What do we mean by Impact?

A history of change efforts by philanthropic agencies and government organizations directed at graduate schools of education has not produced long-term or sustained changes in their form and function. The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), however, has been able to demonstrate that external change efforts can result in change in schools of education when bottom-up efforts are combined with top-down support. Such change is an important "impact" of CPED. In this short essay, the CPED Executive Director and Chairman of the Board provide an overview of CPED's impact and then challenge authors and reader to help CPED further extend the definition of impact as it related to all aspects of the Education Doctorate.

Self-determination theory in schools of education

In many graduate schools of education there is strong resistance to formal theories, especially those that are supported through quantitative empirical methods. In this article we describe how self-determination theory (SDT), a formal and empirically focused framework, shares sensibilities with critical theorists concerning the importance of actors' own embedded experiences of the world, and the importance of liberation and resistance to hegemony. Yet we argue that, unlike many post-modern views that are largely negative, SDT is truly critical precisely because it posits a common human nature, which can be more or less supported and allowed to flourish in different cultural and institutional contexts.

Quantifying Quality: What Can the U.S. News and World Report Rankings Tell us About the Quality of Higher Education?

Since their first appearance in 1983, the U.S. News and World Report rankings of colleges and graduate schools have generated much discussion and debate, from some declaring them among the best rankings ever published to others describing them as shallow, inaccurate, and even dangerous. The research presented here addresses two of the most common criticisms of the methodology used to produce these rankings. In particular, this study answers the following questions: What is the extent of change in U.S. News' ranking formulas across years and what are the implications for interpreting shifts in a school's rank over time? How precise is the overall score that U.S. News uses to rank schools and what are the implications for assigning schools to discrete ranks? Findings confirm critic's concerns in each of these areas, particularly in relation to the ranking of graduate schools of education. Based on these results, five recommendations are made for improving the interpretability and usefulness of the rankings.