Through a case study of two doctoral programs situated in the United States, this essay highlights how doctoral programs designed to prepare leaders in K-16 institutions and other contexts can be "framed around questions of equity, ethics, and social justice to bring about solutions to complex problems of practice" (CPED, 2016; Buss, Zambo, Zambo, Perry, & Williams, 2017; Zambo, Buss & Zambo; 2015). More specifically, we argue that programs should be able to clearly and explicitly articulate their distinctive understanding of "social justice" and trace the ways that this understanding is operationalized in particular facets of their program. In the following sections, we first offer a brief overview of our educational contexts, our programmatic definitions of social justice, and the ways we put that definition to work in our courses. Importantly, we offer the following as work-in-progress examples to serve as entry points into a larger conversation about operationalizing specific understandings of social justice in education doctorate programs, rather than as exemplars or models.