Chapter 4: Preparing Teacher Evaluators tn Complex Environments: The Influence of Policy on Academic Drift in Educational Leadership Preparation

Like many states, Indiana has recently revised its focus on evaluating teacher performance, and in 2011, the Indiana General Assembly passed Public Law 90 (PL-90), significantly altering the state’s teacher evaluation policy. Framed within the literatures on academic drift in professional training programs in higher education and nonsystem actors in policy implementation, this chapter explores how educational leadership faculty at four Indiana universities perceived the changes to requirements for teacher evaluation and to what extent they altered their curricula for future school leaders in response to the law. These faculty members are independent from the state’s K–12 education system and neither created nor will implement teacher evaluation policy, but they are key interpreters of this policy for future school leaders. Whereas academic drift has been studied in fields that tend to be influenced by traditional market forces (Harwood, 2010), we apply the concept to K–12 educational leadership, thus examining a field that is strongly influenced by public policy. Faculty must account for both the labor market for administrators (e.g., What knowledge and skills do employers desire?) and the overall education policy context (e.g., What knowledge and skills are necessary to understand and comply with policy requirements?). There are often misalignments among public education policies, the needs of diverse districts, and research-based “best practices” in leadership, and faculty must balance these sometimes conflicting demands. This chapter addresses gaps in the respective literatures on faculty as nonsystem actors in K–12 education and policy influences on academic drift in a U.S. context.