Citing what it calls a "leadership deficit" in the nation's schools, Harvard University is introducing a doctoral education programme aimed at attracting top talent to transform the US education system by shaking up the status quo.
The Doctor of Education Leadership is the first new degree to be offered in 74 years by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and comes as US students continue to lag behind their peers worldwide.
The degree is designed for people who want to be top-level managers - such as superintendents of large districts or state education agency heads and seeks to attract upper-echelon candidates who normally would choose other, more lucrative fields.
"Education is getting better, it's just not getting better fast enough," said Robert Schwartz, the school's academic dean. He says that for too long, colleges have produced administrators isolated from other disciplines and geared more toward managing existing systems than pushing badly needed reform.
"Radically accelerating the pace of improvement is an urgent national priority.... We need people who really are trained in large-scale organisational development and change," he said. Harvard acknowledges "a widely shared view that US schools are failing",in a description of its new programme and also blames "a leadership deficit in education."
Schwartz said many school leaders don't know what good teaching looks like and are unpractised at navigating the policy-making process that allocates major education funding and unprepared to remake large, complex and always-changing organisations.
International assessments show US students near the bottom in academic achievement. In 2006,15-yearolds in the US ranked 21st out of 30 countries in maths and 25th out of 30 in science, according to the Program for International Student Assessment.
Arthur Levine, a prominent critic of current education school programmes, said Harvard's programme shows promise. He praised its collaboration with the business and government schools, and its third and final year, which he said offers the substantial, practical training absent in too many programmes. Changing
technology, demographics and economics are presenting challenges educators haven't figured out,but urgently need to, Levine said.
The Harvard programme will start in the autumn of 2010 with just 25 students. It's tuition-free and includes a living stipend to attract a broader range of students.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
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