Washington
University programs that prepare people for leadership posts in elementary and secondary education range from “inadequate to appalling,” and the Ed.D. degree that many of them receive should be eliminated, according to a report issued on Monday by Arthur E. Levine, president of Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Speaking at a news conference here on the release of his scathing report, “Educating School Leaders,” Mr. Levine said he had found that programs in educational leadership suffered from low admissions standards, weak faculties, and inappropriate degrees.
“There is absolutely no reason why a school leader needs a doctorate,” Mr. Levine said.
In its place, he called for the creation of a new degree, the master’s in educational administration, with a curriculum in both management and education. It would be the terminal degree needed to rise through the ranks of education administration.
The doctorate in school leadership, Mr. Levine said, should be reserved for a small number of people who want to become researchers. The degree is currently awarded to both scholars and administrators and as such, he said, is ambiguously defined.
His report summed up a four-year study based on national surveys of deans, faculty members, alumni, and principals, as well as case studies of 28 departments and schools of education. The report is the first in a four-part series planned by the Education Schools Project, which Mr. Levine directs. The project is backed with funds from the Annenberg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation. Teachers College was not among the institutions in the study.
Critics of Mr. Levine’s proposals assailed him for joining a blame game in teacher education. “We are sick and tired of all of us being blasted in terms of the bad things we’re doing,” Leo Pauls, executive director of the Renaissance Group, said in an interview on Monday. “It’s time that people like the secretary of education start identifying names of the programs and institutions that need major changes or start giving some credit to those of us who are doing a good job.”
Mr. Pauls, whose group is a national consortium of colleges and universities with large teacher-education programs, said that Mr. Levine’s call to eliminate the Ed.D. is “far too simplistic.”
The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education flatly rejected such an approach. In a written statement issued on Monday, the association instead called for “strengthening current degree programs and a major effort to recast and strengthen the education doctorate.”
According to Mr. Levine’s report, more than 40 percent of principals, and an even higher proportion of superintendents, are expected to leave their jobs over the next decade. Given that statistic, Mr. Levine said, schools of education must reform their educational-leadership programs now.
Universities, he said, must stop using their education schools as “cash cows,” moving the revenue such schools generate to other, higher-priority programs on their campuses. He criticized schools of education for creating incentives -- like giving out credentials and degrees -- simply for taking courses. Such incentives, he said, encourage bad programs. Too many students in educational-leadership programs “are more interested in salary bumps than they are in getting a good education,” Mr. Levine said.
He suggested that boards of trustees could help persuade presidents of institutions with education schools to make such changes if the schools themselves were unwilling to do so. If boards are unsuccessful on that front, “we need to tell the states,” Mr. Levine said.
“States need to be willing to step in,” he said, “and demand reauthorization of existing programs.” States should also tell schools of education that they have three years to improve or risk being shut down, he said.
“This report is written with love,” said Mr. Levine, a former president of Bradford College. Universities, he said, are the best place to prepare education leaders, but he noted that education schools face new competition from alternative programs operated by states, school districts, and private organizations. According to the report, information does not yet exist on whether those programs are more effective.
Arthur E. Wise, president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, said in an interview on Monday that he would support a fresh look at the Ed.D. degree. But, he said, “what I would most strongly disagree with is the conclusion that there are no worthwhile programs offered by any of our institutions.”
The Education Schools Project plans to make the full text of the report available on its Web site.