Rethinking the Ed.D., or What’s in a Name?

The Ed.D. or Doctor of Education is a beleaguered degree. In the field of practice, the Ed.D. is criticized for its failure to be neither fish nor fowl. Many Ed.D. programs could be seen as a watered down version of the Ph.D. in Education and seemingly fail to provide practitioners with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors needed for effective leadership in educational settings (e.g., McCarthy, 1999). Within academe, the Ed.D. lacks status as a doctoral degree (Clifford & Guthrie, 1988). As a professional degree, it not only lacks the status of the Ph.D., considered to be “the highest degree in academic disciplines ” (Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, 2002), but it also lacks the status of other professional degrees such as the J.D. (Doctor of Jurisprudence) and the M.D. (Doctor of Medicine). Finally, the Ed.D. is hampered by its imitation of the Ph.D. rather than its creation as a unique degree. For example, to earn a Ph.D., one takes graduate-level course work and a qualifying or comprehensive examination and writes a dissertation. These same expectations exist for the Ed.D. student. Differences between the degrees consist of variations in the kind and number of courses to be taken as well as the nature of the comprehensive examination and the dissertation (Miklos, 1992; Richardson & Walsh, 1978). What usually goes unquestioned is that the Ed.D. degree will consist of thes