I’ve found it a bit difficult to find people with a personal experience in earning a doctorate degree in education. Thus, I turn to you college confidential! I’m currently an undergraduate student studying physics with a minor in education. I would love to be a high school science teacher but ultimately I would also like to strive for higher positions. My interests range from educational policy and administration to improving science education in low-income communities. I’ve done a lot of reading on what the typical path is and this is what I got. It seems to me that it goes teacher → principal → superintendent (give or take a position).
Anyway, I suppose I’m asking if anyone can give me professional advice on what graduate degree would be best, when would it be best to get it and where would be the best place to get it. It seems to me that it’s better to be a teacher for several years before applying to graduate school. When applying to graduate school, I would be looking at EdD programs then upon graduation applying to administrative jobs. Is this correct? Is it always an EdD or can it also be a phD in education leadership/policy?
Note: I’d appreciate it if people the people that respond to this forum are experienced or knowledgeable about the programs and not some uppity snob questioning my career choices. Thank you!
@valgreen - Welcome to the forum. It would probably help to get thoughtful responses if you had left out that last sentence. No one will question your career choices. Teaching is a great profession and aspiring to be a principal or more is fine. You are right about likely needing an EdD or a PhD. I am pretty sure that either would suffice for your goals. However, there is no need to get it right away. Start teaching first and then take some time off to get your advanced degree once you know which one will be the best choice for your career.
@xraymancs Thank you for your response! I sincerely wish I didn’t have to add that but I’ve gone through enough forums to see aspiring teachers getting things like “why don’t you just teach college?” or “teachers don’t get paid that well”. It can be quite disconcerting when it’s something you hear pretty often! But thank your for your advice, that’s exactly what I was thinking my path would look like. I will be applying to teaching certification programs for next fall and couldn’t be more excited!
As someone who has taught high school for 30+ years, I’ll second @xraymancs 's advice: First teach. You’ve experienced education from one side of the desk. But if you hope to really effect change, you’ll need to see it from the other side.Get a couple of years of teaching in-- high school, college, whatever-- and then get your graduate degree and work to effect the changes you decide are necessary.
I actually think you have to teach in order to do what you want. Generally speaking, educational doctoral programs like to see students have several years of classroom experience (and perhaps even a few years of administrative experience) before you apply. And virtually all if not actually all K-12 administrators have classroom teaching experience.
I guess you could probably do an M.Ed before beginning to teach, but you couldn’t get much further than that in graduate education (or shouldn’t) before teaching.
You don’t have to get an Ed.D. There are lots of administrators with PhDs. Which one to get depends on the individual school. Very generally speaking, PhDs are research degrees (used to prepare people to do research in education and to teach future teachers at universities) and EdDs are practice degrees (used to prepare people to be administrators in educational systems). But that’s not always the case - for example, Harvard’s research-focused program was called an EdD until 2014.