The Israeli Ministry of Education has recently initiated a program of reform in the training of public school principals that aims to expand state licensing regulations for educational leaders. This article suggests that the principals' training and licensing (PTL) reform should be linked to the attempt by Israeli policy makers to institutionalize evaluative neoliberal governance in the Israeli education system. To support this suggestion, the article traces the historical development of PTL policies in Israel to set the new centralized reform in its neoliberal context, and links it to the rise of "new professionalism" in Israeli educational administration. The innovative framework presented here links educational governance and PTL policies together to facilitate a systematic analysis of licensing regulation policies and reforms in other national contexts.