Advocacy & Policy Concentration

About Advocacy & Policy

Advocacy & Policy engages communities, citizens, the political world and the policy dynamics that construct our schools and educational systems. By understanding how policy can support and advance learning, as well as the obstacles and opportunities to transforming both the policies and structures of education, students are empowered to engage in the kind of work outside the classroom that is needed to ensure a vibrant education inside of it. Our Advocacy & Policy concentration embraces our location of Washington, DC – the seat of national policymaking and the site of deep educational challenges and opportunities – and affords students a rich environment to engage in hands-on, experience-driven study of the dynamics of the educational policy world.

The educational contexts of Washington, DC, are complex and too often understood in isolation from each other. Bringing together advocates, policymakers, instructional leaders and school officials, the M.A. in Educational Transformation enables students to learn from diverse perspectives and viewpoints.

Full-Time Course Sequence

Students attending the program full time work at their Residency Experience during the day and attend their coursework full time in the evenings.

Part-Time Course Sequence

Students attending the program part time attend their coursework part time in the evenings and work at their Residency Experience during the day during their second year.

First Year

Second Year

Core Courses

EDTR 5001: Culturally Relevant Education & Social Justice

This course explores the relationship between social justice and the context and practice of education in a democratic society through a systems thinking lens. Students investigate how systems of power, privilege, and oppression have historically shaped and continue to shape the contours of the US education system and contribute to unjust outcomes for students from historically marginalized backgrounds.

EDTR 5002: Advocating for Learners

This project-based course serves as a capstone experience to candidates’ time in the M.A. in Educational Transformation. It connects intersections of advocacy, policy, and teaching so that aspiring policy actors know what it means to be connected to the work of teachers and community members and teacher candidates animate their role as advocates and changemakers in larger policy structures.

Residency Courses

EDTR 5101 & 5102: Policy Residency I & II

Policy Residency I and II constitute a two course sequence that will connect students’ daily experiences in the residency experience with theoretical frameworks of organizational, policy, and political change in order to highlight the challenges and opportunities of policy and advocacy work in the field of education. These courses will provide a space for personal and professional reflection and growth, provide in-depth knowledge about and critical perspectives on the education policy and advocacy landscape, and help students build writing and research skills for advocacy and policy.

Concentration-Specific Courses

EDTR 5111: Critical Empirics

This course examines how statistics and “data” can both perpetuate injustice and illuminate injustice, and equips students with the tools and knowledge to tell the difference. Students will investigate how data has been used to perpetuate racism and other forms of oppression and limit opportunity, what it means to use race as a variable, whether or not quantitative research can be critical, what it means to be a critical participant in conversations about statistics and data and how we might leverage statistics and data to move policy toward greater social justice.

EDTR 5112: Policy Analysis in Education

This course will examine current debates within educational policy and focus on the development of student skills to evaluate research within the field. Through examining issues such as charter schools and vouchers, standards and accountability, teacher education reforms, models of instruction for English learners and special needs students, class size reforms, and comparative models of educational practices, we will stress the ability to analyze, critique, and evaluate the literature on “what works” in education and develop the skills of an astute policy analyst.

EDTR 5113: Data Analysis in Education

This course equips students with the statistical tools used in the quantitative examination of data and that aid in the analytical investigation and explanation of issues related to education policy. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to explore how data can be used to investigate the impact of education policy, use a software package to apply statistical methods for describing and analyzing authentic education datasets, and interpret analysis results and infer conclusions from robust statistical analyses.

EDTR 5114: Intergovernmental Relations & Accountability in Education

This course focuses on the issues and problems of governance of education in the US context. It focuses on four themes: federalism and intergovernmental conflict, fiscal federalism and school financing, accountability policies and politics, and civil rights and contestations over schools. In each of these areas, we pay attention to the role that membership plays in governance and the cleavages of race, class, and gender that challenge prevailing norms of Governance.

EDTR 5115: Organizational Change in Education

This course will examine the nature of educational organizations – public and private – in the US and how change occurs within educational institutions, particularly schools and school districts. Students will examine theories of change associated with charter schools and privatization, particularly strategies of interest group and community mobilization, as well as the school level factors that are necessary for reforms to take root and improve educational outcomes for children (trust, teacher capacity, and resource inputs into the system).

EDTR 5116: Learning Design and Assessment Policy

This course is a graduate introduction to assessment within K-12 education in the U.S. and an examination of learning design principles, with a focus on how education policy in the U.S. both advances and inhibits policies that advance genuine, rich, and deeper learning experiences of students. The course takes a critical lens towards existing assessment practices while recognizing the need to understand and foster the dynamics and processes of student learning, and provides a non-technical overview of theories and principles of the science of learning and development (SoLD), assessment, and policies that support SoLD-aligned teaching and learning that supports each and every student.