The Ed.D. -- Who Needs It?

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List: Findings and recommendations for educational-leadership programs

Biography: Arthur Levine

Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University's Teachers College, about his proposed reforms in training programs for leaders of elementary and secondary schools.

Article: Change in the Principal's Office: the Role of Universities (4/15/2005)

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By JENNIFER JACOBSON

Sacramento, Calif.

Arthur Levine promises not to talk long. But the departing president of Columbia University's Teachers College admits that this may be easier said than done. As he stands before several dozen people in a hotel conference room, he warns that after a recent course, one student wrote on the evaluation: "If I had 20 minutes left to live I'd want to spend them in your class because every minute with Art Levine feels like an hour."

Laughter fills the room where education professors and administrators from the University of California have gathered to hear him speak one summer morning here.

Then Mr. Levine, all business, continues: "Our schools have changed profoundly." He ticks off the responsibilities that a new principal must face: be an expert in testing students, provide professional development, and be held accountable for the test scores of her school. "We don't have the leaders today who can do those things," he says. "We don't have a lot of programs around the country capable of preparing them."

He continues to paint a bleak picture. Before turning to his solutions -- and he's got plenty of them -- he sighs. "Well," he says, "I don't know." The audience laughs again.

A few months earlier, many of those people weren't laughing. They were mad as hell.

In March, Mr. Levine publicly announced that education schools were broken and that he had a plan to fix them. He issued a scathing report in which he said university programs that prepare elementary- and secondary-school administrators ranged from "inadequate to appalling." The doctorates in education that many of the programs offer should be eliminated, he argued. The degree, he said, was just not very good. His recommendation to scrap the degree, which Teachers College offers, caught even his own faculty members and students off guard.

Critics, among them professors of educational leadership and teacher-education groups, assailed him for joining a "blame game" in the field. "We are sick and tired of all of us being blasted in terms of the bad things we're doing," said Leo Pauls, at the time executive director of the Renaissance Group, an association of colleges with teacher-education programs, on the day of the report's release.

Deans and professors acknowledge that education schools need to improve, but they disagree with Mr. Levine's recommendations. Nonetheless, they invite him to speak at their professional conferences, like the one in Sacramento, because, in a field dominated by platitudes about educating all children and hiring the best and the brightest to do so, they believe he is sincere. His heart, they say, is in the right place. And since he presides over a top-notch education school, they are willing to hear what he has to say.

Mr. Levine believes that people will continue to listen even when he is no longer president of Teachers College -- which will, in fact, be quite soon. Last week he announced his resignation, effective at the end of this academic year. After 12 years at the college, he wants to focus on improving education schools and says he cannot do that and hold down a full-time job, too.

The son of postal workers who did not go to college, Mr. Levine, who grew up in the Bronx, decided long ago that education was the best way to change the world.

At 57, long after many of his peers have shed their idealism, he hews to that view. "I love education schools, and that is the hard part," he says of his controversial attempt to change them. "I haven't set out to be an iconoclast. I have a social responsibility."

Studying the Schools

Education schools are often viewed as anything but responsible. As president of this country's most prestigious one, Mr. Levine has heard his share of complaints: Why do they have such low admissions standards? Why don't they help public schools? Why do they focus less on teaching than on research?

In the past decade, the criticism has only increased, he says. Four years ago, he decided to see how much of it was true.

He assembled a team of journalists and graduate students from Teachers College to study educational leadership, teacher education, and the quality of education research. Mr. Levine would write a report on each topic, followed by a book on education schools. With one report now published, he plans to issue the second and third reports in November and March, respectively, and to finish the book in two years.

The first report has caused quite a stir. "Educating School Leaders," released in March, was based on national surveys of deans, faculty members, school principals, and alumni, as well as case studies of 28 departments and schools of education. Teachers College was not included in the study, to avoid any bias on Mr. Levine's part.

He promised anonymity to the schools that participated and confidentiality to the people interviewed. Only when he had something good to say would he identify a school. In his 86-page report, he names just two.

American programs in educational leadership suffer from low admissions standards, weak faculties, and inappropriate degrees, Mr. Levine wrote. He called on states to close weak programs and urged colleges to stop using their education schools as "cash cows," moving the tuition revenue such schools generate to other, higher-priority programs. Since the raises and promotions that teachers get are often based on the credit hours they take, education schools have a large pool of ready customers.

Mr. Levine acknowledges that those criticisms are not new. In 1987 a national commission recommended closing 60 percent of education-administration programs, but its call was ignored. In fact, the number of such programs has increased by 20 percent since then, he says.

Education schools must reform themselves now, he warns, because states, school districts, and the for-profit sector are creating alternative programs in educational leadership. "We're facing new providers who want our business, though I hate that word," he says.

He has called on education schools to scrap the Ed.D. and in its place create a new degree, the master's in education administration, with a curriculum in both management and education. It would be the terminal degree needed to rise through the ranks of education administration.

Principals and school-system superintendents should not have to write research-based dissertations that have nothing to do with their jobs, Mr. Levine argues: "It just seems a waste of time. It's an example of status trumping substance."

Mr. Levine prefers exactly the opposite, as evidenced by his very looks and demeanor. Less polished than many college presidents, he has wavy hair that constantly needs combing, and bushy eyebrows that could use a trim. He looks rumpled whether in an oxford shirt and khakis or a nice suit.

"He's very friendly, very real and direct," says John Weingart, associate director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. "He doesn't have different personas."

