About Ed.D. Educational Leadership

Preparing transformative educational leaders who abolish, challenge and subvert unjust educational spaces while co-creating liberatory and humanizing systems for California public education.

This applied doctoral program cultivates a new generation of educational leaders equipped to expose and resist inequity and also to design, nurture, and sustain systems that center joy, healing, belonging and justice. Graduates of our program lead in California public school settings including early childhood sites, TK-12 schools, community colleges, and community organizations including settings connected to or impacted by the carceral system. Our focus is on developing leaders who can build conditions where all learners can thrive. We give particular attention to remaking educational systems that have historically failed many members of our society. Our students are trained to critique and dismantle administrative violence while simultaneously dreaming, designing and implementing educational ecosystems rooted in collective care and radical possibility.

This program operates with full awareness that public education and higher education are shaped by forces that include settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism and heteropatriarchy. We prepare leaders who navigate these systems critically so that they can work to dismantle these harms. Our commitments are grounded in solidarity with communities and movements demanding justice. We value lived knowledge, collective accountability, and liberatory practices challenging dominant structures and we frame our program with the goal of expanding what counts as leadership, scholarship and learning.

• PLO 1 — Leveraging Legitimacy and Gaining Access
  • Students use the legitimacy of the doctorate and their professional roles to convene stakeholders, influence agendas, and exercise authority in decision-making arenas.
• PLO 2 — Generating Practice-Based Evidence
  • Students produce credible, context-specific evidence (e.g., pilot programs, reports, curriculum toolkits) that enable reforms to scale across multiple educational sites.
• PLO 3 — Grounding in Critical Theories
  • Students’ foundation in critical theories (e.g., decolonial, critical race, DisCrit, feminist, queer) equips them to interpret dilemmas of educational practice.
• PLO 4 — Structural Inquiry and Redesign
  • Students use structural critique to design their research for transforming routines, policies, and practices.
• PLO 5 — Leading with Authentic Identity
  • Students critically reflect on and integrate their cultural, personal, and professional identities into leadership practice to build trust, transparency, and credibility with diverse constituencies.
• PLO 6 — Practicing Navigational Resilience
  • Students anticipate and navigate systemic barriers, including political resistance, bureaucratic inertia, and gatekeeping, while sustaining equity-centered goals over time.
• PLO 7 — Learning Under Pressure
  • Students demonstrate adaptability by engaging critique, weathering discomfort, and being open to feedback to expand their capacity to reframe dilemmas and adopt innovative approaches in high-stakes leadership contexts.
• PLO 8 — Building and Mobilizing Solidarity Networks
  • Students cultivate and sustain networks of peers, faculty, and community partners to amplify collective leadership power, mutual accountability, and shared advocacy for systemic equity.