was a youth of the civil rights movement, college student of the Viet Nam war, and a young adult of Watergate. We had a built-in cynicism gene pool developed over years of bureaucratic question marks. The irony of it all is that if you are around long enough, the newcomers eventually view you as the same establishment that you wanted so much to change in those younger years as a professor.

On the other side of the state was the other bookend of the early years of MPEA: Edwin Bailey. Ed was a well respected professor of school leadership at UMKC. Ed was one of the most likeable, easy going individuals you would ever meet. He was professional, hard working, quiet, and a step-up kind of guy who would get things done. He was also the first Executive Secretary of MPEA, a position that I believe was established well after the early years of the organization. He held that role, I think, from the early or mid-eighties until 1994, when Jim Walter of UMSL took the Executive reigns. Ed retired from UMKC sometime in the nineties and to the best of my knowledge, he still lives in KC. He was a gem of a gentleman...loved by all who knew him. And he was really into collaboration. When I was doing research for this talk, Rich Hatley told me that Ed was instrumental in creating, during that same era, a group of professors called “Interested Professors of Educational Administration.” The group met once a year in Kansas City, with professors from the University of Nebraska, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Arkansas, and UMKC. Ed really was a step-up and get it done kind of leader.

In the middle of the state was Neil Aslin. I don’t have any insights that say he was instrumental to the degree that Unruh and Bailey were in getting MPEA started, but he was the Chair of Educational Administration at MU and was an active member in those early days before his untimely death in 1976. Aslin had been at MU since 1962 and he served as the Chair from 1968 until his death at age 65.

During those early years, the organization met regularly. I did not recall it was twice a year but Chuck Fazarro told me it was twice a year from the very beginning. I guess I did not recall twice a year because I was not attending it twice a year. I was in that career stage of researching and writing and focused on my projects and tenure and did not regularly attend the meetings. Frankly, the meetings appeared to me, at that time, as more a good place for theoretical, esoteric discussions of what leadership meant instead of discussions about how we could foster change in the way we prepared school leaders. As one rather progressive- thinking colleague recently described it to me, it was like trying to swim in frigid waters, fully clothed. Change, it appeared to me, seemed ever so hard with the group at that time. Establishing a meaningful goal and doing something about that was a challenge because of the era, the circumstances, and maybe the mindsets that surrounded the profession. School leader preparation in Missouri had not yet discovered the significance of grounding coursework in existing knowledge of best practices. Leader prep coursework across the state was more likely to be based upon personal experience and those war stories of how we used to do it in the good ole days. I think you could say that leader prep had a rude awakening about the same time that all of education did...let’s go back in time and put together the pieces of legislation and the responses of MPEA.

1965...MPEA was not yet a twinkle in anyone’s eye...but nationally President Lyndon Johnson was moving through congress the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, designed to bridge the gap of educational inequity for 5+ million students of poverty and color...it was part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, part of his Great Society program. We all remember ESEA...it had all those Titles...Title I, Title II, etc. to Title VII and then eventually Title IX and so on. Oh, a really interesting sidebar fact of ESEA 65 was “it forbade the development of a national curriculum.” At least that’s what I found in my research...interesting given where we are headed as a nation. ESEA 65 was all about moving funds into the hands of Local Education Agencies, LEAs, and ensuring they followed the rules of the Titles. Uncle Sam held the purse strings...maybe the early roots of accountability through fiscal sanction.

ESEA was the educational setting of the era before and during the birth of MPEA. In the very early years of MPEA, another major piece of legislation would also shape the roles of school leaders...fast forward to 1975 when PL94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children’s Act of 1975, was enacted. The Act ensured the rights of children with disabilities to have a free and appropriate public education that emphasized special education services to meet their unique needs. Students and parents were given rights and principals and superintendents had to know them and protect them.

