Learning to be a teacher must be difficult, and recent reforms could exacerbate this problem. Harvard University was the first U.S. institution to offer the Doctorate of Education, Ed.D., and after nearly a century the school recently joined the ranks of deserters. Harvard was not the first to ditch the Ed.D., however, as our University had already done so. The faculty council at the University Education School voted last September to discontinue several Ed.D. programs, and the Board of Visitors approved the move last month. These programs will no longer be available in the fall but concerns may still remain.
The Ed.D. has been under scrutiny for some time. In the field of education it has competed with its Doctorate of Philosophy equivalents, which are more recognizable and some would say have more comprehensive curricula. Generally, completing an Ed.D. takes three to five years, and a Ph.D. requires at least five years. But the debate about these two degrees is precisely because of their differences.
One line of thought in education reform aims to make these degrees more distinct. The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), for example, looks to find the difference between a Ph.D. and an Ed.D. "Three years of bi-annual convenings and on-line collaborations produced the following Definition of the Ed.D.: 'The professional doctorate in education prepares educators for the application of appropriate and specific practices, the generation of new knowledge, and for the stewardship of the profession,'" according to its website. Finding this description was just phase one. That is one long discussion section, and everyone could have gotten an Ed.D. in the time it took to define it.
The CPED and others see the Ed.D. route as a more direct path toward teaching, whereas the Ph.D. requires research. Obviously, the CPED looks to sustain the Ed.D., and given this goal it is hard not to believe its results as self-justifying.
The University's Education School and Harvard's are trying to consolidate their Ph.D. and Ed.D. programs. Harvard combined several Ed.D. programs into one interdisciplinary Ph.D., whereas the University Education School removed Ed.D. options in favor of their Ph.D. equivalents. Some of the rationale is for clarity's sake, to help everyone know what's what. By taking this approach these two universities imply the more rigorous Ph.D. is simply the better of the two.
And excising the Ed.D. largely makes sense. In doing so, education schools will streamline their resources and make their objectives more uniform. Moreover, when the Board of Visitors convened February, it reported the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia found the Ed.D. neither viable nor productive. The cut seems pretty simple.
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