Speaking Truth to Power in Educational Research

• In Event: To Know Is Not Enough: Commissioned Essay Writers—Monday (Coffee)

Abstract

Educational research suffers from neutrality sickness. The field in general harbors the illusion that our work, to be taken seriously, must be devoid of any advocacy and, heaven forbid, any direct activism. Yet, aren’t advocacy and activism exactly what we should be doing, especially when what is being done in our name sometimes contradicts the best research? Needless to say, as educational researchers we must do our research with integrity, and we must be fair and open to whatever it may uncover. Nevertheless, to claim to be neutral is both foolhardy and disingenuous because it flies in the face of what our work is about, that is, using research for the improvement of the human condition through education.
Much of what we know about education runs counter to current reform efforts in US education and, as is often the case, the most powerless and marginalized, both students and teachers, are the greatest victims. Numerous policies and practices come to mind: the stubborn insistence that there are some mythical “best practices” that work for
all students in all situations; the increasingly popular practice of placing untested teachers
after a summer program of just several weeks’ duration in our most challenged public schools; the policy of testing students to death, in the process taking the joy and creativity out of teaching and learning; the indiscriminate bashing of teachers as if they alone, and not the ills of society, were the cause of student failure; and the view that education should be ruled by the market and therefore based on competition, with rewards and punishments doled out accordingly. In this brief essay, I focus on one example of what 2
we know and how it has been distorted to fit a political rather than an educational agenda:
bilingualism and bilingual education.

Author

• Sonia Nieto, University of Massachusetts - Amherst