Personal sidebar story...At the unveiling of 94-142 in 1975, the government wanted to make a splash with the media, and they did. But they also wanted to be sure that they gave equal time to practicing educators, so each state was provided the opportunity to send a few practicing administrators to a small two-day conference in DC to hear the first explanations/unveiling of the details of 94-142. I was a Principal in Ft. Collins at that time and when the Colorado State Dept contacted our Supt for a name, he gave them mine. So I had the opportunity to go to DC and listen to the top Ed Dept officials talk for hours about 94- 142. As a relatively new principal, many things went right over my head. But, one thing stuck forever in my mind. It seems like it was said late in the day after many hours of tedious explanations and as I have told many of my classes over the years, it made a world of sense at the time. The speaker said that the creation of 94-142 and the component of having an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for each student with disabilities would become the template, the forerunner if you will, for an IEP for every student in education. He was saying that the future of education was being laid at that time and that the future would be a personal plan for every student, developed collaboratively among parents and teachers and the students and implemented just as we would soon begin to implement the IEPs mandated by 94- 142....that never materialized, but for two decades, I really thought we would eventually head in that direction. A potentially good thought from bright educators that died on the vine.

By 1977 MPEA was moving growing quickly. In our human development metaphor, it was the kindergarten years. Meetings were held regularly and the membership was growing beyond the four initial institutions of UMSL, UMKC, MU and SLU. I still viewed it as a stuffy, good old-boys network...which was probably an unfair and inaccurate depiction, but, the fact is that it was primarily an older, and definitely male, collection of veteran tenured professors. To illustrate the seniority issue one only had to look at the faculty at MU. When I arrived at MU in the fall of 1977, the closest professor in age to me was 10 years my senior and I was the only junior professor by rank in the department (everyone else was a full professor). And we had no Professors of Practice and but a handful of adjuncts who served in name only...we gave them a title as a political courtesy, not as a responsibility. And it was an all-male group...with smoke-filled rooms and conversations I generally found boring. The picture was generally similar across the state. MPEA was not a picture of diversity, equity or social justice. That was my view...maybe a bit unfair, but a view of a how it appeared to me as a young professor at that time. It was an all-male, old-male organization. I don’t recall women at the meetings in those early years, but Chuck Fazarro does recall that Dr. Unruh’s wife, Glenys, attended sessions during the early years. She was an accomplished and experienced educational leader in the St. Louis area who co-authored books with her husband and with other educational leaders of the era such as William Alexander. While I do not recall meeting her, I am pleased that Chuck recalled her involvement in MPEA. By all account, that would make her the first woman in the organization. And from my recollections, maybe the only one. I may well be wrong, but that’s based upon what I recall of the persons at the meetings.

As I follow history of MPEA via the metaphor of “human development,” the eighties were the early youthful years of MPEA. MPEA was about 10 years old in 1982-83. MPEA was almost a middle schooler in maturity. From my recollections, that’s a good parallel of where the organization was in its development.

We all know the major educational focus of the country in the eighties...it was called the Nation at Risk report. In 1981, Secretary Terrell Bell appointed the National Commission on Educational Excellence. The official title of their report in 1983 was A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Reform...Reform...Reform...that was the key term. Debates were occurring in the think tanks and professional associations across the country about the choice of words...what words would best describe the needed direction of education. Would it be Educational Reform, School Reform, School Improvement, etc. I recall those discussions around the table at NASSP headquarters in Washington and around the tables at MPEA meetings. Everyone wondered what we should call the “need for change.” Those issues were evolving largely due to work coming from Michigan State. Wilbur Brookover is commonly considered one of the initial, influential researchers in the body of literature known as School Effects. That literature placed the focus directly on the school site as the locus of needed change in education. And following the early 1970s writings of Brookover, came Ron Edmonds, who became the face of the movement and the research. Larry Lezotte was to soon became the passionate spokesperson after Edmond’s death in the summer of 1983. I guess I am older than I want to admit because I remember Terrell Bell well and I remember Ron Edmonds very well.

