Educational Leadership at 2050: Conjectures, Challenges, and Promises

This is a practical, bold, no-holds barred look at challenges facing educational leaders and the university programs that prepare them through mid-century. It examines key continuities and discontinuities of current times for school, education, and society. Both practice and preparation occur in contested social space, the implications of which are explored in a postindustrial, digital age. The stark warning signs of the conflict roiling educational leadership includes the re-segregation and marketization of the public schools; the demonization of teacher unions; attempts to de-professionalize professional preparation; the continuing achievement gap which ignores larger social inequalities; the debasement of education degrees by online diploma mills; the escalating culture of numbers and cheating scandals; and the erosion of full-time, seasoned faculty providing leadership to university preparation programs. The promise of social justice leadership anchored in a fast-changing demographic portrait of increasing national diversity is encapsulated in the construct of leadership accoutrement's which awakens the art and science of leadership. . Finally, the authors propose the pedagogically centered leadership for creating a functional bridge between leadership and learning in preparation and practice.