MS. LAGEMANN: We want to start again and I want to start with the questions from the committee, and then turn it over to the floor.

Two points before we do that. The first is, I hope in the questions we can sharpen some of the differences between and among our three speakers. They were not saying exactly the same thing, and I think it is very important that we tease some of that out.

The second thing is, I am aware that there are a lot of other deans of schools of education in this room, in addition to me, and I hope that, when we get to the Q and A for everybody in the room, you will really talk up about some of the difficulties we all face.

It is easy to be a critic, and it is not so easy to actually enact some of this stuff. I hope we can get into some of the practical realities that the deans in the audience bring. So, the committee first.

MS. SCHNEIDER: One of the kind of mantras of this committee has been about the mechanisms for accumulating knowledge.

I am sorry, Ellen, but I did hear this comment in all three of the talks, but maybe you will have different ways of answering it, that had to do with the opportunity to give graduate students this mentorship involvement in research.

Russ, you had talked about it as sort of a hierarchical structure, which is that you did one thing at one time, and I was hoping that maybe you all might expound on this idea a little bit more.

We have been talking in the committee about opportunities to help graduate students learn how to be better peer reviewers and what that might look like.

It would be really helpful if perhaps you could give us a little bit more detail on what you might think these experiences might be like.

MR. WHITEHURST: There are a number of ways that it could play out and has played out in programs that provide a hierarchy of experiences.

What we tried to do in the doctoral program I was associated with was to have students produce two research product and do a synthesis as a minimum requirement.

So, a project due at the end of the second year that was like a doctoral dissertation, perhaps not so ambitious in terms of goals, a synthesis paper that provided some overview or synthesis of the literature, and then a doctoral dissertation, with an encouragement to do more work including, as I mentioned, to work for some faculty member other than the prime advisor somewhere in the course of the process.

MR. SHULMAN: Let me respond at several levels. One is, I have been very taken by something that they have been doing in the chemistry doctoral program at the University of Michigan.

That is, they have developed a system of what they call rotations for first year students. So, the compromise between not having them get research experience at all, and just taking pro-seminars, and becoming immediately indentured to one faculty member and her lab, is to design a set of six week or seven week rotations across a number of labs.

That puts a real curricular or research challenge back in the hands of the lab directors. They have to design an experience for those first year doctoral students which isn't just you are washing glassware in seven different labs.

That means they have to re-examine -- now, how do they do that? I didn't get deeply enough into that chemistry world to know, but it is one thing I want to know.

If you are going to do that, one of the things it would suggest -- and now I go back to my colleagues at NSF or Spencer or Hewlett or elsewhere that fund research -- you have to be prepared to fund proposals that are somewhat looser in their structure, so that they afford doctoral students, or post docs who are working in those settings with more degrees of freedom for breaking off chunks and running with them in some fashion.

So, they are not running off the field entirely, but there is some more flexibility. If you don't, if a five-year project has got to all be choreographed in advance -- and I guess it is for IES, then, too, if you are going to do training, if it isn't going to be opportunistic and developmental as it goes along, then there won't be much opportunity for students to do what they have to learn to do.

I think our methodological training is poor, but I see very, very few examples of research where a bad question could have been addressed better, if only they had learned hierarchical modeling.

The fact is that the best research begins because people have learned to conceptualize things well. They have had experience and feedback and practice at coming up with conceptual models, theoretical models, testing them against some evidence and then redoing them.

We don't teach that very much. We are too busy teaching method or technique or teaching theory, and that is the heart of research.

Getting a chance to do it within ongoing research programs and projects would be extraordinary. I can see people, as they move through the program, having the expectations grow for what they contribute to the program, and for what they break off from it as a piece for themselves.

MR. COHEN: I am not sure I know what you mean by cumulative, Barbara.

MS. SCHNEIDER: Oh, that is right. I forgot about that. I am sorry.

MR. COHEN: That is okay.

MS. SCHNEIDER: David has some concerns with the concept of knowledge accumulation and expressed it at the last committee meeting, and I was foolish enough to have started with that as a concept. So, I am sorry.

MR. COHEN: No, no. What Lee just said is right. There is an assumption that teaching methods courses solves problems of students knowing design and how to frame questions. Maybe some courses do, but most don't.

Lee is also right in saying that if students had opportunities to learn those things and apply them and, therefore, learn them more deeply, and apply them again and learn them more deeply, that would be cumulative, and we call that learning.

That would be a very good thing. It is pretty rare, as far as I can tell from my inquiries. In order for that to occur in any more than serendipitous ways in graduate education, there has to be a curriculum which creates the opportunities to learn those things and others and, for the reasons I was caricaturing in my talk, that is really difficult. Developing a progressive curriculum is devoutly to be wished, but it is not easy.

In addition to that, it is very difficult to develop a set of opportunities to learn in a field in which knowledge cumulation has been only modestly attended to.

Our field is much more marked by knowledge accumulation than by the growth of knowledge structures in some progressive way.

