Multiple Paths to Prestige: A Re-Examination of the Historical Narratives about Elite Graduate Schools of Education

Abstract

The Ed School reforms that academics advocate for vary wildly, but they begin from a remarkably similar set of assumptions about what these institutions are and how they came to be. A closer examination of this work suggests that one potential reason for these similarities is that regardless of disciplinary approach, scholars largely rely on historical studies that only sought to identify common themes, a limitation that their respective authors repeatedly expressed. Yet, the central findings of these texts have largely gone unexamined, leading scholars to continue to assume that Ed Schools faced the same set of pressures, that their shared circumstances led them to act in the same way during important inflection points in their history, and that because they could not appease all their stakeholders at once, they chose to focus on rising higher in academia’s pecking order. Underlying all of these assumptions is an even more fundamental belief about Ed School reform: that the complex web of forces that constrain these institutions binds them so completely that meaningful change is not possible in the current paradigm, and so Ed Schools need to change dramatically if they want to escape the unenviable position they have been in for over a century. This dissertation draws on the history of three elite Ed Schools, the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (PennGSE), and Teachers College at Columbia (TC) to show that the foundational assumptions of these debates need to be reevaluated. Outside of milestone anniversary celebrations, Ed Schools rarely consider their own histories, and so these relatively young professional schools have even shorter institutional memories. As a result, when decision makers in Ed Schools try to contextualize the problems they seek to solve, they instead turn to their peers and the existing scholarship about Ed Schools for guidance, and so they begin with a belief that they face insurmountable obstacles. This dissertation shows that a closer look at an Ed School’s institutional history often tells a different story, and that the relationships these institutions had with their stakeholders also created incentives to pursue other forms of prestige and influence, and so they were less homogenous than the existing scholarship suggests. I show that in addition to seeking prestige via the production of “basic” research, faculty at elite Ed Schools also sought status in ways that carry a reputational cost in academia, including through the training of practitioners, helping school districts apply research to practice, influencing the development of regional institutions and education policy, and gaining primacy over less prestigious vocational fields by offering programs outside of K-12 education.