The Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium: A standards-based approach to strengthening educational leadership

In this article, we describe the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC), as well as its intellectual ground and reform efforts. We begin by examining the foundations that provide shape to the ISLLC standards. We review new visions of learning and teaching, changing conceptions of organizations, and reconfigured relationships between schools and their communities. We also analyze the evolving context of schooling, focusing on movements underway in the economic, social, and political domains of the education industry. The middle part of the article reviews the picture of educational leadership that informs the work of the consortium. In the final section, we describe the principles and core tenets that provide the architecture for the standards and outline the standards themselves. We also chronicle how the ISLLC standards are being used to strengthen educational leadership throughout the United States. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.