So, in order to solve the problem that I think Barbara was talking about, we would have to pay attention to more than just the graduate curriculum, because that curriculum and its products would swim in these larger seas.

If there are not evident returns to knowledge building in graduate education, then sooner or later we would feel it, in trying to do that kind of graduate education.

MR. FLODEN: One of the things Lee said is that he would expect -- I think it is Lee, I have lost track of it -- expect more commonality in some initial course work across programs across time.

Two related things. One is, I notice as we are talking, we tend to talk about our field as if this were sort of one thing.

I know in my college we have, I think, 14 different doctoral programs. So, it is a two-part question. One is, to what extent do any or all of you think that a single set of core experiences in the first year, say, is desirable, and the second is, do you have ideas about, if this is the sort of general thing, that it would be good to come to some more agreement across institutions about what it is that ought to be a part of initial things that one learns, how as a field we might make more progress toward that.

MR. SHULMAN: I would like to hear Margaret's comments about this, too, because that is precisely what you are trying to do a CU.

I suspect that Felice's observations about exceptionalism hold there too, Bob. We are not that much more complex than most other fields. We just get tribal earlier.

I would like to give a try, a serious try, at a core, and I think Margaret's observation that there were students who wanted to get some chance to paddle in the water that they came to Boulder for. There would have to be some trade off.

Yes, I was a product of the University of Chicago College, where we believed that the same core set of courses prepared anyone for anything, and it obviously did, except for the field of education, alas.

I mean, I think you could. You would have to fight enormous battles, because everybody -- it would be like the California social studies project. Everyone would like a chapter on their thing. It would be hard, but I would like to try it.

MR. COHEN: Partly, it depends on the size of institutions. It would be easier to do at my Michigan University than yours, just because yours is so huge.

I don't think it makes sense to think about this in general, but I do think that it makes very good sense to think about as much commonality as possible, as is reasonably feasible.

Lee's point is very, very important. If commonality is turned into the sort of usual American textbook approach, we don't need that.

On the second question, Bob, I would be inclined not to -- I would be inclined to hope that the committee would not urge an across the board effort at common standards of research education until we had some really good examples out there of what we think it should be like.

I would rather create commonality when we had a couple of outliers in the population. There is an enormous amount to be learned from comparisons, if we had a couple of really outstanding programs.

I would urge the committee to focus on trying to generate some of those, and use that as leverage on the rest of the field.

MR. KLAHR: Let me expand on that very issue in terms of quantifying what the problem is. I am an outsider to the field of education, and when I hear all these problems, I am not sure if people are talking about the average or the max, in one thing or another.

Are we talking about this problem existing, even at the very best top five or six places in the country, or are we talking about an average problem that we would like to improve.

If we think the five or six best places in the country are already pretty good, then Russ wants to add maybe five or six more that are equally as good, or he might even think the very top ones are not good enough and they need to be radically reconfigured also.

I guess I would like to hear from the three people on the panel, whether you see this problem as one that exists even at the very best school.

We saw this morning, 4,000 PhDs in education, and Russ is proposing a solution that will put out maybe another 100 a year.

That may be all you need. A hundred great people maybe can do better than 4,000 mediocre people, but I just don't get a sense of what people have in mind when they talk about this. Is it the cutting edge that is really dull, or is it the mean that is just not as good as you would like it to be.

MR. WHITEHURST: I speak without deep familiarity with the range of schools of education in the nation. I think, though, that even the best have problems in terms of the training of education researchers.

This, unfortunately, is anecdotal, but I have certainly heard from colleagues in the leading schools of education, that talked to me about the difficulty they have attracting students, because the culture is not one that is generally supportive of training for a research career.

So, there are tugs away at those students, and ways to diminish their motivation that are not ideal. It is not the people.

Each of the best schools of education has national treasures, but the culture for training graduate students for doing research is generally not a strong one. So, yes, I think even the best ones need --

MR. COHEN: Even where there is good sort of beginning research training -- and there is at several places -- as far as I can determine from asking my colleagues, there is not a structured progressive curriculum that requires students to use what they hopefully learned in those introductory methods courses, in research design in serious substantive work on through the second and third year of course work, and their prelims and thesis.

That kind of a structured curriculum, it does exist in some pockets. There are some ed psych programs that have something like that but, as far as I can tell, from casual empirical inquiry, it is pretty rare.

MR. SHULMAN: I would agree. I look at the vigor program in mathematics that NSF sponsored, and is still sponsoring.

The best departments in the country got that money. It wasn't the departments in need of remediation. Their argument was that mathematics, as a field, is changing. The expectations and demands for mathematicians are changing.

They also were confronting the fact that, in many of the fine departments, a majority of their students were coming from overseas. They couldn't recruit domestic doctoral programs in mathematics or the mathematical sciences. This was an issue for them.

