Chapter 2: The CPED Framework: Tools For Change

The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) began in 2007 with a group of education faculty members from 25 schools of education collaborating to ask questions and seek solutions for a problem that plagued the field of education for almost a century. In contrast to other fields, in education the doctorate came in two forms—the PhD and the EdD—and both had been used to prepare academic scholars and the highest level of practitioners (McClintock, 2005). This practice perpetuated a kind of confusion that left faculty members doing “neither [doctorate] very well” (Shulman, Golde, Bueschel, & Garabedian, 2006). In 2006, Shulman and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning offered a challenge and potential solution. In their piece, Reclaiming Education’s Doctorates, Shulman et al. challenged schools of education to reclaim both of their doctorates and improve them for the specific preparation of research scholars (PhD) and professional practitioners (EdD). Additionally, they outlined a “vision” for how this might be done by “networking of individual sites prepared to form consortia that experiment with such efforts [to redesign the professional practice doctorate] in collaboration” (p. 30). Thus, CPED was born.