Twenty-one institutions have signed on to a project to redesign the Ed.D. The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate — a joint effort of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council of Academic Deans in Research Education Institutions — is the latest effort to fix the much-maligned degree.

“The Ed.D. is perceived as ‘Ph.D.-lite,’” said Lee S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, in a news release. “More important than the public-relations problem, however, is the real risk that schools of education are becoming impotent in carrying out their primary missions, to prepare leading practitioners as well as leading scholars.”

For years, Arthur Levine, the former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, has been calling for reform of education schools and has even proposed eliminating the Ed.D. entirely, replacing it with a professional master’s degree like the M.B.A.