Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Chronicle of Higher Education

Some Schools of Education Should Abandon Research Doctorates, Report Says

By DAVID GLENN

Some schools of education should abandon research doctorates, report says
Research-oriented doctoral programs in education vary widely in quality, and a significant number of them should close up shop, according to a report released on Monday by the Education Schools Project.

The report's author, Arthur Levine, said in an interview on Monday that he is confident that schools of education will tighten their standards. "It may not happen this week or this month or this year," he said. "But it's inevitable. The field is under siege."

The new document, "Educating Researchers," is the third in a series of reports on schools of education from Mr. Levine, who served as the president of Teachers College at Columbia University from 1994 until last year. He is now the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and director of the Education Schools Project.

Mr. Levine's previous salvos examined education schools' roles in training teachers and administrators. The new report looks at how well the schools perform in training researchers. Mr. Levine and his colleagues conducted surveys of deans, faculty members, alumni, and school principals; scrutinized the research productivity and citation history of instructors in doctoral education programs; and analyzed the dissertations of more than 1,300 people who earned education doctorates in 2002.

The bottom line: While many institutions that offer doctoral education programs produce excellent researchers, Mr. Levine writes, many others "are not strong enough to sustain such programs in terms of their missions, hiring practices, faculty quantity and quality, research funding, and climate."

In describing the dissertations approved at one large research university in 2002, Mr. Levine does not mince words: "In general, the research questions were unworthy of a doctoral dissertation, literature reviews were dated and cursory, study designs were seriously flawed, samples were small and particularistic, confounding variables were not taken into account, perceptions were commonly used as proxies for reality, statistical analyses were performed frequently on meaningless data, and conclusions and recommendations were often superficial and without merit since they were based on the meaningless data collected, and the dissertations were written in cookie-cutter fashion."

A major part of the problem, Mr. Levine argues, is a "blurring" of the lines between doctoral programs oriented toward training students to be education researchers with those oriented toward training them to practice as teachers or administrators. Students who intend to become administrators -- and who have no need or desire to receive intensive training in research -- wind up in programs where they nonetheless need to go through the motions of writing a dissertation. At many institutions, Mr. Levine suggests, neither the students nor the instructors take that enterprise very seriously.

Mr. Levine has argued elsewhere that there is generally no need for administrators to receive doctorates at all; he has said that everyone would be better off if administrators simply earned two-year degrees modeled after the M.B.A. (The Chronicle, September 23, 2005).

But the new report does not make that argument explicitly. Instead, Mr. Levine simply argues that schools of education should draw clear lines between practice-oriented degrees and research-oriented degrees.

The new report drew praise on Monday from Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, director of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. "The report covers ground that has been covered previously, but it does it with new data," Mr. Whitehurst said. "And it comes from a source that has to be respected and taken seriously by the schools of education. Dr. Levine is obviously an insider, and he's talking about his own profession."

Mr. Whitehurst said that schools of education would do well to forge new alliances with departments of statistics and psychology. He pointed to the interdisciplinary predoctoral programs that the department has recently financed at institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University and Florida State University as potential models. (Mr. Levine, however, said in the interview that education schools should be cautious about interdisciplinary projects. "The risk they face is creating a program where there aren't people with expertise and the boundaries of the field are amorphous," he said.)

Other readers of the new report were more skeptical than Mr. Whitehurst. Richard L. Schwab, dean of the University of Connecticut's Neag School of Education, said in an interview that he agreed with many elements of Mr. Levine's report, "but it's not new news." For several years, he said, deans of education have been exploring new ways to delineate between research-oriented and practice-oriented degrees.

More generally, Mr. Schwab said, schools of education are improving their research-oriented requirements. "This is my 15th year as a dean," he said, "and I've seen steady increases in the number of courses, both qualitative and quantitative, that we're requiring of our students."

Mr. Schwab particularly objected to the report's broad suggestion that institutions categorized as "Master's I" in the Carnegie classification scheme should get out of the research-doctorate business.

"I don't think the issue is so much not letting smaller colleges offer the degree," he said. "There are some very good smaller programs that have developed a niche expertise that I wouldn't want to see lost."

David G. Imig, a professor of the practice at the University of Maryland's College of Education, said he shares Mr. Levine's hope that a sense of crisis will impel schools of education to change their practices. "Where Arthur has pointed us -- I think we're close to that," he said. "We have to be close. Or there's a major, major train wreck ahead."

The looming danger, Mr. Imig said, is that schools of education will become irrelevant to policy debates, as government agencies, school districts, and nonprofit organizations increasingly hire researchers who are trained outside of education schools -- that is, people with Ph.D.'s in economics, statistics, or psychology.

"A fundamental concern," Mr. Imig said, is that education schools are not producing "the kinds of doctorates that are recognized, celebrated, invited to engage in the national conversation about education reform."

Mr. Imig, who is a former president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, is now coordinating a project of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that is designed to improve education doctorates. Mr. Imig rejects Mr. Levine's call for the abolition of the practice-oriented doctorates, but he said that he otherwise broadly agrees with Mr. Levine's new report.

The Education Schools Project is financed by the Annenberg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation. The fourth and final report in the series, which Mr. Levine expects to release in late 2008, will describe in positive terms what he believes education schools should do.

The document.