Educational leadership

About Educational leadership

Educational Leadership: The Practitioner Magazine That Has Spoken to K–12 Educators Since 1943

Educational Leadership — universally shortened to EL by its readers — is the flagship magazine of ASCD, the American professional association for educators, and one of the longest-lived practitioner periodicals in education anywhere in the world. It was launched in 1943, the same year its parent association was created, and its founding issue carried a lead story titled "Teaching in Wartime". More than eighty years later it is still published by the same organisation — now the merged ISTE+ASCD, renamed the International Society for Transforming Education in 2026 — and still describes itself in the words its publisher uses today: a magazine "by educators, for educators", and since 1943 "a trusted source of evidence-based, peer-to-peer guidance and inspiration". The Journals World record for this post carries its long-standing print ISSN, 0013-1784, and names its publisher as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, which is the name ASCD bore for most of the magazine's life. This profile explains what kind of publication EL actually is — a themed practitioner magazine rather than a conventional research journal — and traces the history, structure and editorial model that have kept it at the centre of American K–12 professional reading for eight decades.

Identity: a magazine, deliberately

The first thing to get right about Educational Leadership is its genre. It is catalogued with an ISSN and indexed in the ERIC education database like a journal, and individual articles in it are marked "peer reviewed" in ERIC records; but it does not behave like a scholarly journal, and it does not pretend to. Its articles are written predominantly by practising teachers, principals, district leaders and the researchers who work alongside them; they are commissioned and shaped around a theme announced well in advance; they are edited for readability by a professional editorial staff; and they aim at improving practice on Monday morning rather than at reporting a single study for the permanent record. ASCD's own description of the modern magazine stresses exactly this peer-to-peer character, and an EL staff summary notes that its writers and editors produce "an award-winning publication that reaches hundreds of thousands of K–12 educators and leaders each year". In the print era its volume year followed the American school year: volume 70, for example, ran from September 2012 to May 2013 in eight numbers, with December and January combined in a single issue (volume 70, number 4) and the April 2013 number being number 7 — an eight-issue rhythm aligned to the months when schools are in session. Volume numbering thus doubles as a dating tool: volume 1 is 1943–44, and a citation to "Educational Leadership 64(3)" is a citation to November 2006.

The founding: a new association and its first publication, 1943

Educational Leadership was born from an organisational merger in March 1943. Two national bodies concerned with curriculum and instruction — the National Education Association's Department of Supervisors and Directors of Instruction, and the independent Society for Curriculum Study — combined to create a new department, initially called the Department of Supervision and Curriculum (Development), which in 1945 took the name Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, or ASCD. In its founding year the new body established its first eight affiliates and published the first issue of Educational Leadership, with "Teaching in Wartime" as its lead story — an apt emblem of a magazine founded, in the middle of the Second World War, to help educators think together about practice under strain. Wartime travel restrictions meant ASCD held no conferences from 1943 until its first annual conference in St. Louis in 1946 (theme: "Setting Our Instructional Sights"), so in its earliest years the magazine was not merely one channel among many: for a scattered national membership that could not meet, the periodical was the association in print, carrying its collective thinking from school to school by mail.

The magazine grew up with the association's public positions. ASCD's own historical timeline — the record against which this profile's chronology has been checked — notes a 1955 resolution, prompted by the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, calling for all public schools to be "open and free to the children of all people"; a 1959 resolution recognising equity and cultural diversity as goals of education; and the influence of its 1962 yearbook Perceiving, Behaving, Becoming in popularising the humanist movement in education. The yearbooks were a separate ASCD line, but the readership, the authors and the arguments overlapped heavily with the magazine's, and EL's themed issues became the place where positions the association was forming — on curriculum, supervision, equity and the whole child — were argued out in front of the profession. When ASCD describes its early purpose in its official history — an organisation created out of professional interest in "curriculum planning, teaching methods and practices, and the multiple aspects of improvement in instruction" — it is also, precisely, describing the magazine's editorial scope.

