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Feature, Peabody Reflector

To Ed.D. or not?

topics: Education Reform, Professional Education, Higher Education

Fall 2006, Ray Waddle, Peabody Reflector

That is the question posed as the worthiness of the education doctorate is debated due to a recent report that calls for abolishing the degree.

Joan Dabrowski, a literacy coach in the Cambridge (Mass.) public schools, flies 1,100 miles nearly every weekend to complete her Ed.D. at Peabody. Despite the airport hassles and intense Friday-Saturday classroom time in faraway Nashville, her pursuit is practical. A Peabody Ed.D., one of the nation’s most respected doctorate programs in education, positions her for career advancement, and makes her a better educator right now.

“I can apply what I learn the very next week,” says Dabrowski, an education professional for 15 years. “We are using our studies to inform our day-to-day work.”

At Peabody it sounds like all is well with the Ed.D.

But nationally the tune is distinctly discordant.

The nationwide fate of Ed.D. degrees, long a subject of fretful debate about its worthiness as a tool for producing leaders in education, is enduring a new round of scrutiny, prodding, and outright rejection.

The current conversation—or is it revolutionary foment?—was triggered by a provocative four-year study, released in 2005 and written by a denizen of the education elite, Arthur Levine, who at the time was president of Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York. (Levine left Teachers College this summer to become president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, N.J., an organization that awards fellowships and works to foster improvements in American schools.)

In an 86-page report called “Educating School Leaders,” Levine bluntly indicts the overall quality of university degree programs that prepare education leaders. He argues that they fall short of meeting the rising demand for leaders capable of helping schools raise student achievement in an era of federal No Child Left Behind mandates. That demand will only intensify, he says: The U.S. will need to replace more than 40 percent of principals and superintendents who are expected to leave their jobs in the next decade.

These degree programs, he declares, range from “inadequate to appalling.” They teach courses irrelevant to the needs of school administrators in an era of tumultuous change. They pursue a “race to the bottom” by lowering standards to lure new students, he charges.

And, in collusion with state officials and local school systems, they feed a suspect economy that rewards salary bumps to teachers and administrators for getting fast-track doctorates whether the degree is rigorous and useful or not. Despite all this, he says, many schools and their leaders “continue to deny problems and resist improvement.”

“The question is whether education schools and their leadership programs will attempt reforms necessary to curb current trends,” he says.

Surveying hundreds of programs of education leadership and providing 28 in-depth case studies, Levine singles out just two universities for praise. One is the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The other is Peabody College.

“The strengths of Peabody include the quality of students, the strong credentials of the faculty, and the attitude there that the Ed.D. should be a practical degree for practitioners,” Levine said in an interview this summer.

“But it’s still a doctorate.”

Levine thinks rising administrators and would-be leaders don’t need a doctorate in today’s classroom climate of results-based expectations. He argues for the elimination of Ed.D. degrees altogether, one of several recommendations calculated to rattle the establishment and improve the embattled landscape of pragmatic leadership.

Instead, he proposes that Ed.D. degrees be replaced by what he calls a Master of Educational Administration (M.E.A.), something like a Master of Business Administration, focusing on real-life management skills for working educators. He says the Ph.D. in education leadership should be clearly defined as a research degree for future scholars only. His complaint: too many Ph.D. programs today are an unsatisfactory hybrid that attract both researchers and administrators and confuse the job market.

He also calls on states and school systems to stop giving raises to educators for collecting graduate degrees, and instead reward raises based on skill and competence.

News of Levine’s prognostications reached the Peabody campus, where reaction has been a mix of fascination, skepticism, guarded agreement (up to a point), and a good dose of historical perspective.

“The field has been in turmoil for 15 years now; his is just the latest salvo in a series of calls for national reform,” says Joseph Murphy, professor of education in Peabody’s Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations.

“If there’s anything wrong with his findings, it’s that he’s two or three years behind the curve, because many programs have begun to change.”

Indeed, Peabody itself overhauled its Ed.D. program some years before Levine went public with his plea for improving the rules of the game in education leadership.

The Ed.D. program at Peabody, under the direction of James Guthrie, raised its admission standards, lowered the number of students who can enter, and intensified its practice-based orientation.

At the same time, Guthrie and Peabody decisively clarified the Ph.D. program, enhancing its identity as a research-based track for scholars, not an administration degree.

