Printer-friendly versionThe education doctorate, attempting to serve dual purposes—to prepare researchers and to prepare practitioners—is not serving either purpose well. To address what they have termed this "crippling" problem, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council of Academic Deans in Research Education Institutions (CADREI) have launched the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), a three-year effort to reclaim the education doctorate and to transform it into the degree of choice for the next generation of school and college leaders.
The project will be coordinated by Dr. David Imig, professor of practice at the University of Maryland and a former Carnegie Foundation visiting scholar. Imig spent more than 25 years leading the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, retiring as its president in 2005. Working closely with colleagues from the Carnegie Foundation, Imig will direct the work of this project.
"Today, the Ed.D. is perceived as 'Ph.D.-lite,'" said Carnegie President Lee S. Shulman. "More important than the public relations problem, however, is the real risk that schools of education are becoming impotent in carrying out their primary missions to prepare leading practitioners as well as leading scholars. We must move forward on two fronts: rethinking and reclaiming the research doctorate (the Ph.D.) and developing a distinct professional practice doctorate (the P.P.D.), whether we continue to call it an Ed.D. or decide to give it another name."
At the invitation of the two organizations, education schools at 21 institutions so far have committed to working together to redesign and transform doctoral education for the advanced preparation of school practitioners and clinical faculty, academic leaders and professional staff for the nation's schools and colleges and the organizations that support them. The areas of professional practice that most interest participating institutions thus far are K-12 school and educational leadership, community college and higher education leadership, and teacher education from pre-service through professional development.
"During the course of the coming three years, we intend to have participating institutions plan and develop models that highlight the preparation of professional practitioners," Imig said. "Our goal is to share these models with other education schools in the network and in the larger community of schools of education.
The education schools will work to strengthen every facet of their current doctoral programs—from candidate selection to the "capstone" experiences for advanced candidates, from the assessment procedures used in the program to the curriculum that is offered. It is expected that each participating institution will develop "professional practice laboratories" as the settings in which candidates will collaborate to address the challenges of educational practice, and a new generation of assessments for monitoring the progress of candidates and to permit reasonable peer comparisons among programs. Participants will be guided by recent work of the Carnegie Foundation that has focused on pursuit of excellence in doctoral education and in a variety of forms of professional preparation.
At their institutions' expense, teams that include faculty members, administrators and graduate students will attend meetings throughout the year in order to create a network that will stimulate individual work and provide space for sharing and critique. Most recently, the teams met in New York in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE).
The following institutions are currently engaged with Carnegie and CADREI in the CPED:
University of Connecticut
Duquesne University
University of Florida
University of Houston
University of Kansas
University of Kentucky
University of Louisville
University of Maryland
University of Missouri-Columbia
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Northern Illinois University
University of Oklahoma
Pennsylvania State University
Rutgers University
University of Southern California
Vanderbilt University
University of South Florida
University of Vermont
Virginia Commonwealth University
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Washington State University
Other institutions are likely to join the effort during the coming months.
Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center with the primary mission "to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education." The improvement of teaching and learning is central to all of the Foundation's work. The Foundation is located in Stanford, Calif.
The Council of Academic Deans from Research Education Institutions (CADREI) considers questions relating to the promotion of the preparation of education personnel in all its phases in the Universities and Land-Grant Colleges of the several states of the Union and the discussion of such questions and formulation of such plans, policies and programs as may tend to make the member institutes of the Council more effective in their work.