Scope and the themed-issue model

Every issue of Educational Leadership is built around a single theme in teaching, learning or leadership, announced to prospective authors many months ahead with a call for manuscripts. The 2014–15 theme list preserved on ASCD's site is typical of the model: months devoted to topics such as teaching with mobile technology (the May 2015 issue, with a manuscript deadline the previous December), each theme framed as a genuine question — as mobile technologies become ubiquitous in students' lives, "how are schools evolving?" — rather than as a subject heading. Submissions were directed to the editor in chief at ASCD's Alexandria, Virginia headquarters (1703 North Beauregard Street, Alexandria, VA 22311-1714 — the address ERIC records also give for the publisher). Around the themed core, an issue carries standing departments and columns: the editor's own opening column, long published under the "Perspectives" heading; research-briefing columns that translate new studies for practitioners; and shorter practitioner pieces. The digital era has added companion forms rather than replacing the magazine: EL articles are repackaged as "EL Topic Selects" and "EL Essential Reads" — free, downloadable packs of articles curated by the magazine's editors around a single problem of practice for use by school teams — and as the "EL Takeaways" summaries, all distributed through the same ascd.org platform that hosts the current issue.

The content itself can be sampled from the ERIC-indexed record. An April 2013 article, "Creating Strong Principals" by Pamela Mendels and Lee D. Mitgang (volume 70, number 7, pages 22–29), argued that districts, not just preparation programmes, build principal quality — through pipelines into hard-to-staff schools, mentoring for novices, better assessment and planned succession. A November 2006 article by Linda Darling-Hammond and Barnett Berry, "Highly Qualified Teachers for All" (volume 64, number 3, pages 14–20), took on the teacher-quality mandates of the No Child Left Behind era and proposed a national initiative on teacher supply, induction, pay and working conditions. An April 2015 piece by Susan M. Brookhart and Connie M. Moss, "How to Give Professional Feedback", offered a microscope–camera–telescope framework for feedback conversations between teachers and principals. These are characteristic EL artefacts: authored by recognised experts, grounded in research, but written as usable guidance, with the argument carried in prose a busy principal can finish — and the reason the magazine's articles are so widely assigned in education leadership courses and quoted in practitioner literature.

Editorial leadership

For a magazine of this kind, the editor in chief is a genuinely consequential figure, and EL's modern history is associated particularly with Marge Scherer, its long-serving editor in chief, whose reader surveys and editorial stewardship shaped the magazine across the 2000s and early 2010s. When Scherer retired in the autumn of 2016, she was succeeded by Anthony Rebora, who introduced himself in the February 2017 "Perspectives" column as the magazine's new editor in chief: he had spent sixteen years as an editor at Education Week, most recently covering teaching issues and working with educator-writers, and had been the founding editor of the Education Week Teacher site. Rebora wrote that he was joining "a publication that is so influential in K–12 education and so committed to both practitioner voice and editorial quality" — the two commitments that define the magazine's editorial contract with its readers. Rebora later rose to become chief content officer of the combined ASCD+ISTE organisation, overseeing content development across books, blogs, quick reference guides, video, podcasts and Educational Leadership itself. The name of the magazine's current editor in chief could not be verified from the official pages consulted for this profile, and is therefore left unstated here rather than guessed; what those pages do establish is continuity of the editorial operation itself, with named EL editors curating its article collections today.

The publisher's transformations: ASCD, ISTE+ASCD, and a new name

The magazine's institutional home has changed its name twice since 2023, and readers tracing imprints should know the sequence. ASCD stood alone from 1943 until 2023, when ASCD and ISTE — the International Society for Technology in Education — merged to create a combined organisation known, transitionally, as ISTE+ASCD, described by the partners as the largest innovation-focused education non-profit worldwide, serving over a million educators in every US state and over 100 countries. The combined organisation's own "Our Story" page records that the 1943 founding of ASCD and the first issue of Educational Leadership stand at the head of its shared timeline — the magazine is presented, that is, as a founding artefact of the merged body, not a legacy product being wound down. Membership access follows the merger: ISTE+ASCD members can read every Educational Leadership article without limits through the organisation's platform. In June 2026 the organisation announced that ISTE+ASCD would take the permanent name International Society for Transforming Education, with membership, certifications, standards, professional learning and publications — EL among them — continuing without interruption. A Journals World record that names the publisher "Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development" is therefore historically accurate for the magazine's first eighty years; the current publisher of record is the successor organisation under its successive names.

