Leonard C. Burrello
Acknowledgement
The following information is an expanded history of two major program areas—School Administration and later Educational Leadership as well as Higher Education and Student Affairs. Chancellor’s Professor George Kuh and I began to develop an outline of the evolution of our two program areas throughout the School’s 100-year history. George edited every word I drafted for School Administration along with Chancellor’s Professor Martha McCarthy. Both were two of the most outstanding representatives of the School for over 32 years. Our current colleague in the Program Area, Janet Decker, prepared the fifth and final era of the Program history. Finally, Clinical Professor, Ronald Barnes and three other program graduates from the 1970s and 1980s, Neyland Clark, Douglas Williams, and Vernon Johnson each offered their suggestions in the preparation of this perspective on the history of the Department. Indiana University Educational Leadership and Policy Studies is unmatched in terms of its research productivity while always retaining its focus on the preparation of school leaders at all levels of practice for over 100 years.
The History of The Department of Administration and Administrative Studies and its Transformation into Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
One way you can capture the history and the transformation of this program area is by studying its evolution through five distinct but overlapping eras. Each era spills into the next, not necessarily abandoning what came before. This perspective attempts to capture the priorities of each era through its faculty, their values, and portfolios of research and development projects, graduate programming by its individual program area while servicing local schools and districts, the university, state, nation, and international community. Currently the School has four major departments, including 29 programs. In this chapter our focus is on the program in School Administration from 1923 through 1982 and its evolution into Educational Leadership through the present which includes research and development of national, state, and local policy.
- The Beginnings: 1923-1946 – strong presence in principal preparation and placement of administrators in school districts and professional organizations.
- District Leadership Preparation, Placement, and Continuing Professional Development:1947-1975 – Leadership of State Associations, School Boards, Superintendents, Principals at all levels, and Special Education Directors.
- Practitioner-Scholar Focus: 1975-1990 – Leadership recruitment moves nationally with the passage of the Federal Law 94-142, which brings innovation and a national initiative on inclusive practices for students with disabilities and a stream of federal and state grants.
- National Prominence as a Research and Development Program of Educational Leadership with a focus on policy studies: 1990-2010 -- Educational leadership becomes oriented toward scholar-practitioners and achieves national ranking in top 10 programs.
- Continued Focus on Research and Policy Development with a Legal Thrust – 2011-present – Educational Leadership largely focused on preparation of undergraduates and graduates in policy development and its impact on local and state practice.
ERA #1 The Beginnings: 1923-1946: Principal Preparation and Building a Web of Policy Influence
The early history of the School of Education started with the on-going support of high school and elementary principals’ conferences closely followed by a study of the duties of county school superintendents and superintendents of schools in selected Indiana cities authored by Henry Lester Smith and Leo Martin Chamberlain in 1929. In 1924 the Indiana University Bureau of Educational Studies and Testing and the School of Education Division of Research and Field Services established the foundation for the assessment of educational practices and a means of promoting best practices across leadership, teaching, and learning of basic skills.
In 1936-37, Smith and William Painter started to catalog movements in education within the international community of 112 countries on every continent. From 1924 through 1942 (minus a year or two) the School of Education held an annual conference on Educational Measurement. Their vehicle of choice to report studies was the Bulletin of the School of Education. In the 21st volume of the Bulletin, Smith and Harold Moore in 1945 addressed school facilities, one of the Indiana legislature’s favorite funding projects. In Bulletin #23, Maurice Stapley authored a chapter on efficient student transportation. Henry Smith began the School of Education’s 100-year relationship to the practice of leadership preparation at the school and district levels in what we are calling the first era of the Department. Smith retired in 1946 and ERA #2 began.
ERA #2: District Leadership Practitioner Preparation and State Policy Influence – 1947-1975
The modern history of School Administration and eventually, Educational Leadership began with Maurice E. Stapley. who joined the faculty of the School in 1946 and from that time served in various key teaching and administrative roles until his retirement in 1977. Professor Stapley also was chosen to become the first Executive Secretary of the Indiana School Boards Association (ISBA), a fledgling group of school board members who felt their purposes could be better served through a statewide association. Under the leadership provided by Professor Stapley from 1949-54, the ISBA not only grew to become effective in influencing the direction of educational legislation in Indiana, but also it became an organizational model for states throughout the country. Although the ISBA today has a number of full-time employees, much of its continuing impact can be credited to solo efforts of Professor Stapley back in the early 1950s. His efforts were recognized nationally, and in the mid-1950s he was under contract with the Midwest Administration Center, University of Chicago, to direct and coordinate research projects and activities related to board member effectiveness. Just as he had a key role in the development of the ISBA, he was a principal contributor to the development of the National School Boards Association.