“Despite Levine’s lament and a long list of polemics by others, historic conditions and present-day political and economic realities render it almost impossible to concentrate on Ed.D. reforms alone,” Guthrie, professor of public policy and education, wrote recently.

“The Doctor of Education degree and the Doctor of Philosophy in education degree are inexorably related. Neither the Ed.D. nor Ph.D. in education will be a legitimate, widely accepted, advanced degree until the purposes they serve are clear and separate, and the standards accompanying their pursuit are elevated. The Ed.D. will not get better until education schools upgrade the Ph.D. as well.”

Peabody’s Ed.D. is geared for working professionals eager to deepen their leadership skills, civic influence and grasp of institutional life. With one track for pre-K–12 and one for higher education, the Ed.D. is a 36-month, weekend-based program that involves no dissertation writing. Instead, students complete a hands-on capstone project, tackling a specific education issue or problem and bringing their methods and experiences to bear on assessing and solving it.

“Degrees should prepare you for the work you’re going to do,” Murphy says.

Peabody’s restructuring of its Ed.D. is evidently a rarity, going against the national grain. In the larger picture, the Ed.D.—its definition, its usefulness, in some places its weak standards—is still a foggy creature of controversy, ensnared in university politics, state credentialing expectations, and the human desire for the cachet of possessing a “doctorate.”

“I think the Ed.D. has lost credibility because there are schools that compromise it,” says Sharon Weiner, director of the Peabody Library and an Ed.D. student at Peabody.

“Universities are becoming so market-driven that they have to do what the customers want, and that has diluted the degree. But it can still have value. I have found the Peabody program invaluable.”

Says student Dabrowski: “The Ed.D. is all over the map. It means different things depending on where you graduated.”

That view is shared by Metropolitan Nashville Public School’s director, Pedro Garcia, who said the value of most Ed.D. programs isn’t automatically clear today, and neither is its meaning. If it’s not a practical degree, he has no use for it. (Garcia, who has an Ed.D. from University of Southern California, specifically praised Peabody’s Ed.D. for its practice-oriented philosophy.)

“In general, I don’t know the difference between the Ed.D. and the Ph.D. these days,” Garcia says. “The most important thing is what they learn, and how practical it is. That’s the reality. With some degrees, the graduates have book knowledge but they aren’t practitioners. If I am looking at three candidates for a job, and one has a Ph.D., and one an Ed.D. and the third has neither degree, I don’t think one or the other is automatically the strongest. What I want to know is, Can they interpret data, use data, teach reading, care for kids? Can they supervise and evaluate? Can they improve schools based on results?”

The nagging questions and perceptions about Ed.D. degrees have allowed Levine’s criticisms to get an unusually wide hearing in the past year.

“Anything that happens in education takes a long time to unfold, but I think he’s had remarkable influence so far,” says Diana Dean, an assistant higher education professor at Illinois State University.

Since the report’s release in spring 2005, Dean has done an evaluation study of its impact. (Her study was funded by the same organization that sponsored Levine’s study, the Education Schools Project, based on various foundation grants.) She found Levine’s accusations and recommendations being debated nationwide at various conferences, education associations, state offices, and boards of higher education. Some are doing assessments to see if Levine’s findings apply in their state. Others are scrutinizing the rigor of their own Ed.D. degrees or using the debate to re-ignite momentum for reform that existed before Levine made his study.

None, though, has followed through by eliminating the Ed.D. The reason is universally acknowledged: Too many universities are invested in their Ed.D. programs to scrap them, and there’s too strong an economy between university degree programs and a bureaucratic credentialing industry that rewards educators for pursuing such degrees.

“The Ed.D. is an established credential, and if a certain percentage of people have their doctorate, you don’t want to be the first to go without it,” Dean says.

Levine himself, meanwhile, sounds pleased that the ruckus has triggered some vigorous conversation. It’s a sign of unease with the status quo, a possible new opening for reform, he suggests.

“The report has produced a conversation larger than I imagined,” he says. “The recommendation to eliminate the Ed.D. was so radical it made the other recommendations seem more reasonable.”

He said a report like his needs to take four steps to have serious impact. There should be 1) media coverage for it, 2) invitations asking him to speak to influential leadership groups, 3) state or local reassessments of current practices, and 4) real-world implementation of the proposals.

“I’ve gotten the first three,” he says. “I won’t get the fourth.”