Also, the political reason. If our most prestigious departments don't publicly announce that they are in the process of re-examining and redesigning doctoral education, then what is the motivation for the next group of good, but not prestigious, necessarily, departments for saying they ought to do it, too. I think there are all kinds of reasons to think of this as a communal opportunity.

MS. EISENHART: We know, from engineering and business and medicine that innovation is not cheap. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of funding.

What I wanted to push the three of you on is, if you could have your own wish list of some creative way of funding that isn't now currently available, what would you suggest?

MR. COHEN: Lee generously deferred to me. There is nothing like having one of your colleagues serve you up a fat one. Thanks, Lee.

This is one of the worst times in recent history to be trying to think about the answer to that question. When I finished speaking earlier, Ellen came over to me and said, that is very nice, but you didn't address the big question. I said, which one was that, and she said, money, honey.

She is right. This really is a terrible time. The University of Michigan has taken big cuts, and it is going to take at least as big cuts this coming year, and it is going to do real damage to our school and to others.

I am pretty sure that, at a university like the University of Michigan, which is a serious professional school university, I mean, the humanities and sciences are hugely important.

It is a university that understands professional schools and cares about them and, in that sense, it is like UCLA and other places.

I am pretty sure that if the ed school, perhaps in conjunction with a few other parts of the university, and said to him, here is a plan that will allow us to do a much better job of meeting our professional responsibilities in the education of professionals, that will therefore allow us to do a much better job in helping weak schools in difficult districts in Michigan, and that will help us to do better research training -- that is a three part menu that is important, especially to public universities that care about professionalism -- I think the chances are somewhere around eight in ten that the provost would say, let's do it, and I will bust my hump and help you raise the money and do the things that need to be done inside the university and with funders to do it.

In order for my school to do this, it would have to not just reach out to a few other schools and departments, but it would have to be willing to not turn itself exactly inside out, but to make some very substantial changes.

It would have to be willing to do those things for 10 or 15 years to get sufficiently far down the road to have something that was reasonably decent and institutionalized.

I think the support is out there, at this point in American history, for that sort of thing, even given the miserable fiscal situation in the states.

The support is there because schooling has moved so far up on the national and state agenda. It is a real opportunity, but it would take a lot of imagination and a lot of persistence. I think it could be done.

MR. WHITEHURST: I think if you look at the history of funding of doctoral and research training in other professions, the federal government has always carried most of the water there.

There has to be a core of funding, and it can be in fellowships. Certainly at EIS we are going to do our part there.

I also think that schools of education and programs can be a bit more entrepreneurial in terms of developing funds.

In the department I used to chair, faculty members could not submit grants over my signature unless they had support lines for two graduate students in the applications.

That generated a core of funding for graduate students that was quite important to the department's ability to support graduate students for four years.

There are probably, in many situations in education, possibilities for funding off campus when research and practice intertwine.

Chicago, for example, where there is a large group of investigators that focus on the Chicago school system and how data and research can improve the system, there are opportunities there for stipends that are connected with research training.

Again, the federal government is going to have to step up and there is going to have to be a substantial core of support for doctoral training in educational science.

MR. SHULMAN: The dirty little secret that I have to confess to is that all of those reports you heard about people doing this or that as part of the Carnegie initiative on the doctorate, those of you who aren't part of the CID may think that the way they were able to do that is because the Carnegie Foundation gives each department big bucks to do this.

The fact is there isn't a penny we give each of those departments. Yet, there are 85 departments across 55 universities or something, that are participating in these initiatives.

Now, would it be better if we did have more money? Probably, if we could give enough money, but it has meant that they have gone to provosts, and they have gotten money for a research assistant, money for this and that.

The fact is that, if you are doing it with your own internal resources, at least you don't lose sleep over what is going to happen to the program when the money runs out. There may be some real truth to that.

The other thing is that, just like the VIGRE program in the NSF did not try to affect all of doctoral education in mathematics in every institution in the country simultaneously, this sort of thing is going to probably have to begin with a small number of places who are willing not only to take the chances associated with doing something significant, but becoming part of a community of scholars that agrees to study the consequences of what you are doing and to share and exchange data.

I agree with David entirely. Let's not precipitously move to a homogeneous model of educational research training until we have gotten some time to look at natural and unnatural variations and begin to understand their consequences.

For that, we need not only the courage to experiment, but the courage to be open and to exchange data and information about how things work and for whom.

MS. LAGEMANN: Anything else from the committee? Okay, the floor is open. Don't forget to stand by the mike and say who you are.

MS. PETERSON: A lot of what the panel has talked about this afternoon and this morning is about how we can change our programs to have core knowledge, the core things we want our students to learn, in order to learn how to do research, creating a community and a cohort of doctoral students that go through it together.

I am very sympathetic to that, given that I just realized that three people from my doctoral cohort from Stanford are here in this room. Therefore, we must have gotten great training at Stanford, and we are really great and visible in the field.

