ISLLC Standards for School Leaders: Policy and Practice
This paper examines the 2008 Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards for School Leaders, exploring their purpose, structure, and practical application. The paper outlines how the six policy standards — covering vision, academic culture, management, community engagement, professional ethics, and cultural sensitivity — guide school administrator training and evaluation. It then considers New Jersey's pilot principal evaluation program, which incorporates the ISLLC standards, and applies each standard to real-world challenges such as low parent involvement, student underachievement, and community poverty and crime. The paper concludes by reflecting on how widespread adoption of the ISLLC standards benefits educational leaders through a common professional vocabulary and an evidence-based framework for improvement.
- Introduction to the ISLLC Standards: Overview of the six 2008 ISLLC policy standards
- ISLLC Standards in New Jersey: New Jersey pilot principal evaluation program details
- Applying ISLLC Standards to Local School Challenges: Standards applied to poverty, safety, and parent involvement
- Personal Impact of ISLLC Standards: Reflection on standards' effect on leadership practice
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper moves logically from broad policy context to specific state-level application to personal reflection, giving it a clear and purposeful structure.
- Each ISLLC standard is grounded in a concrete local problem — poverty, crime, parent disengagement — making abstract policy language tangible and relevant.
- The concluding section connects professional standards to first-person practice, demonstrating how a leader would internalize and apply the framework.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective policy application writing: it introduces a formal framework (the six ISLLC standards), maps each standard to a real-world scenario, and evaluates what actions the standards require of a school leader. Citations are integrated to support each claim rather than clustered, showing source-use as evidence rather than decoration.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an overview of the ISLLC standards' origins and purpose, then narrows to New Jersey's pilot evaluation program. The third section applies multiple standards to local problems — parent involvement, safety, funding inequity, and underachievement — in a problem-solution pattern. The final section shifts to first-person reflection on how the standards affect day-to-day leadership practice. Total length is appropriate for a focused policy application essay at the undergraduate or early graduate level.
Introduction to the ISLLC Standards
The most recent set of Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards for School Leaders were published in 2008 (CCSSO, 2008). The purpose of both the old and new standards was to improve the learning environment for children through leadership, but the new standards differ from the old in their focus on policy. This policy focus reflects the wide acceptance and use of the standards by most states (Derrington and Sharratt, 2008, p. 21) and an abundance of research accumulated over the past few decades that has substantially altered the role of educational leadership (CCSSO, 2008).
More specifically, the ISLLC standards are intended to provide a framework for creating school leadership policy, training program performance standards, lifelong career development goals, and system support (CCSSO, 2008, pp. 13–14). If the six ISLLC policy standards could be reduced to a single word or short phrase, they would be: vision, academic culture, management, community engagement, professional ethics, and cultural sensitivity. These standards are intended to guide school administrator and principal training programs, school officials, and legislative representatives during the process of establishing state standards for educational leadership.
ISLLC Standards in New Jersey
In 2010, New Jersey began a pilot program for principal practice evaluations slated for the 2012–2013 school year (N.J. Department of Education, 2010). The evaluation instrument incorporates the 2008 ISLLC standards for assessing practice and performance criteria. This pilot program is intended to validate a proposed evidence-based program for statewide adoption if it proves to be feasible and effective. Half of the evaluation assesses professional practice performance, including financial management and teacher recruitment and retention. The other half is based on student performance, as evaluated by standardized test scores and school-specific student achievement goals.
References
CCSSO (Council of Chief State School Officers). (2008). Educational Leadership Policy Standards: ISLLC 2008. CCSSO.org. Retrieved October 12, 2012, from
Derrington, M. L., & Sharratt, G. (2008). Evaluation of school principals using Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) standards. American Association of School Administrators Journal of Scholarship and Practice, 5(3), 20–29.
N.J. Department of Education. (2010). EE4NJ Pilot Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). State.NJ.US. Retrieved October 13, 2012, from
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