I had the opportunity to meet Terrell Bell to visit with Dr. Bell on two occasions, once each during his stints education’s national leader. Dr. Bell served as Commissioner of Education under President Nixon when Education was part of HEW and then he served as Secretary of Education under President Reagan. After three or four years as Secretary, he resigned the post over disagreements with Reagan for funding...at the time it was common knowledge that Reagan wanted to eliminate the cabinet position, so cutting dollars was part of his plan for elimination.

I also had the chance in the late seventies and early 80s to meet and work with Ron Edmonds. I was working as a consultant to the Jackson MS School District in the late seventies and into the mid eighties. Superintendent Robert Fortenberry and I were planning staff development for the district’s principals...as we described it at the time: “We were trying to bring his principals’ leadership skills from the 1950s to the 1980s in three years.” It was a lot of work! And one afternoon in 1979 or 80 Dr. Fortenberry said to me, “Do you know this guy named Ron Edmonds...I like what I read.” I think Bob had read one of Ron’s articles in Ed Leadership and maybe heard him at a national conference. I said yes and that I had met him in KC the previous year and he was very impressive. So Bob says, “Do you think you can get him down here for a few days so he can work with our principals.” I said I would try, so I called Ron and his opening question to me was: “Is this a Superintendent who really understands change and really wants to make change; or, is he just asking me down because I am black?” I talked with him about what we were doing with the leadership program for the principals and reassured him Bob’s motivations were well placed. He agreed to come to Jackson for a summer retreat with the districts administrators. I flew in a day early to finish the planning and late on a very rainy, stormy night I picked Ron up at the Jackson airport and we had dinner and then went to our hotel. The next morning we drove about an hour to a very nice lakeside retreat area where Ron proceeded to engage those principals in a most impressive conversation/lecture about the school effects research and the role of the principal to address that research as well as the potential power of a principal to lead change real change in a school of poverty. It was a good experience for the principals and maybe an even better retreat for a young professor who is not easily impressed...but who was very impressed by this wonderfully bright and articulate leader of the early days of the School Effects movement. Personally for me, it was a sad day in the summer of 1983 when I learned one morning as I was about to start a summer school class that Ron had just died of a heart attack. His death was clearly a setback for education in that era. It would be the equivalent to have suddenly lost Bob Marzano, Doug Reeves, and Rick DuFour about 10 years ago, all at once. Ron’s influence on the educational scene in the late 70s and early 80 would have rivaled their collective influence on education in the 2000s. We lost years of Edmond’s impact.

And where was MPEA in the early and mid eighties...very much in those adolescent, growing pain years. The organization was looking for an identity and it was still struggling to find one. The membership of professors in educational leadership was beginning to meld from old, gray haired men to younger men and an occasional woman. I don’t honestly remember who the first women leaders of MPEA were at that time, but I do recall Sue Shepherd and Margaret Dalton from SEMO, Carol Baker from NWMSU, and Joyce Dana from SLU as early women leaders in MPEA. But I recall their involvement as being the late eighties or early nineties, not the early or mid eighties. As noted, I qualify every paragraph in this speech with “As best I recall.” That’s the best I remember or could find in my research on the organization.

But I do know that in that same era the gender of our students in our leadership classes was changing rapidly...we were approaching the 50% mark of female students and that would, for us at Mizzou, be surpassed before we closed the decade of the 80s. Equity by gender, at least by numbers, had arrived in our graduate classes, but not yet in the professoriate.

So MPEA was moving into those tumultuous early adolescent years...trying to find itself like an eighth grader looking for an identity. But compared to where it is today in adulthood, the organization was just “muddling along” like many a middle school and high school student. A common direction was not evolving clearly, membership at meetings was only mediocre at best, and the working relationships with MDESE had not matured. The right culture and the right people were not yet in place for that to unfold.