On the other hand, I have always believed very strongly in individual differences. I wonder if you might b willing to comment on the extent to which it might be important also to think about, maybe think about what we expect individuals to be like in terms of their skills, their expertise, when they are fantastic education researchers and then sort of where they start.

I actually am struck by the great variability in terms of experience that people that come into our -- I will just use our learning sciences program as an example, since I teach the doctoral course in that

I just think about the four learning sciences doctoral students that are on my research project with Jim Spelon(?).

There is a white woman who is an undergraduate psych major who worked on after school programs. There is a white male who is an undergraduate computer science major. There is a Latino male who has an MBA from Stanford and was a physics undergraduate major, and an African American female who was a teacher in the Chicago public schools and has some administrative experience.

Now, these are our four research assistants and doctoral students, and we are working on issues of learning and organizational change and leadership.

I think they come in with actually very different experiences, but they are marching through our learning sciences doctoral program and I think, in some sense, we treat them as though they are the same.

We don't think about the fact that some of them may need -- I mean, the computer science kid knows a lot about modeling and doing tools, but he really doesn't know much about research and needs to learn about that.

The psych major actually knows a lot about research, doesn't know much about schools because she worked on after school programs, if you think about what we might give them, and where we want them to be.

The other thing I am struck by in this conversation -- and this probably isn't true -- but one could make the assumption that, from what we have said today, we assume that people are going to spring full blown from our doctoral programs as full fledged researchers, voila.

I think someone did suggest that we not think that way about teachers any more. I mean, we think they have to be mentored when they get out into the schools.

Most of our students we encourage to do post docs after they leave our program. In fact, the people we are hiring as assistant professors have done post docs. So, it is like a continuation in their life course trajectory as researchers.

I just wonder if you might comment on to what extent you think it might be helpful to sort of think of these individuals who are going through our programs, and whether we could think more about the outcomes and whether that would help, or whether it is really one size fits all.

MS. LAGEMANN: Who wants to respond to that one?

MR. WHITEHURST: I will take a shot at it. In doing so, I will try to produce a contrast between my colleagues here.

I, in fact, am not enthusiastic about a curriculum in terms of a set of course experiences that take three years that cumulate in the training one needs to be a researcher.

I am more in favor of a minimalist curriculum where there is a core of methodology and statistics and, beyond that, students pursue their own interests.

With that core, there could be students interested in reading, students interested in math and students interested in cognitive science and students interested in all manner of things.

They will pursue those interests based on the mentors they seek out and the experiences they generate for themselves.

So, the curriculum is not so much a set of experiences that everyone shares but, rather, a set of requirements, of products, that everyone produces, and those products will surely evidence the individual differences in interests and approach that students bring to a graduate experience, and are devilishly hard to stamp out, in my experience.

MS. BENBOW: Camilla Benbow, Vanderbilt University. What we have been talking about a lot today is a talent development phase. What we have spoken a little bit about and touched on is the talent identification part.

Part of, I think, the problem here is getting the right people on the bus, identifying the right people. So, I am going to touch on that just a little bit, and see if that can't be part of our thinking.

As part of another research project that I am doing, we decided to do a survey, which is an hour and a half long.

So, it is a comprehensive survey of graduate students in the math sciences, in the very best graduate programs in this country. These were in chemistry, physics and so on, the very best.

We were doing this for other reasons, but it relates to what we are talking about today. We were looking at, what were the experiences that these students had that got them to there, and then what are the experiences they had moving on.

We are also following these people up. So, we first surveyed them at age 23, 24, when they were second year graduate students. Half of them are females, half are males.

We are following them up at age 33. We know that these students, now age 33, these individuals we surveyed are becoming the professors, the researchers, and so on. So, we picked the right group to survey.

When we look at that, and you look back on these students' lives, these people were interested in research for a very long time.

You can look at their development back from fifth grade, seventh grade, tenth grade, college, being invested and involved in research.

So, what I am talking about here, how can we put together a set of experiences that can take individuals when they are sort of malleable and interested, maybe in social science and helping people, but twist them and move them toward education.

So, how can we get together? So, can we do something like the math and sciences do, where you can get money in great good research grants that you can get undergraduates on, perhaps some advanced high school students on, that can start twisting that twig, moving that twig and bending it a little bit so that they move toward education.

I work with gifted kids. Gifted kids who are interested in education are always told, don't go there. That is a waste of your talents.

Now, how can we change that? If we don't address who is going to become a graduate student in the first place, what we are doing is trying to remediate.

I have heard a lot of remediation today. We have got to teach them how to think logically. I thought, oh, okay, that is good. It is good to learn, but we are doing it in the sense that they are not coming in with the right set of attributes. How can we bring those students in?

Then I would like to say, too, so that is one aspect, who we think about and the sort of experiences so that we can increase the pool that we are recruiting from.

Then a second part is, what we have been doing at Vanderbilt, we have been looking at our graduate programs in terms of training educational researchers, and we feel that we can do a better job.

One of the things that we have been doing is thinking about reverse engineering. Let's look at the people who are successful and look at the experiences that they had, and go back and make sure that you have put similar things.