Mr. Weingart should know. The two men have been best friends since college. In their junior year at Brandeis, they ran against each other for student-council president. Mr. Weingart won. The next-best job Mr. Levine could find was head of the student educational-policy committee, which helped plan the curriculum. "I found the stuff fascinating," he says. A pre-med major (his parents wanted him to become a doctor), he went on to do an independent study on the history of higher education, and loved it.

After college he and Mr. Weingart began work on a book on college curriculum. College officials, they felt, could not make good policy based chiefly on what the two young scholars saw as anecdotal evidence. So they visited 26 colleges to give administrators hard data instead.

Mr. Levine and Mr. Weingart's book, Reform of Undergraduate Education (Jossey-Bass, 1973), was named book of the year by the American Council on Education in 1974. The award jump-started Mr. Levine's career.

He landed a job writing about education policy for what became the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. That led to his first college presidency, in 1982, at now-defunct Bradford College. He was just 33. Later he worked at Harvard University before taking charge of Teachers College, in 1994.

From the outset of his education study, Mr. Levine intended to use his position at Teachers College to push for change. "I was president of a well-known education school," he says. "People could disagree with me, but they had to take what I was saying seriously."

The Wrong Solution

His colleagues do, indeed, disagree. Although they say Mr. Levine's analysis is dead-on, they contend that his proposals will not solve deeply entrenched problems.

Creating a master's degree in education administration will not prevent colleges from using their education schools to make money, says E. Joseph Schneider, executive secretary of the National Policy Board for Educational Administration, a consortium of 10 associations with an interest in educational leadership programs. "As long as teachers can get salary increases by getting additional courses, there's going to be a temptation for universities to give easy courses," he says. "We need to get school districts to change their reward system."

Colleges, too, he says, have to change the way they do business. But why should they, if students are showing up in droves? "It comes down to who's going to blink first," he says.

Until then the overabundance of such programs -- Mr. Schneider puts the current total at about 550 -- will continue to be "kind of a joke," he says. "Any podunk college in the country can add this." To start an educational-leadership department, an institution just needs to have a full-time faculty member and some adjuncts -- principals and superintendents, he says.

Students in these programs typically are teachers who work all day and attend classes at night, on weekends, or during the summer, says Arthur E. Wise, president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. "As a result, universities won't push them too hard," he says. "We've got to fix the process, first and foremost."

To that end, Mr. Wise says his group, which belongs to the national-policy board, already reviews education-leadership programs. The group has recognized about 168 of the programs as meeting the rigorous standards the field has established for school leadership. Mr. Levine, he says, has ignored those standards.

P. David Pearson, dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley, disagrees with Mr. Levine's recommendation to stop awarding doctorates to people who want to become superintendents and principals. "It's like saying the problem with medical schools is that a lot of the training for M.D.'s is irrelevant, so what we need to do is train people as physician's assistants," Mr. Pearson says.

Besides, he says, superintendents like the title of doctor: "There's some cachet in it."

Close to Home

Given his desire to change schools of education, one would think that Mr. Levine would start with his own school first. But he has not done so. Teachers College continues to offer the Ed.D. "Simply because the president of an institution has an idea about curriculum," he says, "doesn't mean the faculty are going to adopt it."

In fact, the head of the education-leadership program at Teachers College opposes Mr. Levine's proposals. Like many of the skeptics, however, Craig E. Richards is quick to say that criticism of Mr. Levine's recommendations is not criticism of the man himself. "My comments are about the report, not about Art or his presidency," he says.

While Mr. Richards agrees that the field would be stronger with fewer programs, the same holds true for other professional schools, such as business, law, and medicine, he says. His major criticism of the report is that it overgeneralizes.

He calls eliminating the Ed.D. no more than a thought experiment, since we can't go back in time. "How can we convince school boards not to hire people with doctorates and hire people with some other degree we've yet to create?" he asks.

Mr. Levine's conclusions surprised his own faculty members, Mr. Richards says. Professors were unaware of them until the president shared them a week before the report was released, he says. Mr. Richards was especially stunned, he says, since Mr. Levine is also a member of his department and had secured foundation support two years ago to survey what was working well in education leadership at the college, and what was not. The department has since created a summer program for principals. Its education-leadership program, Mr. Richards insists, is here to stay.

But after Mr. Levine's report came out, students weren't so sure. Their concerns prompted the president to hold a meeting at his home in May.

Students "felt affronted, betrayed, and disappointed that there hadn't been a forum, that they weren't aware of this in advance of being released," says Stephen McKibben, a second-year Ed.D. student in education administration, who attended the meeting. They felt that the degree "had been tainted or diminished" by their own president's report, he says.

Still, the meeting gave faculty members and students a chance to vent, Mr. McKibben says. Mr. Levine "was gracious in providing that opportunity."

Even if he were to put his recommendations into effect at Teachers College, it would be insufficient, Mr. Levine says, since he wants nationwide change. He does not expect that to happen overnight. The Ed.D., he predicts, will fade over time. Although a handful of schools are considering alternatives -- he declines to say which ones -- the Ed.D. is hardly on its last legs.

At the annual conference of the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration, in Arlington, Va., in July, Clarence E. Fitch, a professor of education leadership at Chicago State University, received the group's Living Legend award. In his acceptance speech, he proudly announced that this fall the university would begin offering a doctorate in education leadership. Everyone applauded.