What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate ... and a Great Deal More: Reflections on the Research Community’s Attempts to Become a Vehicle for Change

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Can Educational Research Influence Educational Change? AERA, New Audiences, and New Modalities for Influencing Change

Abstract

The early 20th century was a simpler time for educational researchers. At that time, educational researchers lived in a world of heroes and villains, and educational researchers were cast in the hero role. The villains were self-interested politicians; the rallying cry was, “Take the schools out of politics”; and educational researchers were expected to supply the scientific knowledge that university-educated school leaders would use to change ineffective and, even, corrupt educational systems into highly effective, as well as fair and just, organizations (Tyack, 1974).
That storyline never quite played out in reality. Research virtually never provided defensible and definitive answers to what-should-we-do-Monday questions, and the educational research community has been attempting to figure out how research can become a legitimate (as opposed to merely a bogus public-relations) tool for change ever since. This paper will first analyze why educational researchers, from the mid-20th century forward have complained that policymakers and practitioners intent on promoting change do not use educational research and why change agents normally find educational research mostly unusable (Cronbach, 1982). The second part of the paper will focus on selected late 20th and early 21st century attempts within the research community to alter this situation and insure that educational research finally plays the role in the change process it was expected to play in the early 20th century storyline.
The first section of the paper will discuss the different languages employed by members of the research community, on the one hand, and policymakers and practitioners, on the other. Other issues that will be discussed in the first section of the paper include the significance of context and the value dimensions of educational issues. With respect to the value dimension issue, the paper will note that empirical questions cannot ultimately be disentangled from value issues. The reason: empirical studies must be framed, empirical questions must be articulated in language, and the framing and language selected, to a large extent, will predetermine “empirical” results. This realization suggests that research is inevitably political and that, consequently, the traditional entreaty to rely on research to “take the schools out of politics,” at the very least, needs to be reinterpreted.
The initiatives that will be discussed in the second part of the paper include attempts by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to function as a de facto interest group within the policy community; AERA’s attempts during the 1990s to expand the format options that can be used for sessions at AERA annual meetings; and the so-called science movement within the educational research community that flourished during the first decade of the 21st century. None of these initiatives did much to legitimate the early 20th century storyline about the role that research can play in the change process. Their failure to do this, however, does provide insight into the phenomenon of change and the change process in schools and other educational institutions.

Authors

• Robert B. Donmoyer, University of San Diego

• Marybeth Gasman, University of Pennsylvania

• Joyce E. King, Georgia State University