Across Missouri, the components of the Excellence in Education Act of 1985 were beginning to unfold and with that came programs that would last for years. I happened to have had somewhat of an “insider’s seat” at the table as that act was being written and unfolding. If you recall, in 1983 Commissioner Arthur Mallory appointed a task force on Performance-Based Teacher Evaluation. Turner Tyson chaired the task force and I served as the Resource Person to the group. The committee met for most a year or so before we finalized our work in the form of a recommended set of strategies for teacher evaluation across the state. When we began deliberating the issues of PBTE, you could count on one hand the number of school districts in the states’ 570+ districts at that time that had any form of valid and reliable teacher evaluation system. As our design work culminated in 1984 and turned into professional development, Turner and I regularly traveled the state to build a basic knowledge of the practices that the committee recommended. In so doing we had hours and hours of “windshield time” to talk about educational issues. Simultaneously, Turner was busy drafting the Commissioner’s recommendations for the MO Excellence in Education Act, which, as Turner would tell it, was a huge set of issues, only a few of which they expected to get through the house and senate. But the time was ripe for educational legislation, right on the heels of Nation at Risk, so every single issue drafted was passed by the “education minded” bicameral. From that bill we ended up with (a) Career Ladder, (b) a state-wide testing program called the MMAT, (c) District Student Discipline Policies, (e) minimum teacher salary of $15,000 starting in 1987 and growing to $18,000 by 1990, (f) the Leadership Academy, (g) Performance-Based Administrator Evaluation, and (h) the Missouri Principal Assessment Program for Principal Certification. I would end up also chairing the Administrator Evaluation task force and I also ended up going on half-time loan to DESE for a semester to help build the original Administrator Assessment Center in the image of the Missouri Principal Assessment Center, a project I had created at Mizzou in the early eighties based upon the NASSP’s national Assessment Center Program. During that stretch, I also was directing the first decade study of middle level schools, so I was a bit busy with projects and thus more sporadic in my engagement with MPEA during those years than in any other decade.

Eventually we made it through the eighties and into the nineties, which one could say was the “Coming of Age” era for MPEA. I think that is a very fair way to describe the nineties for MPEA...the organization really came into its own as a viable influence on education in Missouri, largely due to the working relationships the association developed with MDESE’s Leadership Academy leaders. Both Doug Miller, in particular, was supportive of the notion that MPEA could be a strong force in the changes needed in school leadership across the state. DESE, through Doug, stepped up to the plate and the groundwork thus was firmly set for a strong relationship between MPEA and DESE. And by the way, it was not easy on their end...for thought the Leadership Academy staff saw the value and the importance of involving MPEA in addressing issues, not all leaders at DESE saw the same value. Doug and the Leadership Academy staff had to go to bat many times over the years to support that strong relationship.

As we moved into the early nineties and as MPEA was moving, metaphorically, from college into the real world of work, the organization was taking on tasks for the overall good of the state and those tasks were being funded by MDESE grants. The ball really got rolling at the annual fall meeting on October 30, 1994 at Tan-Tar-A. The sum total of persons at the meeting was five or six. I presented a report developed by NASSP entitled Developing School Leaders: A Call for Collaboration. I was on NASSP’s national committee that developed the report and thus had a history with the report and felt rather strongly about the critical need for Higher Education, State Departments, and LEAs to collaboratively discuss the direction of leadership in each state and strategize about how to move forward positively with the development and certification of school leaders, particularly principals. Even though there were only five or six professors in attendance, the discussions got pretty heated over what principal preparation should look like. We left that meeting with a plan to build collaborative efforts among MPEA, MDESE, MASSP, MAESP, and MASA. To a large degree we were successful in that endeavor in the months that followed. We had a common set of goals to work toward and a basic common mindset that together progress could be made in leader preparation across the state.

At that same time, Ed Bailey was stepping down from his two-plus decades of formal and informal leadership of the association. The change had nothing to do with the direction or focus of MPEA, it was just coincidental. Ed was a superb leader of MPEA and helped the organization get to that point in time when the culture, the people, and the issues came together for the strong collaborative relationship with DESE.