Professor Stapley’s stature and positions in the state associations allowed him to use those relationships with school boards in placing alumni of Indiana University in public school administrative posts throughout the country. His strength, the envy of many institutions, was being able to match the prospective employee and the employer with credible success. Hundreds of practicing administrators located in school systems across the country are evidence of an achievement rendered by the IU School of Education Professor Stapley received many calls from graduating students to say, "Chief, I have been offered a job."
The historical significance of the Stapley tenure and those who followed him was his emphasis on student development, graduation, and placement. However, just as important to him and his legacy was the IU commitment to assist practitioners in their on-going careers in school district leadership positions. The next person to play a seminal role was Dean Berkley, who found his way to the IU SOE in 1957.
Dean Berkley, joined the IU faculty as an Assistant Professor of Education, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1990. Like Stapley, Dr. Berkley’s lifelong hallmark was public service. From his various administrative roles starting as the Director of College and University Placement, moving on to Director of Field Services and eventually serving as the Director of the Division of Administration and Administrative Studies from 1969 through 1982. In his role, he too worked to help place our graduates and bring university faculty resources to school districts during his IU career. Later Dr. Berkley became an International Toastmaster, and it was not unusual for him to travel two or even three evenings week to speak to school boards, central office staff, and community and industry groups about the state of public education and the core values that should drive schooling. His was a message of hope with great humor. This avocation led him to reach audiences in 49 of the 50 states as well as several foreign countries. His unique contribution to the history of the IU SOE was his ability to succinctly tell the story of public education in ways that inspired educational leaders to bring their communities together. As a department administrator, the faculty found him encouraging and supportive, often offering a simple word of advice. At home, he was a soft-spoken person of few words that were heard and appreciated by many.
Stapley and Berkley were instrumental in bringing colleagues from Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Measurement to aid in their efforts to support practitioners’ needs for improving teaching, learning, and assessment. North Central Accreditation Association under multiple faculty members (e.g., Jon Vaugh, Vern Pace, Don Manlove, Egon Guba, Chris Jung, William Voorhies) and the Middle School Association led by Maurice Glassman at IUPUI are only two examples during this era. In the next era, another joint program with Curriculum and Instruction (C/I) will be highlighted.
In 1965, William Wilkerson joined the Department of School Administration. His distinct contribution to the department besides being its Chairperson was his expertise in state policy making and budgeting. As a doctoral candidate at IU, Dr. Wilkerson, made an earlier contribution to a national study on school finance (with William “Monte” Barr as a mentor), and for the next twenty years his research focused on state funding for school districts, financing school construction, and the funding of public building bond issues. His connections and influence in state policy and budgeting set the stage for Professor Neil Theobald and Robert Toutkoushian to follow him as contributors to the Center for Evaluation and Educational Policy (CEEP). The Center research focus has been historically on education policy, reform, and finance, with a particular concern for issues of equity, access, and use of evidence in policymaking.
School Administration also had some international activity during this period under the leadership of Chris Jung and Lee Stoner who ventured to Pakistan.
It is important to keep in mind all the activities of graduate placement, School Study Councils, and district and state support continued after the Stapley, Berkley, Wilkerson, Jung, Voorhies tenure. It was picked up by Ronald Barnes, Larry Campbell, Betty Poindexter, Chuck Little, and Wally Burke and others.
ERA #3 Practitioner-Scholar focus: 1975-1990
The 1970s was marked with legislation following Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to transform public education. Public educators have always been challenged to accommodate students from different social classes, genders, races, and ethnicities. The Brown decision directly impacted race and to a lesser extent ethnicity. The passage of the Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) Act in 1975 added students with disabilities to the litany of cultural challenges to public education; its purpose was to find ways to include students with various exceptionalities, including gifted students, in appropriate educational programs. Ability had been an issue for educators since the 1920s with the advent of intelligence testing and was accentuated again with this law. And like Brown’s promise that has not yet been fully implemented, it took states many years to provide services for disabled students at a level of compliance so that federal supervision could be relinquished. Indiana made some bold moves during the post-FAPE period to get itself into compliance by funding a database project with faculty from School Administration and the Development Training Center.