How the magazine is made, and what its readers told it

The themed model places unusual weight on planning: themes and manuscript deadlines are published a full cycle ahead — the 2014–15 list, for instance, set a 3 November 2014 deadline for one 2015 theme and a 1 December 2014 deadline for the May 2015 mobile technology issue — because the magazine must persuade busy practitioners to write, on speculation, for an issue that will appear half a year later. The bargain it offers authors is editorial rather than financial or bibliometric: professional editing of a kind university journals rarely provide, and an audience of peers. That the audience values the result is documented in the magazine's own reader research. In "How Does EL Measure Up?", editor in chief Marge Scherer reported a reader survey in which subscribers praised the magazine for providing up-to-date information and for being trustworthy, readable, attractive, relevant and open to multiple viewpoints; more than 88 per cent of respondents subscribed to at least one competing education publication — ASCD SmartBrief, Education Week, Edutopia and Phi Delta Kappan were named — yet more than three-quarters rated EL at least somewhat better than the other education publications they read, and 40 per cent rated it much better. Readers asked, characteristically, for more international perspectives, more divergent viewpoints and more research grounding — requests the magazine's themed, multi-author format is structurally designed to answer, since a single issue can stage several positions on one question side by side.

The magazine has also served as the print front door for the association's larger campaigns. Its December 2012–January 2013 issue (volume 70, number 4) carried "How ASCD Supports the Common Core", describing how, with a $3 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ASCD ran statewide summits in Arkansas, Colorado, North Carolina and Utah, partnered with four state education agencies, and built the free EduCore digital tool of evidence-based strategies and videos to help teachers move to the new standards in mathematics and English language arts. The episode is characteristic: a policy shift arrives, the association mobilises programmes around it, and Educational Leadership explains the work to the profession in its own pages. In the merged organisation's digital environment the same content operation now extends the magazine rather than merely archiving it: EL articles are reissued as curated "Topic Selects" and "Essential Reads" packs for school teams, summarised in "EL Takeaways", and read without limits by members — the print-era themed issue re-expressed as a set of team-learning resources, under the same editorial brand that has been attached to the association's thinking since "Teaching in Wartime" led the first issue in 1943.

The magazine's horizon was never only American. ASCD's own timeline records that in 1970 it sponsored the first meeting of the World Council of Curriculum and Instruction in Pacific Grove, California, with educators from 70 countries, and that in 1983 it chartered its first international affiliate, in Germany — the organisational expression of a readership and authorship that the magazine had been building through its international coverage and its whole-child philosophy. That philosophy, which ASCD's retrospective history describes as a core set of values and beliefs in support of the whole child, became one of the association's signature frameworks in the 2000s and a recurring EL theme: the proposition that curriculum and leadership questions cannot be separated from children's health, safety, engagement and support. The 1946 first annual conference, the multilingual professional world the association convened by 1970, and the digital community the merged ISTE+ASCD now serves in over 100 countries are points on one line, and the magazine has been the line's most durable artefact — the publication a member in 1950, 1990 or 2025 would name first if asked what the association actually sends them.

Indexing, metrics and how to cite it honestly

Educational Leadership is indexed in ERIC, the education database of the US Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, where its articles carry EJ accession numbers and ISSN 0013-1784, and it is covered by the standard education abstracting services used by academic libraries. It does not have a Journal Impact Factor and should never be assigned one: it is a practitioner magazine, and bibliometric products built for research journals do not describe its influence, which runs instead through professional reading, course adoption, association distribution and the republication of its pieces in ASCD collections. No article processing charge applies in the scholarly sense — authors write for the magazine under its "Write for EL" guidelines, responding to announced themes, and are edited by staff rather than charged for publication. For citation purposes the durable facts are these: title Educational Leadership — a registered mark of the association, which styles it Educational Leadership® in its own historical materials — ISSN 0013-1784, publisher ASCD (now within the International Society for Transforming Education), continuous publication since 1943, volume years aligned to the school year. A complete reference therefore looks like this in the wild: Darling-Hammond, L., & Berry, B. (2006). Highly qualified teachers for all. Educational Leadership, 64(3), 14–20 — author, issue theme context, volume, number and pages all recoverable from the ERIC record. Anyone who needs a single sentence of orientation can use the publisher's own: since 1943, Educational Leadership has been a trusted source of evidence-based, peer-to-peer guidance and inspiration for the educators who run America's classrooms and schools — a claim that, unusually for a publisher's slogan, the magazine's eighty-year unbroken run goes a long way toward justifying.

Sources consulted for this profile are listed in the accompanying sources file. Where a fact could not be verified from a reliable source — for example, the name of the magazine's present-day editor in chief — it has been left unstated rather than estimated.