Jim Walter of UMSL stepped into the Executive role that year (1994) and helped move the organization forward. With a foucs, with a collaborative spirit, and with fiscal support from DESE, membership of the organization grew exponentially; at least the attendance at the meetings grew exponentially from the earlier years. And the issues tackled were substantive and meaningful for the state. For example, Jim and three or four members wrote a grant for DESE funding to articulate the role of the ISLLC standards in our state certification and principal preparation programs. Doug Miller and Larry Wheeles of DESE stepped up time and again to provide funding for that grant and subsequent grants. MPEA had it first major financial base from which to operate. MPEA’s meetings grew in membership, committees took on significant tasks and the relationship with DESE got tighter and tighter. Soon MPEA and DESE staff were collaborating on almost every key issue related to leader preparation, working toward a very common goal of raising the standards of the preparation programs across the state and the expectations of those whom we certificated. The association, primarily Jim Walter, developed and published a white paper entitled Renewing the Spirit of Liberty: Preparing Principals for Missouri Schools.

The membership and programs that you are familiar with today (meetings of 30-50 members with an agenda of learning, discussions, and speakers) grew out of those mid 1990s efforts. In a stretch of five years from 1994 to 1999, I believe the organization was as active in meaningful issues in leader preparation as it had been in the first 22 years. MPEA members (a) worked on translating ISLLC standards into practice, (b) unveiled the MPEA website on April 24, 1998, almost exactly 14 years ago; (c) developed an MPEA position paper on the principalship and also published a monograph on principal preparation; (d) developed a collaborative working relationship with DESE, (e) secured multiple grants to fund organization/state collaborative projects, and (f) brought in well-known and respected national speakers like Joe Murphy to talk about ISLLC standards and Ed Bridges to talk about problem-based leader preparation strategies.

Over the first half of the 2000s, the association members continued an aggressive assault on improving the study of leadership and the preparation of school leaders across the state. In those five years, different committees led the development of (a) Case Studies in school leadership, (b) Rubrics for Principal Portfolio Evaluations, and (c) recommendations for principal preparation programs. I had the opportunity to organize and lead a two-day retreat with the State Board of Education on the Role of the Principal in School Improvement, with MPEA members leading all but one of the presentations and discussion sessions with the Board. From the summary of that retreat, several recommendations were presented to the State Board about principal licensure, standards for leader preparation programs, and principal assessment that may have somewhat helped influence the perspectives of State Board members about principals, their needed competencies, and the influences quality principals can make on student academic success.

The formal leadership of MPEA during the 2000s could best be described as in constant transition. In a seven year stretch of time in the mid 2000s, the baton of Executive Director of MPEA was handed off from Jim Walter to John Williams to Mick Arnold to Bob Perry and then to Jim Kern. In track, that would be a five-person 400 meter relay team. To follow the track analogy, the association leadership has been on a long medley pace. We went from the sprinter of Adolph Unruh to get the association off and running, to the long distance runners of Ed Bailey and Jim Walter and back to the sprinters of John and Mick and Bob and now Jim is currently a middle distance runner for he has not yet reached the state of long-distance.

For those of us who have been very active, or not so active, members for shorter or longer stretches, we have many reasons to be proud of the overall body of work of MPEA. We all have gone through professional stages when we have the time and window of work- opportunity to be very active and take leadership roles in an organization....and we all have years when we don’t have that time because of other responsibilities. What has been impressive over the past 15 years of the organization is how dispersed the leadership of the organization has become. Although only a handful of members did almost all of the organizations work in the early nineties, we are in debt to them for the foundation and expectations they provided.

For about half of the organization’s life, it was looking for an identity...and for the next half it was busy making an impact because it had developed a mature identity. That has been most rewarding to watch for someone like me who lived through both of those times. Today, it appears to me the organization is about as healthy as it has ever been. Twice-a-year conferences continue to draw members, the Higher Education Evaluation Committee meets regularly and defines and addresses common issues among the 17 institutions, the organization continues to have a good working relationship with DESE thanks to the efforts of Hap Hairston and Paul Katnik, graduate students and their research continue to be showcased, and desired competencies of schools leaders is as much on the front burner today as it was when it became the trigger for the organization to move into a meaningfully active political role in 1994.

