National Network Aims to Recraft Ed.D. for Practitioners

Responding to long-standing complaints about the relevance of Ed.D. degrees, nearly two dozen colleges and universities have joined a new network aimed at creating doctoral programs in education that are geared more for practitioners than for professional scholars.

Led by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in Stanford, Calif., the group includes public and private institutions at different stages of redesigning their programs for administrators, policymakers, and others pursuing nonacademic careers.

Lee S. Shulman, the foundation’s president, said the effort is driven by the contention that such practitioners are not best served by courses of study that largely seek to mimic the structure, content, and requirements of traditional Ph.D. programs in...