Education policy grad programs and careers

[SkyGuy_Ritchie]

Hi, this is my first time posting, so I am a little unsure how this works, but I wanted to share a little bit about my background and career interests and then ask about how they might align with various graduate programs.

 

First, my background: I graduated two years ago with a BA in Liberal Arts and since then have been teaching math and humanities classes at a charter school. While in college I earned relatively good grades (3.55 GPA), got to know several of my professors personally, and volunteered to tutor with Breakthrough Collaborative and to mentor students through the In2Books online pen-pal program. Since becoming a teacher I have taught an 11^th grade seminar-style humanities class, 8^th grade Algebra II, 9^th grade Geometry, and (most recently) a 9^th grade Exeter math class.

 

The Exeter class offers a radically different approach to mathematics. The curriculum, borrowed from Phillips Exeter Academy, is based on a scaffolded set of word problems that covers everything from Algebra I to BC Calculus. The problems are not broken up into chapters and lessons, and there is little in the way of direct instruction. Students come to class having worked on 4-6 homework problems, discuss their work in small groups, and then present it to their classmates while the teacher provides support and helps students generalize their findings from the particular problems.

 

As you might expect, the Exeter approach has been met with a great deal of skepticism and resistance. Parents want to know whether it has been successful at other schools that have adopted it and even if it has whether it can be successfully replicated at our school: they want to see scientific studies of its effectiveness that (to my knowledge) have not yet been done. Their questions, however, have gotten me interested in researching the effectiveness of this and other educational programs and methods.

 

So I guess my questions are as follows:

(1) What jobs exist for people with these interests?

(2) Where are they to be found (in government, universities, think tanks, etc.)?

(3) What level of education do they require? I have been looking into Masters, EdD and PhD programs.

(4) How competitive are they to obtain?

(5) What is the average salary for such jobs?

(6) Will research into education policy still be relevant after the implementation of Common Core?

[hesadork]

Is you interest in ed policy or in curriculum/learning & instruction?  The substance of your post suggests the latter, but you start it and end it talking about policy. 

Edited August 25, 2013 by hesadork

[emilyrobot]

The answer to your last question is "Absolutely, yes" The rest of them are a little bit more complicated to answer. 

 

Like hesadork, it sounds to me like your interests are actually more in the C&I arena than policy. When you say "interested in researching the effectiveness of this and other educational programs and methods" do you mean that you want to perform studies evaluating the effectiveness of curricula/interventions? Training for that work is typically a PhD, probably in a Curriculum and Instruction department. Or maybe you mean that you would like to have a job interpreting or synthesizing information gained from studies already done to inform district/state/federal policy? That's a broader area, and one I know less about.