Institutional Prerequisites and Obstacles to Building a Program Committed to Educational Transformation

• In Event: Transformation from Within and Outside of Schools: Residency-based preparation for education professionals supporting systemic change

Abstract

Why are some proposals for innovation in higher education adopted and implemented while others are consigned to the electronic trash bin? While the creation of particular administrative elements of higher education, such as the semester-long university course (Haberman, 1984) and the Carnegie credit unit (Silva, et al. 2015), has been studied, less attention has been paid to the processes and hurdles that new programs in education must undergo in order to gain permanent status within a university. This paper focuses primarily on the internal university dynamics that need to be engaged as faculty members design and implement an MA program centered on equity. This paper does not primarily address the intellectual content or pedagogical approaches developed and deployed within the program. Instead, the paper discusses the institutional origins and growth of the program within the context of a Catholic university that does not have an existing school of education.
The paper engages six elements of the program’s progression from the “what if” stage to its current form. Those elements can be summarized as 1) finding fellow travelers; 2) administrative need; 3) timing and sequencing; 4) bluesky thinking and avoiding existing “authorities”; 5) painful tradeoffs; 6) external validation and sustainability. The paper begins with an examination of the program's origins in an earlier effort to create an undergraduate minor in examining education and justice. That process uncovered a number of faculty across the University central to the later development of the program. The second theme – understanding administrators’ needs – situates the request to create a new program in the context of demands placed on central university administrators. This theme examines administrators’ need to grow enrollments, while furthering the University’s self-understanding and mission, while also advancing their own career ambitions. The third theme – sequencing and timing -- focuses on faculty persistence and the need to time proposals in alignment with changes in administrators’ professional needs. In particular, administrative turnover afforded an opportunity to revisit a previous denial by an earlier administrator. Theme four – bluesky thinking – examines the necessity to carve out a distinctive space within the University landscape. Bluesky thinking enables both the creative, dynamic features of program design, while also helping to marginalize existing loci of expertise at the University, particularly units that have the clout and motivation to suppress efforts. The fifth theme – painful tradeoffs – discusses the difficult choices made in the design and implementation of the program, two of which may imperil the sustainability of the program. The final theme – external validation and sustainability – stresses the need to validate the model to internal University audiences through two mechanisms: enrollments and financial viability, and, second, securing competitive external grants to signal the validity of the model. The paper concludes by explaining the opportunities for program sustainability in light of recent budget cuts and overall attacks on higher education and public support for education in the U.S.

Author

• Douglas S. Reed, Georgetown University