A few weeks ago an anonymous Protonmail user pointed me1A slew of news outlets around here were also contacted. I couldn’t find any follow up in either News-Gazette or WCIA, however. to this remarkable site. There the author shows that the current superintendent of the Urbana School District, Dr. Ivory-Tatum (not infrequent character on this blog), plagiarized chunks of her thesis, written for her EdD degree defended at the College of Education of the UIUC a while ago.
A bit of context is due.
Educational doctoral degrees became a fixture in the school administrative circles around 1990′: in the last third of the past century the fraction of superintendents with a doctorate grew to about half, and having an EdD degree became, since the turn of the century, essentially a rule, especially in the large school districts.
One can speculate at length about the underlying causes for this process.2There are numerous cases of largely useless filters in various professions, ranging from coerced membership in Hanseatic merchant guilds to self-imposed shortage of medical doctors in rural America, but we will defer the report on this fascinating topic to a separate post. Enough to say that anyone hoping to become a principal or superintendent in a medium or large school district (well paid, well removed from the classroom jobs) is expected to have a doctoral degree, preferably in educational leadership.
Universities are there to help: to them this is a godsent market opportunity. Unlike graduate students in, say, chemistry or computer science who are assured stipends and tuition waivers, schools of education charge their graduate students. And there are a lot of them!
Let’s have a look at our (UIUC) College of Education. In the Spring semester of this year, out of 1751 students in the College, 936 were pursuing a doctoral degree (some more working on a Master’s one).
Some of these graduate students will stay in academia. But most of them are current school administrators, and are doing their degrees with a clear career goal, to get promoted. In other words, our beautiful flagship campus seems to be more focused on churning out school principals and superintendents than actual teachers.
Each of these graduate students pays thousands in tuition per semester, making the College of Education a cherished cash cow for the University. The graduate students themselves obviously consider this expense as a necessary investment to get to that well-paying jobs a few years down the road. (If you are going to be a mere teacher in Urbana School District, this investment would not pay off, as we know all too well…)
As it happens, to get that Ed degree, you need to write a thesis. Ours being a capitalist society, an efficient system emerged which doesn’t require from a doctoral student too much of intellectual effort. The prevalent model is to write about one’s experiences (the terms like autoethnography are used) within the educational system, rendering them in terms of the educational theories du jour. In practice, this means we are dealing with trivialized, flattened derivatives of the continental critical theories. As the original was never too operational or transparent to begin with, the results are normally unpalatable.
But without a thesis, there is no degree, and without a degree, there is no promotion. So, Dr. Brandon Caffey (USD116 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Director) writes on the Influence of Hip Hop Culture on an African-American Male’s Culturally Responsive Leadership. Dr. Wiemelt (USD116 Secondary Multilingual and Alternative/Inclusionary Programs Executive Director) writes on Critical Bilingual Leadership: LIDERAZGO for Emergent Bilingual Latin@ Students, Dr. Ivory-Tatum (USD116 Superintendent) writes about Breaking The Cycle: African American Family Involvement And The Transition From Early Childhood To Elementary Education, and so on.
Needless to say, “aucun bruit ne se fit autour de ces essais“. Yet, whatever we, the lay people, think about their output, the educational bureaucracy pipeline is content with it.
The structure of these essays is rather uniform (I skimmed quite a few of them): literature survey followed by “methodology” 3One shouldn’t take this cosplay at science too seriously. As an example, Dr. Wiemelt’s thesis addresses the “research question” How do a school community and principal embody the tenets of liderazgo and foster a culturally and linguistically responsive school for EBLS? followed by the “research”, i.e., description of the experiences of the soon to be Doctor in Education in the school environment they are so eager to leave.
It is the literature survey, where Dr. Ivory-Tatum cut some corners, as the author behind the academic-dishonesty blog shows.
I feel, uncharacteristically, an urge to defend Dr. Ivory-Tatum on this front.
To apply the standards of scientific inquiry to her, and similar, works would mean we take their cosplay as researchers seriously. Why would we? why anyone would? It is clear that these educational graduate students do not engage into anything resembling scientific enterprise, with its pressure to make your results public, intense peer scrutiny, standards of intellectual honesty. According to a prominent member of educational establishment,4writing for current and aspiring superintendents “passing or failing [an educational dissertation] is largely a political decision.” Hard not to get the message that these theses are merely forgettable sacrifices to the indifferent gods of educational hierarchy.
So, why take them seriously? Why expect that the vaporware of a yet another treatise on “Storytelling as an epistemic framework for composers of social justice education“5actual title of a recent dissertation or suchlike is done in good faith? One shouldn’t. Did Dr. Ivory-Tatum cut some corners in her thesis? In all probability, she did. Is this a surprise? Not at all: we saw her gaslighting and manipulating where it matters, – as she was leading our school district from one disaster into the next, hurting real people, not non-existing readers of her thesis.
So let’s absolve her on that fake research, – who cares. She is a bad leader not for her well-hidden thesis. She is, because the results of her leadership are making all of us, and especially our kids, worse off, year after year.
That‘s why she should go.