Chapter 8: The Doctoral Pandemic: How and Why Doctoral Programs Need to be Purged

Current issues affecting doctoral programs in teacher education, including the meaning of curriculum, assessment of learning, and the role of professional identity within programs are usually addressed with an emerging practice guided by the fear of market forces (Adair Breault & Callejo Perez, 2012). Rubrics now represent the recent and troubling shifts in doctoral education where institutions have exchanged meaningful mentorship and personal journeys of intellectual growth for fast tracks to professional credentials (Normore & Cook, 2011). While rubrics in P–12 education and even in undergraduate education may provide scaffolding and clear articulation of expectations (or at least this is often the stated intention), in doctoral programs they are often instruments of certainty and efficiency—feeding the common lament of students to “just tell them what to do” (Haymore Sandholtz & Shea, 2012). This is particularly true in teacher education and educational leadership programs where so much of the emphasis in graduate work focuses on professional credentials. Additionally, as education doctoral programs have increased, overwhelmed faculty (Banta, Jones, & Black, 2009) have moved toward the creation of dissertation rubrics to ease the burden on supervising research and burden on faculty. One popular process is structuring a doctoral program around the final product—the dissertation—creating a blend of research courses and writing seminars that complete parts of the dissertation as the student progresses through the program. These programs rely on heavy course loads that in and of themselves become a “rubric,” which often does not prepare the graduate for the academy, instead provides a structured checkbox process that leads to degree completion (Graham, Selmer, & Goodykoontz, 2011).