During this time the school administration program continued to hold an annual summer workshop, which was a hallmark of the program for 50 years in drawing loyal alums back to campus annually. Faculty also looked forward to these workshops, which addressed substantive topics and included a BBQ and banquet. The workshops were started during the Stapley/Berkley era and lasted until about 2010.
Martha McCarthy was the first tenure-earning female faculty member in the program of School Administration, one of three programs that composed Administrative Studies. Her substantive focus was school law. Within five years, Dr. McCarthy formed the Women’s Network of School Administrators to provide support for the small, but growing, number of female school leaders in the state. The Network always met before the annual school administration workshop to make female graduate students and school leaders feel more welcome at the workshop events, which traditionally were male-dominated. Among the Network’s charter members was Suellen Reed, who subsequently became Indiana’s first female State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The Network was active through 2014.
Gender was a major issue in public education and returned to the forefront in the 2000s with debates over sexual orientation, a challenge to public education that is rooted in the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolution or sexual liberation. This revolution challenged traditional codes of behavior and interpersonal relationships. In a profession that was at one time had a teaching force that was almost 90% female (today women compose some 76% of the teachers). White men made up three-fourths of school administrative positions at the school level until recently. In 2016-17, a federal survey reported that women now comprise 52% of principalships nationally. However, males still dominate the superintendency at 75%. But women have started to move into the top office of school districts. About 25% of school superintendents are women today (up from 13% in 2000), and women occupy 78% of district administrative roles. Women are also leading professional associations like the NEA/AFT, Educational Trust, and University Council of Educational Administration (where Dr. McCarthy became its first female President in 1984 and Terry Astuto, an IU graduate followed her in that role in 1995). Dr. McCarthy, while President, also initiated the first annual UCEA Conference, providing an outlet for graduate students and faculty to present research findings and engage in robust discussions related to leadership preparation.
In 1977, former Dean David Clark returned to Administrative Studies Department and became fully integrated in the Higher Education doctoral program, but also worked with Robert Owens, a recruited new faculty member with whom he shared an interest and background in Organizational Theory and Policy studies. These two nationally respective figures brought alternative thinking organizational design, form, and function influenced by the loosely coupled thinking of Karl Weick in the late 1970s. When George Kuh became the new Chair of an expanded Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department in 1982, the stage was set for a new narrative for the department which now included School Administration, Higher Education and Student Affairs, and History, Philosophy, and Comparative Education.
With the advent of Public Law 94-142, states had to develop state implementation plans that could pass federal compliance standards and guidelines. This created the need for leaders and teachers to design programs and services for students with disabilities that states were mandated to serve. One of the law’s provisions stipulates that students identified with a disability must first be considered to be educated with their age-appropriate peers with support. If those services could not be provided in the regular classroom, the law allowed a continuum of services to be arranged to meet their individual educational needs. The US Department of Education created a funding program, Regular Education Initiative (REI), to integrate students with disabilities in regular education classrooms to the greatest extent possible. IU professor Leonard Burrello applied and received grant funding to support Maine, Indiana, and Colorado to meet this mandate in 1978, and his project was asked to coordinate the 200 funded US DOE projects with a similar mandate. At the same time, the Indiana DOE agreed to add over $350,000 to bring the initiative to scale in Indiana. The National Inservice Network funded 11 graduate students over four years to staff the project, and 9 graduated with their Ed.D. by 1989. Professor Burrello and his colleagues wrote nine other projects from 1981 to 2010, totaling over 8 million dollars from state, federal, and corporate funding, to support an additional 40 doctoral students focusing on the inclusion of students with disabilities.
Supporting the state compliance requirements, IDOE funded Professors Burrello and Tracy to design a data base prototype for fulfilling its federal mandate. They used the UNISYS Corporation Lab (the former Burroughs business machine manufacture)) at the Smith Research Center (along with James Siantz, a former USDOE staff member and graduate student Monte Bowman) to refine the model that the state took over under Mr. Bowman’s leadership for an additional 12 years.
