School & District Management

Some Ed.D. Programs Adopting Practical Approach

By Jeff Archer — December 13, 2005 7 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Two years ago, Michele Condon had completed all the coursework for a doctorate in education, but couldn’t settle on a dissertation topic. Nothing seemed important enough to the principal to spend a year or two on research and writing.

“I didn’t have time to do something that didn’t tie in to what I did every day,” said Ms. Condon, the top administrator at Bernard Middle School in Mehlville, Mo., just south of St. Louis. “I didn’t want to do something that was just an add-on to get the title.”

Then came a new possibility: Rather than write a dissertation, she could work on a group project focused on a problem she encounters in her job. Last week, she passed her oral defense of the project, which involved crafting new criteria for evaluating teacher-tenure policies.

St. Louis University, where Ms. Condon earned her doctorate, is one of a growing number of higher education institutions that are retooling their Doctor of Education, or Ed.D., programs to concentrate more on the practical skills required of district leaders.

For too long, the thinking goes, such programs have emulated the structure of Ph.D. programs, despite the fact that they generally serve a different purpose. Typically, at schools of education that offer both degrees, the Ed.D. is for aspiring superintendents and other practitioners, while the Doctor of Philosophy program is for budding academics.

In a widely read report issued this past March, Arthur E. Levine, the president of Teachers College, Columbia University, suggested eliminating the Ed.D. degree, which he said often amounts to a watered-down Ph.D. that does little to prepare people for the contemporary demands of educational administration. (“Study Blasts Leadership Preparation,” March 16, 2005.)

Instead, some universities have sought to differentiate their Ed.D. programs more clearly from their Ph.D. programs. Along with St. Louis University, they include: the University of Missouri-Columbia; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Southern California; and Vanderbilt University.

Common strategies involve emphasizing the application of theory to practice and forming more cohesive cohorts of candidates who go through the programs together. Some of the biggest changes are with the dissertation requirement, which some education schools are dropping in favor of team-based projects like Ms. Condon’s.

Too Convenient?

The trend worries some education school leaders, however. Their concern is that market pressures are leading some universities to sacrifice rigor to create programs that are more convenient for their candidates. Group projects, some argue, don’t involve the kind of disciplined inquiry that constitutes doctoral-level work.

Others counter that it’s possible to maintain high standards while making Ed.D. programs more relevant to the work they’re preparing their students to do. In fact, proponents of distinguishing Ed.D.s from Ph.D.s at education schools say the status quo is a greater threat to quality.

Michele Condon, the principal at Bernard Middle School in Mehlville, Mo., takes part in a group oral defense of the project she completed with two other candidates to earn an Ed.D. degree at St. Louis University. The graduate program is one of a growing number to replace the traditional dissertation with a team assignment.

“I think there are a set of legitimate questions and concerns about this that need to be on the table,” said Joseph F. Murphy, a professor at Vanderbilt’s Peabody college of education. “But, at the end of the day, it’s very difficult for me to imagine that it could be any worse than it is now.”

Although often not required, a doctorate is close to a rite of passage for aspirants to the superintendency, particularly in medium-size and large districts. About three-quarters of those leading school systems with 3,000 students or more have one, according to data from the American Association of School Administrators.

Some education schools offer just one doctoral degree. At Harvard University, the school gives only Ed.Ds; at Ohio State University, only Ph.D.s. What matters is whether an institution has different courses of study depending on the candidate’s career goals, said Lee S. Shulman, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in Stanford, Calif.

In practice, he said, many education schools put all doctoral candidates through very similar programs. Whether hoping to be superintendents or scholars, they take a series of courses that culminates in a work of independent research, yielding the kind of study that could be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

“We have come to a situation where we have neither a first-rate model for the professional doctorate, which you can call the Ed.D., nor do we have a really good model for the research doctorate, because we’re basically using the same model to educate both,” Mr. Shulman said.

When the department of educational leadership and higher education at St. Louis University asked itself what aspiring superintendents needed to learn, the answer wasn’t how to produce scholarly research. So the school phased out the dissertation for its Ed.D. program and replaced it with a long-term assignment in which three or four candidates work together to examine an applied problem.

Ms. Condon, the middle school principal, jumped at the chance to do such a project, which initially was offered as an option in 2003 and now is required. She and two other St. Louis-area principals looked at teacher-tenure polices because they’d seen their effects firsthand.

