Program Mission and Curriculum
EPFP™ is a professional development program for emerging and mid-level leaders in public and private organizations whose professional passion is education. The program’s mission is to prepare these individuals for greater responsibility in creating and implementing sound public policy in education and related fields. EPFP combines regular meetings and activities specific to each program site with events of national scope to provide an enriching experience for more than 200 Fellows each year.
Unlike many professional development programs, such as some of those designed solely for school principals, EPFP does not attempt to develop the purely technical skills for dealing with building-level problems. EPFP seeks to fill the need for programs that are designed to develop build the broader perspectives that are must accompany the use of skills for addressing localized challenges. This need expands as new knowledge about learning, teaching, school organization, and the like grow, and as new policies for schools focus on outcomes, accountability for results, and using “quality” measures and continuous improvement in pursuit of results.
EPFP provides a complement to professional development on school improvement in much the same way that general executive development programs complement technical business training in the private sector. The aim is to help education professionals develop broader intellectual horizons, personal maturity, and conceptual sophistication about leadership, public policy, and professional networking. This development enables participants to work effectively with their counterparts in other sectors of society – including business, government and politics, social services, philanthropy, and the media – to transcend the borders that bound any particular sector. EPFP seeks to produce “graduates” who possess the capacity to contribute to the formulation, implementation, and debate about education policies in a particular state and at the national level.
EPFP is defined by local curricular flexibility within a coherent national structure. Guided by a commitment to a common set of beliefs and concepts, each site develops a program tailored to local policy culture, conditions, and needs. Three program strands – leadership, public policy, and professional networking – organize the learning in EPFP. Each strand contains concepts, materials, and tools that sites can implement in a manner designed to fit local circumstances. Each site offers a different emphasis and mix of activities to implement each program strand.