It's the Classroom, Stupid by Hettleman Kalman R.;

Author:Hettleman, Kalman R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: R&L Education
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE ABC’S OF R&D

To paraphrase Mark Twain’s quip about quitting smoking, it’s easy to reform education: we’ve done it a thousand times. But we haven’t gotten it right, and while there are many reasons and many wrongdoers, a paramount reason is the deplorable state of education R&D. R&D is taken for granted in medicine, science, technology, engineering, industry, and other fields. But it is largely absent in public education, and its absence hinders almost every step towards school reform.

The good news is that R&D doesn’t arouse the partisanship that plagues other school policy debates. Even diehard local-control liberals and conservatives agree that it must be a federal responsibility and upgraded. The bad news is that R&D draws yawns from the public, political officials, and, most tellingly, the education establishment. It’s been woefully neglected, and research functions under the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) have been historically inept. But it’s a critical necessity for school reform, and its status and science must change as a pillar of the New Education Federalism.

Lack of Rigor and Relevance

Two decades ago, the Consortium on Productivity in the Schools—a nonpartisan panel that included business leaders, economists, systems analysts, and educators—found that the “education sector is heavily politicized in part because . . . [t]he system suffers from too much scattered and unevaluated change.”43 The Consortium quoted one observer: “A grocery shopper can find out more from a label on a box of cereal than an educator . . . can about a set of educational tools—textbooks, activity guides, computer programs, films, etc.—that cost millions of dollars to develop and market.”44 RAND Corporation analysts found that, unlike research conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), education R&D “has almost no scientifically structured clinical trials, has relatively few major longitudinal surveys, and has no equivalents of teaching hospitals or schools of public health that combine research with practice.”45

Rigor is lacking and subject to controversy. How much should education R&D rely on the scientific “gold standard” of randomized trials, common in medicine research in which patients are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups? Many experts think that’s the way to go in education research. NCLB leans in that direction. And its proponents include Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, director of DOE’s research Institute for Education Sciences from its creation in 2002 through 2008.

But others contend that randomized trials are difficult, expensive, and not much superior to other methods. The executive director of the National Research Council cautions that the quest should be for R&D that produces “reasonably good solutions to inordinately complex and dynamic problems (emphasis in the original).”46 The problems involve difficulties in isolating and measuring innumerable variables like teacher adherence to the research design and funding.47

Another major complication is how to bridge the gulf between research scientists and school practitioners. The “ivory tower” syndrome is worse in education than in other fields, as the National Research Council has underscored. In 2005 the Council spearheaded the creation of a new organization, the Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute (SERP).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.