I haven't heard people kind of empirically looking at it. Here comes my own bent, empirically coming back and see what is there.

It comes back to the apprenticeship. I have heard so much about common core and so on, and the methodologies, but I have heard relatively little talking about the importance of structuring wonderful apprenticeship opportunities where they learn those research skills.

I think about my own self. When I really learned it was when I was doing it. So, I guess there are two things about that.

Are you, as a committee, could you put more emphasis on apprenticeship, but also can there be programs to really bring the right people into education. I think that kind of picked up a little bit on what you were saying earlier today.

MR. SHULMAN: Well, a couple of things. One, I think we were talking about apprenticeships a fair amount, Camilla, but with the notion of, if you will, non-capricious apprenticeships.

If you apprentice to someone, it is only if you have a period of training as long as medical education, for example, which now seems to take about nine years, that you can afford to let the curriculum be dictated by what patients happen to walk into the hospital this week, which is basically what happens, or what the specialty of the chief of medicine is in the place where you are a resident.

I think this is where Russ and I, I think, do disagree. I think you do have to think in more design terms and more curricular terms precisely about the apprenticeship.

I don't see it all as courses. I don't think anybody sees it all as courses. As with any apprenticeship, it begins with more formal controlled kinds of interactions and, slowly but surely, evolves into experiences where the apprentice is taking more and more responsibility for doing the kind of work that was previously being modeled and just observed in a kind of peripheral way.

I agree with Penelope about the variability. Just to reiterate what I said earlier, that is precisely the kind of variability that we see in a growing number of professions, like even medicine, as well as law.

I think those demonstrate the fact that you can have a great deal of variability, still introduce a common socialization and early training experience that creates a community of discourse for the profession, where people do develop a common language, a common set of habits of mind and what have you, and then still have enough flexibility of apprenticeship and individual development so that you don't end up with a set of clones.

It is, again, an essential tension, I think, and we have tended, in our field, in my view, to err on the side of honoring the individuality to the point where there is no professional community, or there is one of a very limited character, and I worry about that.

MR. WHITEHURST: I think if you start with a community of scholars that share a ground, a set of assumptions, and have part of the culture of that community to include the production of graduate students who succeed in research careers, that that will probably do it.

The idea of providing a set of apprenticeship experiences from which one could learn each of the tools that is necessary for the profession will compete with what a student can get out of intensive work with a faculty member that generates the products that make that student marketable, on the market.

I think if you have a student who has developed a core set of skills with one apprenticeship experience, has had some core methodology and statistical courses, that make that student aware that there are other worlds and other tools, and have that student finish graduate school with publications and experience applying for grants, that they will be successful.

Your point about undergraduate training is an important one. I actually had not thought about it, and I think that is an wonderful point. There needs to be a pipeline at the undergraduate level as well, and how to produce it is a critical issue.

MR. SHULMAN: Although an addendum, and that is that the doctoral educators in some of the other science fields talk about one of their problems being the discovery, as students really move through their doctoral experience -- these are well selected students.

I think about the chemistry program at Michigan as an example. They make the discovery that a lot of their students are really more interested in education in chemistry than they are in joining Proctor and Gamble, or the Michigan State chemistry department.

It may be that we don't have to go to the junior high. We may be able to poach locally. I am very serious, and maybe solve a shared kind of problem.

MS. JONES: I am Vanetta Jones, dean of the school of education at Howard University. When Ellen asked if some of us, as fellow beings, would step up to the plate and share some experiences vis-a-vis these issues, I decided that I would.

Howard is the only historically black college that is a research intensive university. We are a school of education that is an urban school of education focusing on issues of diversity.

We see ourselves as preparing both those in the professional area and researchers, who have, as a part of our mission, a part of their commitment and interest, to provide leadership as professionals and do research in the areas that are the most difficult, as we see it, and increasingly so as the K-12 population becomes more diverse.

We, like other schools of education, find ourselves living in interesting times. With all the change, though, and with all the new ideas that are being looked at, I think that it is a great time of opportunity.

We have many of the challenges that have been discussed here today, the dichotomy and the fuzziness between the EdD and the PhD.

Some of our programs that are clearly professional -- like we have an EdD in urban educational leadership, but some of the others that offer, you can make a choice between EdD and PhD, the main difference seems to be the number of methodology courses that students take.

We have used, well, in the latest instance, NCATE, preparation for NCATE, as a tool to look carefully across programs, across departments, and throughout the university, in connection with other schools, at what it is that we are doing, clearly defining what we are trying to do, and looking at changing a number of things.

I think that those schools that are involved with other outside third partners have wonderful opportunities to look at some of the ways that they can change.

I think, quite frankly, if all of us are honest with ourselves, times have changed and are changing, and we have to look at better ways to address to meet the kinds of things that we want to meet.

We are particularly aware of diversity and shortage issues. Achievement gaps are widening. The college going and success rate gaps are widening, those in PhD and so on.

