6. Relations to Master's Degree and Other CUNY Doctoral Programs

As previously discussed (Section 2), the new doctoral program will provide a source of intellectual and potential staffing resources for the existing Master's degree programs on the campuses and will maintain close ties with them. These programs represent an important source of prospective students for the CUNY doctoral program, and some faculty members now teaching in these programs have research experience and expertise which will be of great value to the doctoral program. Master's degree programs at CUNY prepare education professionals in all of the curriculum areas to be addressed by the doctoral program. In addition, the CUNY Advanced Certificate Programs in Administration and Supervision, while they do not have a specific research mission, will clearly benefit from and their faculty participate in many of the research and policy analysis projects initiated in the doctoral program. The proposed doctoral program, however, does not represent in any sense a direct continuation of pre-doctoral programs, but rather a new opportunity for highly motivated students and education professionals to attain the research skills and experience needed to contribute at the highest levels to the improvement of urban education in America.

The Doctoral Program in Curriculum and Policy Studies in Urban Education has a core commitment to intellectual and research partnerships with many other doctoral programs at CUNY. Particularly in the human sciences, the doctoral programs in Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, History, Philosophy, Linguistics, and Developmental and Educational Psychology, through their faculty's research projects and course offerings, will provide essential support to the new program in the form of research methods courses, elective topics courses, and co-supervision of dissertations. We hope that many individual faculty members (see sections 11 and 12 for participating faculty) will agree not only to welcome our students into their courses, but to serve on Studies Committees to guide students, and to engage in joint research projects which can form the framework for dissertation research projects. We anticipate that many members of the doctoral faculty with primary appointments in other programs will have affiliations also with this program.

There is a potential for a collaborative relationship between this program and the existing doctoral program in Educational Psychology. The two programs are distinguished primarily by their complementary conceptual frameworks and disciplinary perspectives (socio-cultural vs. psychological), and to some degree by dominant research methodologies (qualitative-interpretive and multiple-approach methods vs. quantitative analysis). There should be no direct competition for students between the two programs because doctoral candidates in this program will not be pursuing careers in educational psychology, or seeking credentials in that discipline. Students will elect the program which fits with their particular career and research aspirations. In other universities we have contacted (see the Noble Report, 1994, Review of PhD Programs in Education in 16 Institutions of Higher Education), programs in Educational Psychology, in Policy Analysis, and in Curriculum Studies co-exist comfortably with distinct missions, disciplinary foundations, courses of study, and student populations served.