Envisioning a New Ed.D.
Lasting improvements to the K-12 school system may well end up starting in the classrooms – and so colleges of education are logical starting places for education reform. Yet, while teacher education gets plenty of scrutiny, a new, nationwide initiative goes straight to the top of the food chain in an attempt to catalyze change in the education of education’s leaders.
A new project to re-envision the education doctorate, or the Ed.D., at 21 universities nationwide grows out of the basic premise that there’s no clear distinction between the Ed.D., in theory the professional practice degree, and the more research-oriented Ph.D. in education — and, as a result, that the quality of the Ed.D. and of the education Ph.D. is not what it should or could be
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
A New Ed.D.
The Carnegie Foundation's project to reshape the Ed.D. begins (from Inside Higher Ed):
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2 comments:
Again, we think it's about programs and it isn't. It always goes back to faculty. You could get a PhD-lite at the University of Pittsburgh where I went. You could get an EDD that was every bit as rigorous as any PhD from professor x because they always demanded that calibre of high level work. You could choose professor y for either the Phd or the EDD and it didn't make any difference...it was going to be lite either way. The course work was the same so what's the lesson? It's the same lesson all of us who went through such programs learned. We all knew the xs and ys.
One thing I've noticed about this "new Ed.D." project is that in some places it's described as "revitalizing a degree for practitioners" and in other places it's described as creating a degree for principals. Reading between the lines, it also seems to be connected to the "schools are like businesses so we need managers and CEOs" idea.
To me, the Ed.D. (or at least the idea of the Ed.D.) has always been trapped in that complicated space between the university and the schools.
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