Howard produces a good percentage of African American black PhDs in the country, and trying to see to it that we are producing them not only with a commitment and interest, but with the highest and broadest level of skills is very important.

We have a commitment to providing the kind of mixed methodologies, so that they are not crippled, I think, in terms of not having a repertoire of strategies to draw from.

Finally, I would say a concern that I voiced somewhat yesterday, around the lack of diversity in the education research pool, when the issues are increasingly around issues of diversity, I think that just as in the field of health, the introduction of large numbers of women as doctors and researchers brought about the focus on breast cancer and other issues that were not answered or raised before they were there, I think that the absence of a sizeable number of those from different backgrounds will leave unanswered some of the questions that could have been answered, or some of the perspectives that might be given in terms of how we might answer the questions of what works, what doesn't work, with whom, how, and under what conditions that we can come up with.

So, I think that the issue of diversity of those going into education research is a quality issue for the extent to which we can adequately address the huge challenges that we have in American education, which are ones that go beyond our individual disciplines and go to the very fabric and core of life in America as we know it.

MR. READ: I am Charles Read. I am the dean of the school of education at the University of Wisconsin. As Vanetta said, Ellen invited some of the deans in the group to step up and talk about the practical problems of implementing some of the ideas for reform that we have heard.

So, I will try to do that, although I am not sure what question will come out of it. Let me just give you a dean's point of view.

I really resonated to Lee's proposal for an EdD, a degree for practitioners -- let's call it the EdD -- that actually meets their needs, and is rigorous and respected and, at the same time, distinguishes that degree from the research degree.

I was ready to carry this back to the department of curriculum instruction, the department of educational administration, Lee, but I cooled just a bit when I thought about what I would have to do, even assuming that they came together around your proposal.

I would have to make sure that the school of education, academic planning council and the university academic planning council and the provost and the chancellor were all equally convinced.

Then I personally would have to sell this to the University of Wisconsin system, and the regents, in an environment where no public university in the state of Wisconsin offers an EdD. There is no such thing.

Selling new degree programs these days is not the easiest job. Again, I would be perfectly happy to take a shot at that, if I had the kind of proposal that you have in mind, Lee, but that would only be the beginning of the sales job. I mean, then we would have to persuade the prospective students about the value of this new degree.

Karen Simms Gallagher talked about the importance of tuition. It is a little different for a public university. Tuition is only 15 percent of the support for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It doesn't matter, because we still have to have students. I mean, it doesn't matter what the source of funds is. We still have to persuade students of the vision for this degree.

That would actually, I suspect, be the bigger sales job. It is not impossible, but this would certainly be a substantial undertaking.

Now, while I have the microphone, let me say just a little bit about the supply issue in another way. I said to Felice, after her presentation this morning, that if you look back at her Table 2, she I think did us a real service by trying to disaggregate the doctoral degrees.

The top part of her Table 2 actually had roughly 1,000 research PhDs in education in a variety of fields, and that is a very important disaggregation for us. I realize it is only an approximation, and it could be wrong.

You notice in her Table 2 that just about half of those PhDs were in higher education evaluation and research. Now, I submit that is a different market.

Those folks primarily are not going to be constructing and testing theories of higher education. They are going to be in the business of conducting institutional research.

They are going to be answering questions from provosts, chancellors, governing boards, trustees, regents and so on, about institutions. That is where their research skills will be used. I would suggest that is a different market.

Of the remaining 500, about two thirds in Felice's table were in ed psych. That means that the supply of PhDs in the rest of the fields -- CNI, for example, foundations, philosophy, history of education -- is relatively limited.

Now, if there are only about 100 research institutions in the country -- and that was another part of Felice's -- if that is right, then maybe that is okay. Maybe the supply and the demand are more or less in balance.

Felice's table does fit with my experience as a dean, and I wonder what other deans in the group or others in the group have experienced, that the market for solid research, well prepared researchers in ed psych is rather better developed than some of our other fields.

When we do a search in ed psych, we are likely to be looking at more attractive choices than in some of the other fields.

I think Felice's table, even though it is a first approximation, tends to bear that out. As I said in the beginning, I am not sure what question comes out of this, whether that equates with other people's experience.

MS. LAGEMANN: That is fine, thanks, Chuck.

MS. BLOOM: Peggy Fong Bloom from Loyola University, Chicago. Dean Read pretty much covered one of the aspects that I wanted to mention, and that is the practical reality of an institution that relies upon the school of education to produce a certain number of enrollments every year. That is an unfortunate thing, but that is a reality that we deal with.

I would love to just shut down my PhD, and in fact have wanted to, for a period of time to do exactly what Lee suggested. It is just selling that idea that, then, at the different layers gets heavy.

The other piece that I haven't heard yet, and it is again, one of those deep horrible skeletons in the closet, is that, out of 43 faculty, I can only think of a couple that really should be directing dissertations.