“We all agreed that teacher tenure wasn’t necessarily a good thing,” Ms. Condon said. “It was not motivating teachers to stay on top of their game.”

Each team member took charge of one part of the project. Ms. Condon compared job-protection rules in Missouri with those in other states. Another principal surveyed the history of teacher tenure, and the third examined how institutions in various sectors assessed their policies.

Together, they honed a set of standards to determine whether tenure rules adequately balanced students’ interests with teachers’ rights.

Teams and Individuals

The result, after more than a year of weekend meetings at coffee shops or one of their schools, was a 2-inch-thick report that went through several revisions based on input from faculty advisers. Ms. Condon said the group exercise more closely mirrors the kind of work that district leaders do than would writing a dissertation.

“At least in our district, we don’t have one superintendent working in isolation,” she said. “It’s a central-office team, and everyone comes with their area of expertise.”

Architects of the program say one challenge was to come up with a format for team-based projects that still allowed for determining whether each candidate had mastered enough to earn a doctorate. Along with the combined report, each team member submits a paper analyzing the work and reflecting on his or her own contribution. In addition to a group oral defense, candidates undergo individual ones.

Susan Everson, who led the effort to redesign the Ed.D., said the educational leadership department has proof that the system works: Some teams have reached the end of the process and not all of the members have graduated.

“The students will tell you that it’s as rigorous as a dissertation,” said Ms. Everson, an assistant professor. “And as an adviser, I would say it’s no less demanding. You have to learn some new advisory skills, so that you can assess their abilities as collaborative team members.”

Not everyone thinks such changes are a good idea. Betty Malen, an education professor at the University of Maryland College Park, advocates keeping the dissertation requirement for Ed.D. candidates, as her university has done.

“I think we adopt a very narrow definition of what is relevant if we confine our programs to a one-on-one match between what we do in graduate study and what we do on the job,” said Ms. Malen, noting that she spent 13 years as a school administrator. “What I could not do on the job is think deeply about the nature of the problems that were confronting the school.”

She and some others charge that part of the motivation for differentiating Ed.D. programs from Ph.D. programs is simply to accommodate the busy lives of school administrators, many of whom begin a doctoral program but never manage to complete the dissertation.

Ms. Condon believes she would have completed a dissertation were that still the requirement. She has her own reasons: Her father, a St. Louis police officer killed in the line of duty when she was 5, had stressed that he wanted his children to succeed academically.

But the option of doing a project with colleagues who shared similar concerns about their work made it easier to invest the time to do it well. “I think a dissertation can be very interesting,” she said. But, she added, “I think we got something useful out of this.”

Related Tags:

Coverage of leadership is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation.

Events

Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Privacy & Security Webinar
Navigating Cybersecurity: Securing District Documents and Data
Learn how K-12 districts are addressing the challenges of maintaining a secure tech environment, managing documents and data, automating critical processes, and doing it all with limited resources.
Content provided by Softdocs

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

School & District Management The Eclipse Is Great for Learning. But It's Tough on School Logistics
A total solar eclipse will cross a large swath of the country on April 8, sparking tough management choices for leaders of the districts in its path.
5 min read
A woman and stands outside with her arm on the back of a boy as they look up at the sky while wearing special paper glasses made for viewing a solar eclipse.
Jackie Johnson and her son Bradley Johnson, 9, watch a partial solar eclipse at the Frost Science Museum on Oct. 14, 2023, in downtown Miami. In 2024, some districts are planning to delay or cancel school on the day of a total eclipse, out of safety concerns.
Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald via AP
School & District Management Opinion A Good Principal Knows When It's Time to Leave
I didn’t leave my job because of burnout; I stepped away from being a school leader because it was in everybody’s best interest.
Matthew Ebert
4 min read
Conceptual illustration of someone handing off a baton to someone else over a completed puzzle.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week via Canva
School & District Management Principals Tell Politicians on Capitol Hill: We’re Burning Out
Students' mental health top principals' growing list of concerns.
6 min read
People walk outside the U.S Capitol building in Washington, June 9, 2022.
Visitors walk outside the U.S Capitol building in Washington on June 9, 2022.
Patrick Semansky/AP
School & District Management Women Superintendents Experience Bias on the Climb to Leadership
Interpersonal slights and inequities make it hard for women to land the job and stay in it.
3 min read
Woman stands in front of a staircase in different colors. She is about to walk up the stairs. Concept of standing in front of a challenge and finding the right solution and courage to move on.
mikkelwilliam/E+