Dr. Shelby Cosner joined colleagues Drs. David DeMatthews and Dr. Kimberly Clarida, both of UT Austin, to address issues of educational leadership pipeline development as members of a Pre-Conference Panel ahead of the Annual Meeting of AACTE in Indianapolis on Thursday, February 23rd, 2023. Specifically, the panel members considered “strategies and insights to bolster the educational leadership pipeline for People of Color to support districts and schools that have been destabilized by high rates of teacher, principal and superintendent turnover,” according to the program. Cosner’s presentation, “Collaboration between a research/development center (CUEL) and a principal preparation program (Ed.D.) in UIC’s College of Education,” considered “the importance of attending to the ongoing diversification of program participants to ensure that a program is contributing to a racially diverse principal pipeline for its partner school district.” In the case of UIC’s EdD principal preparation program, close partnership with the Center for Urban Education Leadership (CUEL) has generated program data around racialized patterns of recruitment and candidate selection, leading to redesigns of recruitment, application, and selection processes. These internal efforts, in turn, have improved the UIC EdD program’s capacity to collaborate with its partner district, the Chicago Public Schools, on the design of better diversified and robust school leader pipeline strategies. Other issues considered by the panel included current trends in principal and superintendent demographics, and the types of organizational work conditions that district and school leaders can foster to support the recruitment, induction, and retention of teachers of color.