Some of those, it is not -- some of them have come out of programs that are just the same. So, it is not that they are not good people or they are capable people, but they didn't come out of decent training programs.

So, when I look at the applicants for jobs in curriculum instruction and in educational leadership, I am appalled at their training.

I need them. I mean, I have got things to do. I have got doctoral students. So, I think part of whatever it is that we are talking about here has to be what can we do at mid-career for some of our ed school faculty, who actually have the capabilities and the desire but don't have the basic training and skills themselves.

MR. SHULMAN: Just before Karen says anything, if I could just first of all applaud you for the courage of saying what you said, and also remind us that there are probably faculty members in a number of our schools that have exquisite methodological and disciplinary training who ought not to be directing dissertations in education either.

To do -- we don't need someone who has got exquisite training in experimental psychology to direct research and do research that would be simply quite appropriate in experimental psych.

What is the value added, what is the utility of having a high level professional school, if it is simply redundant with what else goes on in the institution. I think that was a very courageous thing to observe.

MR. COHEN: Forgive me for putting off your comment for another two minutes. There are two ways to deal with this problem.

Aside from mid-career training and so on, if the institutions that we all work in don't take this seriously, sooner or later somebody else is going to do it, and it is going to be a train wreck.

So, aside from whether someone has exactly the right solution to a very general problem, it is really distressing that none of these institutions have taken even the teensiest baby step toward dealing with a pretty large problem.

If they would make a few steps in that direction, I am sure we could think of a bunch of different ways to begin to address that, but no one is doing it.

MS. GALLAGHER: Lee was very kind in making some comments about what we are doing at USC. So, I would like to say a few things about what we are doing, and I want to pick up on what several have said, David in particular.

What we are doing at USC is by no means, we think, a model for everyone else. For the last two years, we have been trying to carve out a coherent, shared understanding of what urban ed is.

That is what our mission is. We are a private university in the middle of south central Los Angeles. We have long ties with L.A. Unified School District and other public schools.

The university itself believes it is a private university with a public mission. So, what does that mean for us.

So, for the last two years, we have been trying to carve out a conceptual coherence. What do we mean by urban ed? What do we mean by core courses? Not everyone else, but what do we mean by that so that we can move forward.

We have also tried to put some coherence around the context we are in. Besides being a private university, in the school of ed, our budget is 92 percent tuition.

What we do, you know, you have got to pay attention. I am also a revenue centered management, which means I can't go to my provost and say, hey, I have got this good idea, will you fund it because he is going to say, well, what are you going to stop doing.

You have the authority. You are a revenue center. You get all your money. What are you going to stop doing so that you can do something else. You do have to be able to make priorities and then really put your money where your priorities are.

If I thought that was difficult, moving a faculty of 47 -- and we are smaller, and I believe that does make a difference. For two years we have been working on this, to make the conceptual and sort of the contextual coherence.

We are now into actually taking these good ideas and implementing them, and we are discovering that one of the things that was causing us not to be able to work together coherently was our divisions, our academic divisions.

So, I eliminated them. I just said last year, away they go, which maybe it was because so many other things were changing, no one really recognized what that really meant.

Now we do. Now we have committees around degree programs. So, all the people who are doing the EdD are doing that. It is the same people, some of them, who are doing the PhD.

That is a coherence. You have to match your structure and the way you do business and the way you make decisions with what you are trying to accomplish.

That is really tough. That is when we discovered that the ways we had been doing things, oh, you mean I have to change that.

Right now, we no longer have our structure for promotion tenure. We have got two faculty members, two new faculty members going up for tenure. We don't have our old P and T structure.

These are good people. So, we are trying to move in this very big, moving context, and it is -- what I am struggling to do as dean is to help the faculty realize that being on the cutting edge of doing all this, they want to be there, but they feel much more like we are in the age of discovery and we have just discovered a new land.

While we think that is great, we are kind of scared that we are the only ones there. I wish I could have brought all my 47 faculty here to hear the reinforcement. You talked about a lot of the things that we have agreed.

They get really nervous, because they look around and they don't see anybody else behaving and doing the things that we are doing.

So, sort of confession of a change addict junkie dean here. This has been very cathartic for me. I want to take it back and talk.

Again, it is so that we know that what we have decided seems to be going on the right track. It is not this is not what everyone else is doing. I will not take that back because that is not, in fact, what I hear us talking about. So, thank you. I feel so much better.

MS. LAGEMANN: Karen, I am very glad to hear what you have said, because we have wiped out the ed departments, too, and are running the school entirely with a committee structure, and we also feel nervous. So, I can't wait to go home and tell people that you, at USC, are doing the same thing.

MS. BLACKWELL: Peggy Blackwell, from the University of New Mexico. Speaking about doing away with departments, I came into the deanship of our ed school -- I am not dean any longer, for which I am eternally grateful -- in a time when our college was troubled.

We, too, as a part of our restructuring mandated by the regents, eliminated departments. The faculty liked it.

