Ed Leadership vs. Administrative Degree: What I Learned Choosing Between Them As A Teacher
The vending machine hummed behind me, my lukewarm pumpkin spice latte sweating through its paper cup, and I stared at my laptop screen between back-to-back parent conferences. I’d been teaching 4th grade for six years, burnt out on writing weekly lesson plans and covering lunch duty when someone called out sick, but I still loved working with kids. I was trying to pick a master’s program that would get me out of the full-time classroom but not take me so far away from education that I lost the part I cared about. Next to me, my colleague Lila, who’d just wrapped up her own master’s, dropped her conference folder on the table and nodded at my screen. “Still stuck between ed leadership and admin?” she asked. I nodded. Even my principal couldn’t give me a straight answer on what the actual difference was, beyond one sounding more “instructional” than the other.
I decided to shadow two people at my school to see for myself. First, I spent a day with Mr. Hale, our school business manager, who has a pure administrative degree. A half-eaten glazed donut from the previous night’s PTA meeting sat on his cluttered desk as he welcomed me. I showed up at 7:30 a.m. expecting to sit in on a teacher meeting, and instead we spent the first hour going over the next year’s bus route budget, cutting 10 minutes from one overcrowded route to save the district $12,000 a year. By 9 a.m. he was meeting with the maintenance crew to talk about replacing the leaky gym roof, negotiating with a vendor to get a 10% discount on new playground mulch. At 11, he spent 45 minutes on the phone with a parent walking them through fixing their child’s rejected free and reduced lunch application. By the end of the day, he told me he’d barely interacted with any kids, and that was exactly how he liked it. “I got an admin degree because I like fixing the things that let teachers teach,” he said. “My degree was all about school law, finance, human resources, operations. I don’t need to know how to teach reading to make sure the school has enough reading books for everyone.”
The next week I shadowed Ms. Ruiz, our assistant principal, who has an educational leadership degree. We started the day in a 2nd grade classroom, where she sat in the back observing a first-year teacher who was struggling with transitions between activities. After class, we sat in the hallway on plastic child-sized chairs for 20 minutes talking through small adjustments to her schedule, and Ms. Ruiz offered to come in and model a transition for her the next week. Then we met with a group of three teachers to revise the school’s new dyslexia screening plan, adjusting it to cut down on the time kids spent out of class for testing. By the middle of the day, she sat with a 5th grader who’d been having panic attacks before state tests, talking through a simple breathing routine and connecting him with the school counselor for weekly check-ins. “My degree was almost all about instruction and student support,” she told me over lunch in the teacher’s lounge. “I took classes on curriculum design, teacher coaching, how to adjust supports for kids with different needs. I still spend three days a week in classrooms, not behind a desk.”
That’s when I realized the biggest difference isn’t just job titles—it’s what the degree trains you to do, and what part of school you care about most. For teachers looking to move up, or even parents curious about how school leadership works, that difference matters on a daily basis. When parents reach out to the office wondering why it took two weeks to get a reply about their child’s schedule change, that’s often because that request lands on the admin team, who’re juggling 500 schedule changes and a district budget audit that same week. When they’re wondering why the school is changing its reading curriculum, that’s the ed leadership team, who’ve been training teachers on the new approach for months.
For anyone trying to choose between the two, the concrete questions I tell my teacher friends to ask themselves are simple. First, when you leave a staff meeting, what are you mad about? If you’re frustrated that the budget cut the art supply budget and the new roof is eating up all the extra money, that’s a sign you’d enjoy administrative work, where you get to fix those big systems problems. If you’re mad that the new math curriculum doesn’t work for kids who learn differently, that’s a sign ed leadership is a better fit. Second, how do you prefer to spend your time? If you get energy from solving problems on a spreadsheet or negotiating with vendors, you’ll probably like an admin role. If you get energy from talking to teachers and kids about what they need, ed leadership is the way to go.
I ended up picking an ed leadership degree, and now I work as an instructional coach at a different elementary school. I get to work with teachers to adjust their lessons, pull small groups of kids for reading support, and I don’t have to write 25 lesson plans a week anymore. It works for me. Lila, the colleague I was talking to that day in the teacher’s lounge, picked an administrative degree, and now she works as a district operations coordinator. She tells me she loves not having to handle last-minute parent emergencies, and she gets to plan new school building projects that help hundreds of kids. Neither of us made the wrong choice. It’s just that we cared about different parts of running a school, and we picked the degree that fit what we wanted to show up for every day. There’s no one right path, just the one that fits what you care about.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Ed Leadership vs