State of States: Landscape of University-Based Pathways to the Principalship

This study describes the landscape of school leadership preparation programs in the United States, including pathways to the principalship (master’s, certification, educational specialist) and the delivery modes for each pathway (face-to-face, fully online, hybrid). First, data was collected from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data on the number of degrees and certificates awarded by every postsecondary institution receiving U.S. federal student aid from 2013 to 2018. Then program websites were searched and coded by two independent coders. All discrepancies were resolved; the final dataset was analyzed using measures of central tendency. This study found that master’s programs were the most common route to the principalship, and there were more than double the number of master’s offerings than certification and more than double as many certification offerings than educational specialist. The most common delivery modes across each pathway were, from most prevalent to least: face-to-face, fully online, and hybrid. Ten states had an offering in every pathway and modality, but no individual university offered every pathway and modality. Twenty-one states had one or more universities that offered all pathways but not all modalities. Implications are that program faculty informed decisions about what pathways and modalities to offer, these data allow for sampling techniques that can help researchers conduct more inferential studies to measure the impact of leadership preparation on school outcomes, and these data allow for research that differs by pathway, providing a more nuanced understanding of preparation. Finally, this study serves as a call for a centralized database for tracking SLPP data.