Radford’s Doctor of Education program wins top honors from national higher ed organization

Now in its sixth year, Radford University’s Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) program has just received top honors from a national organization.

The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) recently named Radford’s program as the 2025 CPED Program of the Year, and faculty members from the university were on hand to claim that award at the group’s annual gathering on Oct. 22 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The CPED is a consortium of more than 160 institutions of higher education, and each year it recognizes schools with Ed.D programs that demonstrate innovation, impact and alignment with its principles, as well as those that elevate their approach to strengthening the doctorate in education. Other recent winners of the CPED’s distinction include Texas A&M University in 2024 and the University of Pittsburgh in 2023.

Radford’s Ed.D program was founded in 2020 and is a fully online, cohort-based doctoral program that prepares educators to lead responsively and to develop practices of collaborative inquiry, continuous improvement and community partnership. Its three-year program offers seven-week courses which allow students to complete two courses and a dissertation research credit every semester. The program recently admitted its seventh cohort – consisting of roughly two dozen students – which starts in January.

In its notes, CPED’s awards committee praised the elements that set Radford’s program apart: a compelling narrative of why and how the program was designed, a strong foundation that aligns directly with CPED’s mission and vision, and clear evidence that the program transforms both the professional lives of its students and the localities in which they work.

“We are serving students who are leaders in their schools, and they are serving students in a communities,” Radford’s program coordinator, Associate Professor Sarah Capello, said. “We really feel like we’re influencing educational outcomes by developing extremely strong and capable leaders.  

“It's our students who have enabled us to win this award because we were able to talk in our application about the amazing work that they are doing. Our students demonstrate that our program is effective,” Capello continued. “The fact that our students are doing incredible work through their dissertations and refining their leadership skills and taking on efforts in their school divisions; those are the kind of things that have enabled us to demonstrate that our program is deserving of this recognition.”

She also credited the ongoing success to several behind-the-scenes forces.

“We would never have been able to build this effort if not for the foundation laid by the program’s first coordinator, Brad Bizzell, the leadership of Ed.D faculty member Max Yurkofsky, and the support of our department director, Amanda Bozack, and our Dean of the College of Education and Human Development, Tamara Wallace. They've just been incredible.”

Previous CPED Program of the Year award winners have typically been part of more established and larger Ed.D programs, and Capello said Radford’s success this year, after also being a finalist for the award last year, serves as a distinct validation.

“CPED is really the hub of the energy and the movement within our field, the Ed.D world. They are the most visible organization that’s working to transform the Ed.D into a professional practice doctorate,” she said. “To receive that recognition – as a smaller institution and a younger program – it’s huge. It confirms that we are doing exceptional work and that we are leaders in the field, nationally.”