From my vantage point of observing the life of this organization over a period of 35 years, 1994 was the pivotal year. The organization evolved from a mild-mannered, placid association of several professors, many of whom were male and many were close professional friends, to an aggressive, politically active and agenda setting, diverse organization...diverse in the universities represented, diverse in the ethnic and gender makeup, and diverse in the political and philosophical beliefs about school leadership.

From this point in time forward the organization should find a new gear. If we follow the metaphor of the human life evolution, the organization has moved from infancy to adolescence looking for an identify; from early work force years working hard to get somewhere and leave a thumbprint on the professions, to early the stage of mid-life today. To continue that metaphor, the organization sits on a foundation of life experiences that should serve it well in the coming years. It is staring in the face the best and most productive years of existence. To have productive years are ahead, I think the organization needs to become more politically aggressive. We have passed those “glory years” of educational focus when state departments and the public asked for our thoughts and listened to our responses. We are in an educational climate where everything takes a back seat to test taking and the results thereof. High stakes testing drives our profession, at least now and in the immediate future, and probably until it brings public education to its knees, or chops it off at the knees. We cannot afford to go peacefully into the night, acquiescing to the political agendas set by political powers, regardless of how well intentioned they seem to be. NCLB was to give America excellence and equity and (foolishly) move achievement (a false pseudonym for learning) up x-percent each year until all students passed an assessment of defined but unspecified questions! NCLB was wrong-headed and foolishly conceived by those who knew much about how to be reelected and little about how to educate an ever challenging population of students. Somehow, under the guise of “doing what is right for students,” life in education today may be, unfortunately, more closely aligned with work in a CPA firm than in a school house...we count and we count and we count. Teachers have been caught in the middle of it all, and they are forced to focus on their best guess of what will be asked on the all-important test. That pressure and the tightly defined curricula that they must respond to have had a reverse impact on thinking in the classroom.

I am convinced that time spent thinking more deeply, more reflectively, more analytically has begun to decline in our schools, being replaced with increases in memorization, practice, skill development, practice, fact finding, practice, and did I mention practice! If my calculations are correct, and I am confident they are, the students we are graduating today...the children of NCLB...the first full generation of students who have gone through school fully under the NCLB “rules of learning”...are engaged in deeper thinking considerably less that those who went before them. Specifically, the students in this May’s HS graduating class were second graders when congress passed NCLB in December of 2001 and President Bush signed it in January of 2002. Those “students of the NCLB era” will be graduating with approximately 100 fewer days of real thinking time...minutes when they were thinking in a higher-order/deeper manner during the school day. That’s more than a half a school year of less critical thinking and problem solving, of less evaluation and synthesis, of less creative and innovative thought. The press for recall on high stakes tests in the classrooms of today has overshadowed the importance of deeper thought so we run the risk of placing into society students less equipped to think and problem solve, students less capable of making good reasoned judgments, students less capable of making good social and political decisions. It may be a decade or two for the results of this to surface in an obvious way across society. Consider that if the amount of thinking time in school for the graduates of the past three years and the graduates of the next three years were all averaged, graduating students in each of those six years will have a semester less of deep learning time during their K-12 schooling career, compared to the six-year generation of students graduating from 1996 to 2002.

Think about this as well. From the early years of education as we generally know it today, let’s say the 1950s forward, until about the 1980s, the profession of education generally attracted the best of the best professional women. They were bright and highly capable and generally more talented than were their male counterparts, basically because they were a skewed population of their gender and the male population of educators to which they were compared was a more normal distribution of talent. Then, as we moved into the eighties and nineties many of the up-and-coming, highly capable women went into other professional fields for their careers. We saw similar numbers of women moving into education, but were they, on the average, the same level of thought and competence? I would argue they were not. The research of Muriel Battle’s study in 1982, coupled with other studies such as Sarah Spalding’s study in 87, and Iris Denison’s study in 88, implied that the population of women in educational leadership positions in the eighties was superior in talent to their male counterparts. But as more women moved into leadership roles in the eighties and nineties, as the numbers of women moved in school leadership classes passed the numbers of males, did we end up with an ever declining talent pool of women going into leadership positions. I would argue that we have...and if so, then the generation of women who have moved into leadership positions in the past decade or so may not come from a skewed pool of high talent as was once the case. I think one could argue that they fit more a normal distribution of talent as leaders, just as does the male pool of educational leaders. And the same is therefore true for the talent pool of female teachers over the past two to three decades. While it may not be a popular concept...that the female talent pool in education is not what it once was...it is a likely fact due to greater diversity of job opportunities. Therefore, circumstances surround us today that will make our jobs as the leaders of leaders, the developers of leaders, the teachers of the upcoming generations of school leaders more and more challenging with each subsequent year.

