[EDLING:360] Cal State Prepares to Open Its First Doctoral Programs Ever, in Education

[Harold Schiffman]

September 6, 2007 Cal State Prepares to Open Its First Doctoral Programs
Ever, in Education

This fall California State University will, for the first time,
independently offer doctoral programs, marking a significant change in the
state's longstanding master plan for higher education. The plan had given
the University of California system sole authority among the state's public
institutions to award doctorates.

Cal State administrators today outlined the new doctorate-of-education
programs that will begin on seven of the system's 23 campuses this academic
year. The programs will seek to improve educational leadership and student
learning in community colleges and public schools while helping the state
meet its need for more teachers and school administrators.

The university system was allowed to add the programs after compromise
legislation <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i45/45a02903.htm> passed the
state's Legislature in 2005. Cal State officials and leaders of the
University of California system had spent weeks battling over the issue of
which campuses should be allowed to confer doctoral degrees before officials
in both systems announced that they would jointly support an approach that
gave Cal State the authority to award a doctorate only in education.

The value and quality of education doctorates offered by American
universities has been questioned by national scholars such as Arthur Levine,
former president of Columbia University's Teachers College. As he left the
university, in 2005, he said that university programs that prepared
elementary- and secondary-school administrators ranged from "inadequate to
appalling." <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i05/05a02001.htm>

Cal State officials said they had given "thorough consideration" to the
findings of Mr. Levine's reports on the education of school leaders. They
said they had developed programs that would provide a national model for the
reform of educational leadership and that embody various "attributes of
excellence" Mr. Levine outlined, including clarity of purpose, curricular
coherence and balance, and assessment. *—Sara Hebel*
http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=2986?=atnb
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Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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