In 1987, with Dean Mehlinger’s support, Professors Burrello and Edward Buffie from Curriculum and Instruction created the Dual Major Doctoral Program at IUPUI (90 credit hours) to provide more access to graduate education in Marion County. The program lasted for two cycles and then another alternative, the Weekend Program, was started in 1994. Students completed two courses on weekends per semester and then carried a 12-hour summer load in a 60-credit hour program,giving students from across the state access to IU SOE faculty.
ERA #4 National Prominence as a Research and Development Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies: 1990-2010
This era starts with the hiring of Colleen Larson from the University of Wisconsin, Barry Bull from the University of Minnesota, who along with Professors Burrello and Carlos Ovandi from IU’s C&I Department joined the Educational Administration programs from 17 universities to study how to transform traditional school administration into what William Foster called the critical practice of leadership defined as an intellectual and moral craft. The Danforth announcement read as follows:
“There is a need to reconceptualize preparation away from simply technical skills and toward a complex view of school leadership as a shared, reflective, intellectual and moral activity. Today's agenda calls for administrators to find larger meaning to their work than technical efficiency. This implies the need to develop professional practice programs designed to prepare educational leaders who are involved with ideas for change and the spirit of change; reflective leaders who think critically about education as it exists while creating new possibilities for schooling.”
The critical questions were “who benefits from public education?; and therefore “who is not benefiting,” and “how did it get that way?” These questions came with Professor Foster who joined the IU SOE in 1994. He assisted the four Danforth Fellows (Burrello, Larson, Bull, and Ovando to create a new doctoral program curriculum focused on leadership as a moral practice taught by Professor Foster, innovation and change led by Professor Burrello, philosophy of education based upon the work of Barry Bull, Advanced Legal Studies led by Professor McCarthy, organizational theory taught by Colleen Larsen, and an Advanced Curriculum Studies course eventually taught by Khuala Murtadha, the second African-American faculty member. By the end of 2000s, the Educational Leadership Program was ranked among the top ten programs nationally.
About this same time, the start-up of a new Ph.D. in Policy Studies was also developed by McCarthy, Bull, and Arnove with strands in each of the three program areas.
William Wilkerson’s connections and influence in state policy and budgeting set the stage for Professor Neil Theobald and Robert Toutkoushian to follow him as contributors to the Center for Evaluation and Educational Policy (CEEP). The current CEEP director, Christopher Lubienski, follows its first and second Directors: Martha McCarthy and Barry Bull both also ELPS faculty members. The third director was Jonathan Plucker from Educational Psychology. The Center research focus has been historically on education policy, reform, and finance, with a particular concern for issues of equity, access, and use of evidence in policymaking.
With a new doctoral program highly competitive with Wisconsin, Texas-Austin, and other research-intensive institutions, IU ELPS searched for outstanding young faculty members. We hired Neil Theobald (1992-93), Gerardo Lopez (1996), William Black (2004), Brendan Maxey (2008), Khaula Murtadha (1996-97), and Suzanne Eckes (2002). The hire of Eckes signifies the program’s legal thrust. Hiring a second tenure-track law faculty member was possible as Professor McCarthy had launched an undergraduate law and ethics course that greatly increased the sections of school law offered in the SOE each semester.
The continuing value of Educational Leadership has been its commitment to practitioner professional growth through accessible programming for graduate study from the late 1980s. Also, the addition of clinical professors has maintained the SOE’s connection to practice, professional placement services, and development. Dean Warren supported partnerships for executive development led by Ronald Barnes, Larry Campbell, and Betty Poindexter. The newest statewide association, the Urban Superintendents Association, began in the early 2000s led by Charles Little and now carried on by Hardy Murphy at IUPUI.
Finally, in this vein of activity for 57 consecutive years. the IU SOE has trained over 85% of local directors of special education, starting in 1967-1975 with Philip R. Jones (the Council for Exceptional Children President at the time), then Professor Burrello for 31 years from 1976-2007, and now Sandi Cole for 17 years from 2008-today. This program was another example built for easy access for Indiana residents to further their professional development and careers during a challenging period in the history of public education across the nation.
Many research-intensive universities contribute to the leadership knowledge base but do not prepare many school leaders. IU is unique among research institutions in that it actually has always made the preparation of local districts’ personnel a high priority in addition to conducting research on leadership and policy studies. It is important to acknowledge the hundreds of Educational Leadership graduates who have gone on to lead and develop schools, districts, state departments, professional associations, research, and development centers in Indiana, nationally, and internationally. We cannot name them all, but they know we are proud of their legacy to make education a fundamental right and privilege leading to lives worth living in a civil society.
