“…Thus, graduate students in education leadership today enter into a field of university training programs simultaneously seen as a positive stepping stone into the profession, yet also under critique and revision in an effort to make the student’s investment of time and money in their training relevant, rigorous, applied, and research-based. As with the majority of the subdomains within educational leadership research and practice (Oplatka, 2009; Wang & Bowers, 2016; Wang, Bowers, & Fikis, 2017), the history of professional preparation of school leaders in university programs could be termed, as Riehl (2015) has recently termed the research in educational leadership overall, as “mostly unpunctuated disequilibrium.” It is within this context that I aim to discuss the issue of quantitative methods in education leadership preparation programs, especially as they relate to training doctoral students as scholar-practitioners who aim to work as district leader practitioners.…”