A repeated criticism of Levine’s report is that his reforms don’t realistically address how to dismantle decades of cultural entrenchment that reinforce low Ed.D. standards and an overabundance of such programs. A report in the Chronicle of Higher Education last September cited a critic who said the creation of a master’s degree in educational administration to replace the Ed.D. won’t stop colleges from offering easy courses to educators who need the degree in order to get their raises.

“We need to get school districts to change their reward system,” E. Joseph Schneider of the National Policy Board for Educational Administration told the Chronicle.

Levine suggests it will take all players working together—schools, higher education, government— to change the market for graduate degrees. He predicts change will come, if not from the heroic efforts of individuals and groups, then by the sheer (if glacial) force of a market shift itself over the long haul.

“The market will resist change in the short term, but cause change in the long term,” he says.

The upshot: In the future, the changing needs of schools will require more CEO-style management skills from leaders, making conventional graduate education irrelevant. He sees a trend already: some school districts, notably large inner city systems, are hiring leaders with non-education backgrounds. They are CEOs or lawyers—people who know how to run large organizations and achieve specific outcomes, he says.

“The changes happening in schools are of such depth and such rapidity that it’s all shocking for baby boomers and gen-Xers and everyone else,” he says.

“We’ve seen a revolution in schooling. We’ve moved from a focus on the processes of teaching to a focus on outcomes of learning. Industrial cultures care about process, post-industrial cultures care about outcome. The old question was, How well can Miss Jones teach? The new bottom line question is, What improves student achievement? In the future, the degree for preparing leaders might not be called the M.E.A., but it won’t be called a doctorate.”

At Peabody, both professors Guthrie and Murphy dispute the existence of any serious trend of non-education managers moving into school leadership positions. Such hirings have occurred occasionally, but they’re rare, nothing to suggest an emerging model for future leadership in the field.

But everyone acknowledges the learning landscape has absorbed tumult and change in a globalized economy: Education matters for everyone now, not just elites, Guthrie says.

“Most modern-day parents recognize this changed condition, and they have expressed a political preference for better schools,” Guthrie writes in an article commissioned by the University Council for Educational Administration.

“Policy officials have responded, and No Child Left Behind, much to many educators’ lament, is the new education reality. (Regardless of NCLB deficiencies, to wish that it go away is tantamount to standing on the shore and ordering the waves to roll backwards.)

“NCLB symbolizes a dramatic turning point in American education. This legislation, however awkward in its initial implementation, marks the departure from judging schools by inputs. Now, it is what schools achieve, not what resources they receive, that matters most.”

In such a climate, Guthrie says, doctorate degrees for education professionals need a new model for the new post-NCLB reality.

Managing schools today requires various 21st century skills—knowledge of human learning and curriculum objectives, grasp of organizational complexity, familiarity with modern performance measurement, management by data, attention to leadership dynamics, budget realities, policy imperatives, legalities and community relations too.

In the same essay, Guthrie offers his own set of possible solutions for strengthening Ed.D. degrees, going beyond the proposals made by Levine: Install an independent rating system based on admissions, faculty quality, and practice-based curriculum. Call on associations of principals to formulate standards and exert pressure on Ed.D. programs. Institute accreditation. Also, call on top programs to lead the way.

“If a select few institutions would band together, announce adherence to high admission and performance standards, and orient their curriculum toward professional practice, it might begin to crystallize a set of highly visible, high-standards, high-performing institutions,” Guthrie writes.

“Such an ‘Academic Compact of Ed.D. Excellence’ would have to possess either external or self-policing capacity regarding adherence to announced standards.”

So as it turns out, Levine reopened a debate—rather than started something brand new—about the nature of education leadership preparation that has been swirling around for nearly a century. Despite his outspokenness, there’s no groundswell afoot to abolish the doctorate in education practice. The real issue is adaptation and revision—the construction of a better doctorate, based on a dialectic with a civilization in turbulent transition.

“The doctorate is the coin of the realm in education,” Guthrie says. “We shouldn’t give it up. We should transform it. What makes Peabody’s Ed.D. a doctorate is it represents advanced study of the profession, a dedication to practice and reflection, instruction informed by the issues that drive the professional.”

That’s what keeps Joan Dabrowski—teacher, wife, and mother of two—dashing off to airports to catch weekly flights to Nashville.

“I look at the people I’m studying with, and they want to be outstanding leaders in their particular area. My feeling is schools of education have an obligation to stay connected to practitioners of education. Ed.D. degree programs that value practice ought to continue to do well in this country.”

Ray Waddle is a Nashville-based author and columnist.