ERA #5 Continued Prominence as a Research and Development of Policy Studies with a Legal Thrust: 2011 through 2024
In this era, the program continued to focus on ensuring educational leaders were well versed in research and policy. New faculty hired during this timeframe included Cassandra Guarino (2011-2015), Janet Decker (2012-present), Chad Lochmiller (2015-present), Christopher Lubienski (2016-present), Frank Perrone (2020-present), Jennifer Rippner (2018-present), Michele Moore (2021–present), and Vanessa Miller (2023-present).
During this era, the program ended its long-standing affiliation with the IUPUI Educational Leadership program. Indeed, since 1975, Educational Administration/Leadership had been the most merged program across IUPUI and IUB of all the units in the SOE. Its faculty taught on both campuses, and all faculty meetings included faculty from IUB and IUPUI from 2021-present. Lochmiller served as chair of the ELPS Department.
The program continued to prioritize preparing future superintendents and welcomed a new cohort of Ed.D. students every other fall. Additionally, the M.S. in Educational Leadership program expanded enrollment when it became primarily an online degree. While the program offers in-person instruction to Indiana school districts who partner with the SOE, the majority of M.S. and principal licensure students are from around the United States. The program also began offering two online certificates which allowed it to reach a global audience of educators. The Certificate in Improvement Science and the Certificate in Education Law were established.
Along with the creation of the Education Law Certificate and other initiatives, the program experienced a large growth in education law offerings. In 2012, the SOE partnered with the Maurer School of Law to cross-list SOE education law courses that are part of a JD Minor in Education Policy. There were also joint law initiatives with the Kelley School of Business and the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. In 2013, the SOE established an online Education Law Certificate which is currently the largest certificate program at the SOE. Additionally, the SOE offers a Ph.D. in Policy and Education Law, a M.S. in Educational Leadership with a concentration in Education Law, and an Ed.D./Ph.D. Minor in Education Law. The SOE also hosts the Martha McCarthy Education Law and Policy Institute. The goal of the McCarthy Institute is to increase legal literacy by offering publications, as well as in-person and virtual events. Every other summer, approximately 150 educational leaders, attorneys, policymakers, professors, and others gather for an in-person conference to address current issues in education law and policy. Due to the expansion of education law offerings, 23 sections of law were taught by three full-time law faculty members and adjuncts with a slew of law and doctoral student assistants in 2023-24. The SOE’s undergraduate law and ethics course, which is required for all elementary and secondary teacher education students, has no equal nationally and has been used as a model for other schools of education.
Summary of a Faculty Perspective on the Impact of IU SOE and its Leadership Mission
The IU SOEs legacy lies in its ability as an institution to promote its evolving mission of research. leadership development, teaching, and service. As both Professor McCarthy and a former IUPUI faculty member, Bruce Barnett, offered this observation after reviewing this paper: IU SOE has few peers as a Research Tier I institution due to its lineage – its capacity to build on and use its field-based connections to continue to expand its sphere of influence that attracts and sustains its constituencies, which impact the education of our children and youth. The stature of public education in a contested policy and political environment that seeks to determine who benefits from a publicly supported K-20 system of education is at stake. Educational Leadership is poised to enter a new era where it has the potential to play a critical role in ensuring the health of education in Indiana and beyond.
School Administration/Educational Leadership Faculty in Chronological Order
Henry Lester Smith, Dean
Willliam “Monte” Barr
Maurice Stapley
Dean Berkley
William Day
Christian Jung
William Voorhies
William Wilkerson
William Abel
Russell Abel
Arthur Brill
Richard Gousha
Martha McCarthy
Leonard Burrello
John Harris
Bruce Barnett
Robert Owens
Colleen Larson
Neil Theobald
Willliam Foster
Ronald Barnes, Clinical
Larry Campbell, Clinical
Betty Poindexter, Clinical
Chuck Little, Clinical
Robert Toutkoushian
Gerardo Lopez
Khaula Murtadha
Suzanne Eckes
Barbara Erwin, Clinical
Gary Crow
Monica Byrne-Jimenez
Wally Burke, Clinical
Cassandra Guarino
Janet Decker
Chad Lochmiller
Christopher Lubienski
Frank Perrone
Jennifer Rippner, Clinical
Michele Moore
Vanessa Miller