Ed Leadership vs Administration Degree: What Teachers (and Parents) Should Know
Last month, I was folding my 10th grade biology lesson plans in the school teacher lounge, waiting for the dented old coffee pot to finish brewing, when Mia plopped down across from me. She student-taught with me three years ago, now she’s teaching 9th grade special ed, and her advising sheet was crumpled in one hand, a half-eaten granola bar in the other. The vending machine by the door had just eaten my dollar, the air smelled like burnt microwave popcorn from the kid who forgot his snack after lunch, and she pushed the crumpled sheet toward me. “I can’t tell which one I’m supposed to pick,” she said. “Ed leadership or admin degree. My advisor says they’re basically the same. But everyone I ask says something different.”
I laughed because I’d been there. I got my administration degree back in 2012, when I thought I wanted to be a principal. My college roommate Lila got her ed leadership degree the same year, and at the time, I thought she’d just picked a program with a fancier name. It took us both working full time in school leadership for five years to see how different the two actually are.
All but two of my admin degree classes focused on operations. I learned how to balance a school’s annual budget, how to write discipline policies that aligned with state union rules, how to process open records requests, how to conduct teacher evaluations that would hold up in court if someone challenged them. My internship was with the district’s HR director, and most days I spent sorting through staffing paperwork and sitting in on hearings for teachers who’d violated district policy. When I got my first job as assistant principal, that training was exactly what I needed. I handled all the scheduling, all the bus route coordination, all the compliance check-ins for state testing. That work matters—if no one does that, the building can’t run. But it was nothing like what I thought I’d be doing when I signed up. I wanted to change how we supported struggling kids, but I spent 90% of my day on paperwork and schedule conflicts.
Lila’s ed leadership program couldn’t have been more different. Half her classes were on curriculum design, cultural competency for instruction, how to mentor new teachers, how to adjust literacy programs to fit the needs of multilingual learners. Her internship wasn’t at the district office—she designed a new after-school reading program for her middle school, led a team of four teachers to roll it out, and presented their results to the school board at the end of the year. She never became a principal, and she never wanted to. Today she’s the K-8 director of curriculum for her district, and she spends most of her time co-planning lessons with new teachers and updating reading and math programs to better fit student needs. The only budgets she touches are the curriculum budgets, and she never has to handle staffing disputes or bus schedules.
This isn’t just a question for teachers trying to pick a grad program, either. A couple of years ago, when my oldest kid’s elementary school was hiring a new principal, the PTA put together a list of questions for all the candidates, and one of the first things we asked was what their graduate degree focused on. We’d had two principals in three years before that: one had an admin degree, and every conversation started and ended with test score targets and budget cuts. The other was an interim who had an ed leadership background, and she spent her six months here rearranging the special ed pull-out schedule to give kids more time in the general education classroom, and training teachers how to de-escalate kid conflict instead of just handing out detentions. That difference isn’t a hard rule, of course—people can do whatever they want with any degree—but more often than not, the training you get shapes what you prioritize.
I pushed the advising sheet back to Mia, and gave her three concrete things to do before she picked. First, pull up the full course catalog for each program, and count how many classes are about operations, policy, and compliance versus how many are about instruction, curriculum, and student support. Some universities swap the names, so the title on the degree doesn’t tell you half as much as what you’ll actually study. Second, email the program coordinator and ask directly: what percentage of your graduates end up in building-level admin roles (principal, assistant principal) versus roles like curriculum director, instructional coach, or district program coordinator? That gives you a clear idea of what the program is designed for. Third, ask yourself what specific problem you want to fix when you get this degree. If you’re sick of how your school’s schedule messes with the school day and you want to rework the whole operations of the building, lean into the admin degree. If you’re frustrated that the curriculum your district bought doesn’t work for half your kids and you want to change how teaching actually happens in classrooms, lean into ed leadership.
Mia nodded, and said that made sense. She’d been frustrated for a year that her district requires co-teaching for special ed students, but doesn’t train general ed teachers how to actually do it. Half her time is spent fixing lesson plans that don’t accommodate her kids, and she wants to build a district-wide training program for new co-teachers. That’s not something she needs admin training for, so ed leadership fits her goal better than admin.
I told her that’s the right call for her, but it’s okay if it doesn’t work out exactly how she plans. I quit my assistant principal job after three years and came back to the classroom, because I missed working directly with kids more than I liked the pay raise and the title. Lila tried being a principal for a year once, just to see, and realized she hated spending all day on bus routes and budget meetings, so she went back to curriculum work a year later. No degree locks you into one path, but picking the one that aligns with what you actually want to do saves you a lot of extra classes you don’t need.
Mia stuffed the advising sheet back into her bag, grabbed a pack of crackers from her tote, and headed out for parent-teacher conferences. She hasn’t heard back from her top choice program yet, and she’s still juggling grad school applications with her full-time job and her 4-year-old’s soccer practice on Saturdays. For now, she’s just glad she doesn’t have to guess what the difference is anymore.
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