Ed Leadership vs Educational Administration Degree: Key Differences Teachers and Parents Should Understand
Last month, I was folding orange and red construction paper for our elementary school’s fall festival craft station at 3:20 pm, the teacher’s lounge still smelling like burnt popcorn from the PTA meeting that afternoon, when my former mentor Rita dropped her bag next to me. Rita’s an assistant superintendent now, so she spends most of her days in the district office, but she still stops by our building once a week to grab coffee and say hi. She pulled a stack of grad program recommendation requests out of her bag and sighed, saying half the teachers applying had asked her the same question: what’s the actual difference between an ed leadership degree and an educational administration degree?
That question hit close to home, because five years ago I was sitting right where those teachers are, flipping through grad program websites that listed the same vague course titles, trying to figure out which one would get me where I wanted to go. I’d been teaching 4th grade for four years, I loved working with kids, but I wanted to do more to support the new teachers who were drowning under lesson planning and testing requirements. My friend Mia, who taught 3rd grade down the hall, was also looking at grad programs, but she was frustrated with how the district’s one-size-fits-all scheduling cut 20 minutes of recess out of every day for extra test prep, and she wanted to change that at the building level.
I ended up picking an ed leadership degree, Mia went with educational administration. Today I’m an instructional coach at our school, and Mia’s the principal at a new elementary school 20 minutes away. That difference in path lines up almost exactly with the core difference between the two degrees that no one tells you about when you’re browsing program websites.
My ed leadership degree focused almost entirely on instruction and student support. I took classes on curriculum design, how to coach new teachers through classroom management, how to adjust lessons for kids with different learning needs, how to work with families to support student mental health. Last Tuesday, for example, my day looked like this: I co-taught a narrative writing lesson in a 2nd grade classroom, sat with the 3rd grade team to adjust their reading block so kids get more small-group time, met with a first year teacher to walk through a behavior plan for a student with autism, and had a 20 minute phone call with a parent whose kid was struggling with math anxiety. That’s the work ed leadership prepares you for: it’s still rooted in classrooms and kids, just beyond your own four walls.
Mia’s work, and her educational administration degree, is focused on operations and systems. Her classes covered school law, budgeting, district policy, facilities management, how to manage staff evaluations and compliance reporting. Last Tuesday, her day was nothing like mine: she spent three hours in a meeting with the transportation department negotiating a bus route change that cut 10 minutes off every kid’s commute, approved 14 field trip forms, mediated a conflict between two sets of parents over a birthday party that got out of hand on the playground, signed off on the cafeteria’s fall produce order, and walked through the building to check for leaky faucets after last weekend’s rain.
For teachers thinking about which degree to pick, there are two easy questions you can ask yourself that don’t require digging through 100 course catalogs. First: what do you spend your free period talking about with other teachers? If you’re usually asking about what curriculum works for which kids, or helping a new teacher rearrange their classroom library, or brainstorming how to help a struggling student, ed leadership is almost certainly a better fit. If you’re usually talking about how the school schedule could be better, or how to fix the broken vending machine in the teacher’s lounge, or how to reorganize the book fair to make more money for the PTA, you’d probably enjoy the work an admin degree prepares you for. The second question is: do you want to spend most of your day in classrooms, or most of your day in meetings? That alone narrows it down more than any program description will.
For parents, this distinction matters more than you might think. I learned that first hand last month, when a parent came to me upset that she’d never seen our principal at school events, and thought he didn’t care about the kids. Our principal has an educational administration degree, and right now he’s leading the district’s project to redo all the special education transportation routes, which requires three days of meetings a week at the board office. It’s not that he doesn’t care about the fall festival or the parent-teacher nights; that operational work is what gets kids with disabilities to school on time every day, which is a way bigger impact for a lot of families. It’s helpful to remember that neither degree produces a “better” school leader, they just produce different leaders. If you want your kid’s school to update its reading curriculum, a principal with an ed leadership background will likely be more involved in that process. If you need the school to fix the playground equipment or sort out a bus route issue, an admin-trained principal is usually going to move through that process faster.
After Rita and I talked through the two applications on the table, Sarah the second-year teacher came in to pick up her letter of rec. She wants to be an instructional coach in five years, so we pointed her toward the ed leadership program that worked for me. Mike the 10-year teacher, who wants to be a principal and bring full-length recess back to his building, is going to apply to the admin program Mia went to. I still love my job: I get to be in classrooms with kids every week, which is why I became a teacher in the first place, and I don’t envy Mia the 2 a.m. emails about possible snow days or the annual fight over budget cuts. But she told me last week over dinner that she wouldn’t trade her job for anything; she gets to change the rules for 500 kids instead of just the 20 or so I work with each cycle. There’s no wrong answer, just the one that fits what you want to do. For the rest of us, it just helps to know the difference, so you don’t wonder why your kid’s principal is never at the bake sale, or why your instructional coach knows exactly how to help your kid through their latest reading struggle.
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