The Education Department has begun receiving applications for its new master's program in Urban Education Policy, a 12-month course of study that will combine classwork with a nine-month internship. The program, which is being offered in collaboration with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, expects to enroll between 12 and 15 students beginning in June 2006.
Professor of Education and Public Policy Kenneth Wong began his first year at Brown this fall as the program's director and the first holder of the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair for Education Policy, a professorship funded by the Annenberg Institute's endowment. Wong will also teach one of the core courses of the UEP program, "Urban Politics and Urban Education Policy." The program will also draw on the expertise of a dozen other members of the Brown and Annenberg Institute faculties, including John Tyler, associate professor of education, public policy and economics and chair of the Education Department, and Cynthia Garcia Coll, professor of education, psychology and pediatrics.
The program - unusually short by graduate school standards - will prepare students for "a variety of professional careers involving policy analysis, planning and development in urban public education," according to the education department's Web site.
Its goal is to "produce people who not only have the requisite skills to step into very important positions in urban education, but also have the skills if they want to do advanced research or academic studies," Tyler said.
Wong expects that the program will draw students with a diverse collection of backgrounds. "We are very open-minded about that," he said, and students from multiple backgrounds can apply to this program with no work experience in education.
The idea for creating a new master's program in UEP emerged from the desire to "fill a national gap" in education, Wong said.
"Most urban districts are the ones that are really distressed," said Garcia Coll, who views the urban educational problem as systemic. She compares the task at hand to "trying to fix a broken, rusty engine" and said that few other programs address the particular issue of policy-making for structural school reform.
The idea is to "train a new generation of people that will have the kinds of skills that you need to really be in those positions, whether it's analyzing policy, designing policy, implementing policy," Tyler said.
All three professors noted the uniqueness of the small and narrowly focused program. While other universities such as Harvard or Yale offer master's degrees in general education, the graduating classes there vary from 400 to 600 students.
Another distinctive feature of the UEP program will be its integration of theoretical and research courses with a hands-on, practical internship. "We looked at other master's (programs) in education, and none of them tried to bring about that marriage of theory, research, practice and policy," Garcia Coll said.
The program's curriculum is highly structured and rigorous, "very un-Brown like in a sense," Tyler said. Out of the 10 courses students will take, eight will be required and only two will be elective. The nearly one-to-one faculty-to-student ratio should help students trying to balance their coursework with the nine-month internship. "What could make it work is to have course assignments that map on to the internship," Tyler said.
The internships will take place at participating local agencies, although some of the students might be placed as far away as Boston or Connecticut, Wong said. Potential employers include the governor's office and mayor's office, as well as the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council and Providence public schools. Wong said the students might write legislation, conduct research or perform data analysis about school funding. The internship will involve a time commitment of a few hours a week.
The decision to partner with the Annenberg Institute resulted from a "natural combination of expertise," Wong said.
From the start the Annenberg Institute helped with "planning the program" and "thinking through the curriculum," Tyler said. The Institute also agreed to provide faculty to teach courses during the summer. Discussions about possible team-taught courses, with mixed faculty from Brown and the Annenberg Institute, are still in progress.
Planning for the program's shape began in March 2004. The education department first had to find collaborators for the program, including the Institute and Brown's Education Alliance, and only then could it do "the hard work of creating a program from scratch that was going to be unique," Tyler said.
At present the program's partners are evaluating the courses and syllabi, "and we are going to start advertising rather quickly - we have to admit students next semester, and start teaching in June," said an enthusiastic Garcia Coll.
Wong said the program hopes to "create a community, not only this year, but in the long run." He said he hopes that within the next 10 years a whole generation of UEP alums can combine their skills and networks to work for educational reform.
Meanwhile, Tyler said he hopes the program will eventually be "recognized as producing people who'll make a difference in urban education."
