Published Monday, March 7, 2005
Doctoral Program Faces Changes, Criticism
Elmore Blasts Reorganization, Decision Making Process
By Andrew K. Mandel
APPIAN STAFF WRITER

If you're planning to be a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), stay tuned.

Last May, the faculty officially closed the door on HGSE’s three semi-autonomous academic areas in favor of a centralized doctoral program with four concentrations, but professors continue to debate important details of the biggest administrative transformation to the school in a generation.

“The changes are big, and we all realize that we haven't yet finished that work,” said Pforzheimer Professor of Teaching and Learning Susan Moore Johnson.  “Making these kinds of changes always takes time and the only way they can work is if the participants in the organization keep making adjustments as we try new things out.”

At least one senior faculty member, who abstained from voting for the four concentrations, has asserted that the entire new structure threatens to betray an institutional focus that faculty members spent years cultivating.

In a sharply worded memo sent to HGSE administrators and select faculty members in December, Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership Richard Elmore, who is on leave this year, said he believes that officials made a “very destructive and ill-advised” error by eliminating the “Administration, Planning and Social Policy” academic area and creating two separate doctoral concentrations in “Educational Practice and Leadership" and “Educational Policy.” 

Deeming “policy” and “practice” discrete fields of study suggests that one could examine each separately, Elmore said, undermining a decade in which he and his colleagues crafted a distinctive, cohesive curriculum that links school and district reform with instructional improvement and attracted a pool of doctoral students with significant experience in schools.

 “We are now better situated than we ever have been, and certainly better than any of our competitors, to produce a unique kind of student who combines strong analytic and research interests with a commitment to and competence for large-scale improvement of schools,” he wrote.  “The [new] configuration of the doctoral programs is a major, probably fatal, step backward in this process.”

Elmore said the new description of the “Educational Practice and Leadership” concentration attempts to attract as many applicants as possible by defining leadership in impossibly broad strokes—rather than in the context of instructional improvement.

“It covers everyone who has ever imagined themselves to be, has ever fantasized about being, or has ever been, a leader in any context, and it promises to prepare them to do everything (and correspondingly, nothing),” he wrote.

As a result, he predicts that the two new concentrations will likely confuse and repel the very candidates that the school has aimed to attract.  Elmore was so disconcerted with the HGSE website’s program descriptions that he ultimately asked Academic Dean Kathleen McCartney to take his name off the pages naming faculty affiliated with the concentrations.

What Elmore describes as incoherent decisions are symptoms of a much larger organizational and leadership problem at HGSE, he said, suggesting faculty members—not the administration—should be crafting the mission and focus of their academic programs. 

While the faculty votes on major changes and serves on committees in the new structure, McCartney’s office makes most programmatic decisions because, unlike the old “areas,” none of the new concentrations have individual administrative support, Elmore said.  This kind of centralized control, where non-experts are attempting to determine policy and craft statements about a specialty, “runs against everything we know about how to organize knowledge-intensive work in general,” he added.

“As colleagues, we should take control of the processes by which these decisions are made, rather than relying on the Dean and the Academic Dean to lead the process,” Elmore wrote in his December memo. 

In a series of e-mail exchanges with The Appian, Elmore said nothing significant has occurred since he sent the memo—because, he said, of flawed leadership left unchallenged by the faculty.

“The Dean referred [my memo] to the doctoral curriculum committee, which, of course, virtually guarantees that it won’t be dealt with in any useful way, because the committee is a creature of the existing structure, and reports to the academic dean, who is heavily invested in the existing structure,” Elmore said to The Appian this week.   “Meanwhile, the memo has not stimulated any serious collective action on the part of the faculty, which, unfortunately, is attributable to the general passivity of the faculty around leadership issues in the School, and within the university, for that matter.”

Faculty members generally declined to comment to The Appian on Elmore’s memo or speak out against the entire reorganization, instead focusing their remarks on how to make the current structure work.

“One concern, expressed by some faculty members, is that although the new concentrations permit more interchange across the school they do not offer the administrative and intellectual 'home' to faculty and students that the areas once offered,” said Professor Paul Harris, chair of the Doctoral Committee.  “There have been several discussions among the faculty about the best way to deal with this issue.  For the time being, however, no firm decision has been taken about the best strategy.”

Acknowledging Elmore's concern about the new concentrations, Johnson said she shares a desire to “strengthen our connections between policy and practice” and is confident that the school will ultimately get it right.

“The faculty and the doctoral committee take the issue very seriously and continue to explore the best way to maintain our strengths and develop new ones,” she said.

Indeed, Dean McCartney hinted that the initial vision approved by the faculty may be evolving significantly.

“It is likely that there may be more and/or different concentrations as the faculty think through how best to showcase HGSE's strengths and how best to train doctoral students,” she said.

Asked to respond to Elmore’s criticisms, HGSE Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann emphasized that changes at the school have emerged from faculty discussion and voting.

“Debate and disagreement is natural, understandable, and welcome within an academic institution such as ours,” she said.  “Richard Elmore is a respected member of the HGSE faculty and I welcome his perspective.”

But Elmore said his perspective has been ignored.

“I think in general the climate of the place does not promote honest and frank discussion of issues that are central to our future as an academic enterprise,” he said.  “A number of us raised very strong, very specific objections to the reorganization, most of which predicted exactly what is now happening.  We raised these objections repeatedly at all levels of discussion of the reorganization—at the focus group level, at the senior faculty level, and at the level of the general faculty.  It was clear during this process that there would be no compromise.”

Looking ahead, Harris's committee, charged with making recommendations to the faculty about the future of doctoral programs, will continue to meet this spring.

For previous coverage of HGSE's reorganization, please see:
School Prepares Three Areas to Dissolve (4/12/04)

Andrew K. Mandel is an Ed.M. candidate in Technology in Education program and a member of the Appian Board of Editors.