Education Research and Policy Making: Whose “Felt Difficulties”?

• In Event: Equity-Oriented Public Knowledge Formation: Lessons From Dewey Toward Social and Institutional Transformation

Abstract

Dewey’s moral psychology is grounded in the central notion of a felt difficulty. In simple terms, people persist unreflectively in their habitual behaviors unless and until they encounter an obstacle to their way of going on. Such obstacles prompt felt difficulties that, in turn, prompt people to think about the source and nature of the felt difficulty and how it might be removed.

At the social level, Dewey contends that public-cum-community employs science, effectively communicated, in joint deliberations about how to articulate and address widely experienced felt difficulties, i.e., social problems. The concepts of a community and a public are fundamental for Dewey, and both are normatively freighted. That is, they are associated not with a mere collection of individuals within a legal-political jurisdiction. The public-cum community exhibits, and is cemented by, mutually shared interests, and shows it due regard for the claims of distinctive individuals and groups (save perhaps those with overriding “pecuniary” interests) in its deliberations.

Dewey’s conceptions of a community and a public were not realized in his time. Rather they were central to characterizing the normative problem, writ large, of how to transform the “Great Society” (the mere collection) into the “Great Community” (the collection cemented by mutually shared interests). He identified four obstacles to such a transformation: a conception of individuals as self-interested utility maximizers; idealization of the formal mechanisms of political democracy to the detriment of democratic substance; a misconception/misuse of science vis a vis its normative commitments and responsibilities; and news media characterized by sensationalism, lack of continuity with preceding events, and as serving pecuniary interests.

Reflecting on Dewey’s analysis (circa 1930) in today’s climate, one might wish to revise the old saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” For in an era in which the public and policy are being shaped by Fox News and powerful right-wing think tanks, one might want to say things have gotten worse. Be that as it may, Dewey’s general form of analysis applies well to my experience in the education policy trenches.

In the paper I will amplify the themes of the preceding paragraphs in terms of competing conservative versus progressive education research paradigms. I will also discuss three education policy research endeavors of mine that illustrate the difficulty of getting a Deweyan approach to education research off the ground—one that intertwines education research with deliberative democracy—when what counts as felt difficulty, and thus what policies to pursue, differs according to other beliefs and commitments. These three endeavors were (1) an analysis of a Colorado voucher law that would have transferred millions in state funding from public to private schools, (2) an examination of the ACT as a valid measure of Colorado’s Model Content Standards, and (3) a study of the School Choice system in Boulder, Colorado. Each of these was politically charged and in each case contingents who possessed felt difficulties different from mine (indeed, these endeavors prompted felt difficulties from them) moved to subvert the deliberative process.

Author

• Kenneth R. Howe, University of Colorado