The administration -- that is, the academic side -- like it, thought that we were doing some good things. We had the goal of strengthening research.

As deans, I had -- before I was dean -- gotten very kind of distressed by the fact that our departments were called balkan states. They were tribes unto themselves, and decided that each department had to have its own expert in research to teach research courses, which had, I thought, diminished the quality of research preparation immeasurably. So, the idea of doing away with departments, one reason was to strengthen research.

Another idea I had was that we would be more permeable, that, in fact, faculty could collaborate across what used to be department lines. They might even meet each other, and that we would begin to get some cross fertilization that led to new and better things.

I also thought that having a research agenda in our college might be a very good thing. In New Mexico, why not issues of language, literacy and culture? Shot down by cries of academic freedom, and how dare the dean tell us what to do.

Ultimately, our idea to flatten the college out without departments was eliminated by the registrar's office, which brings up the issue that perhaps the panel could consider, that Charles talked about a little bit, which is the role of the larger university in what is happening in ed schools.

Certainly I found out that the registrar's office had their template for the catalogue and the schedule and you dare not go against it.

So, that is one point. Without doing what a former governor of ours referred to as opening a box of Pandoras, I think that the role of graduate schools also needs to be explored in this.

The dean at Iowa State last week, at another conference I was at, said that their university had voted to eliminate their department of graduate studies, or their school of graduate studies, or whatever they called it, which I thought was one of the greater advancements. So, that is an issue I wish to bring up.

One of the things that we get, that people talk to us about all the time, and that we are really quite good at, is partnership with public schools.

We have a very formal, funded partnership with the Albuquerque public schools that stems from about 1968. One of the larger issues in thinking about the preparation of good education researchers is how that occurs in partnerships with schools.

I think there is limitless opportunity there that we have not explored, and that warrants serious investigation.

MS. MC CUTCHEN: I am Deborah McCutchen from the University of Washington. I have maybe a really naive question about the fundamental critique here. Forgive me, I am going to lapse into my former life as a cognitive psychologist.

I seem to sense two underlying mental models here about research in education. They seem to relate to the kind of dual life we live in research universities with teacher education programs.

One mental model that I thought I heard seemed to be kind of cleaving apart the researchers in the colleges of education from those who did the professional training.

I thought I heard people characterize it as those who really like to teach and are really good at it versus the researchers.

An alternative mental model that I thought I heard was one about kind of melding the professional aspect of our discipline with the research aspect of our discipline.

It seems to me the implications are different, depending on the mental model you adopt for what I do when I go back to my faculty in Seattle.

One implication is that we have our teacher ed faculty and we have our research faculty, and our research faculty should model themselves after the disciplines and do research like the disciplines.

Is that the critique, that we are not doing research as well as the other disciplines, or is the critique that we are not doing research in our discipline, that furthers our discipline.

I would like to hear the panel's views on what is the mental model underlying your various perspectives, and what does that have to do with our dual roles.

Do we have researchers and teacher educators or do we have research on education that includes teaching and learning and schooling.

MR. SHULMAN: If I can respond a bit, Deborah, one of the lovely things about mental models is that two incompatible ones can coexist happily in the same mind, which is why all of us retain a shred of sanity.

Just to take a very personal example, Bob Floden and I were colleagues at Michigan State. At the same time that we were team teaching a fundamental foundations course in teacher education, we were also colleagues in the Institute for Research on Teaching, both doing research and mentoring doctoral students.

We happened to be doing both, but we understood the difference between the two constituencies. So, we are not necessarily calling for giving up the notion that there will be working scholars who are also quite ready and capable of engaging in professional education.

I think our medical schools are good examples of that. Our law schools are examples. On the other hand, there are some faculty in all of those faculties who are clearly specialized in the clinical education piece, and others who are clearly in whatever the equivalent of the lab is in that setting.

I don't think we need a single mental model here, unless it is a very complicated one. I just don't see those as incompatible perspectives.

MR. COHEN: I never was a psychologist, so I probably can't have a mental model. I agree with what Lee said, but I would go further and say that I am deeply skeptical of faculty members who do professional education but cannot educe evidence to illuminate or justify what they do.

I do not mean to imply that they should be conducting randomized experiments on their students. I do mean to suggest that we have many, many colleagues who, to steal a term from Lee, practice, but do not have a scholarship of practice.

That is a humongous problem. It is just a very, very big problem. So, not everyone needs to be a researcher, but if one is doing graduate professional education, one needs to be able to bring evidence to bear on what one does.

MS. LAGEMANN: Final comments, questions? Otherwise, we will dash for the airport. Thank you all for coming. I think this has been a very rich discussion.

Yesterday, Joe Tobin wrapped up our conversation for the day very elegantly and I am not even going to try to do that.

It seems to me it is quite clear the things that we focused on, the status of schools of education, the whole issue of science, money, and a number of other ones

Thanks again for coming, and we will try to take everything into account as we put together our report.

[Applause.]