I am not a basically pessimistic person...in fact I have generally been the eternal education optimist...optimistic that we can make a difference as professors of school leadership. But we make a difference only if we maintain an aggressive posture to move forward with what is right for kids and for the adults who teach and lead them. We calmly, passively accept NCLB and other wrong-headed political agendas that have and will continue to threaten the core of democratic education in our state and nation. We feel helpless in our ability to address these issues, but we have an obligation to speak up loudly as an organization. In the first quartile of its history, this organization floundered, in the inter- quartile range of years it came of age and it began to make a difference. In the last quartile it continued to make a difference. I would encourage you to look at the big picture, not the fine print. Whether or not a standard says “they shall demonstrate x or they shall demonstrate y” may not be as important as what leaders believe, how they relate, and how they view their responsibility to the students they serve.” We need right-minded leaders not compliant technicians. We need leaders with an understanding of the vision, not leaders who audit numbers without seeing the big picture. We need leaders who truly understand collaboration and collaborative learning, not leaders who monitor and reprimand. Let’s not allow our teaching of future leaders to be influenced solely by ELCC, ISLLC, and NCATE the way the lives of today’s classroom teachers have been influenced by the press for success on high- stakes tests.

We have a good culture of collaboration in Missouri among the professional associations, including MPEA and the state department. We reside in a state where an organization like MPEA can make a difference. We have a culture more conducive “to doing what’s right for students” than is the case in most states. By and large, the association has been doing the right things for years...all of that is in jeopardy as the tide continues to shape schooling and expected role of school leaders. We need to prepare leaders to think more creatively and holistically than ever before. We cannot afford for schooling ten or fifteen years from now to continue to look the way it has for the past 60 years. That statement has never been more true than it is now about high school education in our state and country. As we admit leader candidates, as we teach leader candidates, as we certify leader candidates, we must raise the bar because the challenges they will face will be greater and they will have to be more talented than ever to do what is best for students...and we may have to do this from a pool of candidates that will be less talented than ever before. It is far too easy to have a minimalist perspective on what we expect of our leaders in our programs and in the state assessments, even the paper and pencil assessment test. We should take our students well beyond the surface knowledge and into the deeper understandings of how leadership is defined by state and national standards. Teaching surface learning and expecting surface learning will short-change what our school leaders of tomorrow will need. They will have to be problem solvers, not marshals of behavior or bean counters.

And we must help state leaders in Jeff City, both those appointed as well as those elected, to understand the critical fact that if we don’t help shape education in the coming years, if we don’t raise our standards and create a pool of highly talented leaders, then those who understand education the least will continue to shape it for us because those leaders will continue to be compliant, passive implementers of the status quo. And the status quo will, in time, be the death of public education. The politically oriented policy makers will dictate what education will look like and they will run it in the ground. They will run it in the ground the way the Great Plains farmers of the 1920 and 30s devastated the soil that was once held tight with buffalo grass, but was later blown across the plains because they did not understand the concept of soil conservation and could not anticipate and respond to a massive drought. As professors, we must be responsible for seeing, and responsive to shape the big picture of good education. We must anticipate the massive drought (for it is coming), and we must reshape what we do now in preparation for, and better yet to prevent, those hard times. MPEA can (and must) do that...good luck in that endeavor.