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PublicationsScientifically-based research': the art of politics and the distortion of science (PDF 87k) The US Federal Government is forcefully prescribing a narrow definition of 'scientifically-based' educational research. US policy, emerging from contemporary neoliberal and technocratic viewpoints and funded and propagated on a large scale, has the potential to influence international thinking on educational research. In this article we continue a policy critique that has emerged and address three problems associated with the US Government's narrow definition of research: (1) the Government's claims about 'scientifically-based research' are, in themselves, philosophically problematic; (2) the emphasis on quantitative, experimental research is modeled in a questionable manner on techniques from the natural (and especially medical) sciences, and the emphasis on applicability and transferability of findings can be directly related to a predominance of economic principles and discourse; (3) the research commissioned and used by the US Federal Government itself is inconsistent with the rhetoric of scientific criteria. We call for educational leaders and researchers to challenge the Governmental manipulation of science and the marginalization of the education profession from policy-making in its own field. Advocacy Versus Authority—Silencing the Education Professoriate (PDF - 76KB) by Paul Shaker, California State University,
Fresno & Elizabeth E. Heilman, Purdue University. "Teacher Testing: A Symptom" Teacher testing, as it is currently construed, is a symptom of what is wrong with American public education. The fervor for ever-higher stakes associated with teacher testing illustrates how deeply entrenched and outmoded our wrong-headed approach has become. With the inception of Title 11 of the Higher Education Act, the federal government has begun a process of employing such tests not only for entry to the classroom by individuals, but for determining which institutions of higher education will have the right to prepare candidates for licensure. Emerging from legitimate origins and egalitarian motives, the uses of standardized tests have moved into increasingly dangerous political waters including attacks on public education. In America, these punitive and unscientific applications are reaching their apotheosis today in high-stakes K-12 student and teacher testing, with consequences that affect the foundations of public education with broad consequences for United States society. "Advocacy Versus Authority-Silencing the Education Professoriate" AACTE Policy Perspectives, Vol. 3, No. 1, January 2002. Co-author, Elizabeth Heilman. For nearly 20 years, public schools have been at the center of the national political stage, and from the outset, the methods of the policy debate have been unfamiliar to most academicians and outside their traditional processes of accountability and verification. A new brand of academic reflection and research has found its way into popular media penned by "advocacy academicians"-scholars often operating outside their area of expertise yet wearing the garb of objective, expert scholarship. These advocacy academicians employ the institutional forms of fostering and evaluating research-peer review and corroboration and the imprimaturs of universities and philanthropic foundations, for example-but do so under the umbrella of ideology-based interest groups. The message is often, though not always, conservative, free market, and illiberal, and interlocked with the positions of religious, political, and corporate entities. Many of these groups seem to be less interested in reforming public schools than in discrediting public institutions, gaining party advantage, and opening new markets for profit. The central obstacle to these aims is often the academic establishment in professional education, whose scholarship is frequently at odds with that of these emergent forces. "Left Back: Punditry or History?" The Journal of Curriculum Studies, July 2004. Lawrence Cremin in The Transformation of the
School (1961) laid out what many believe is a comprehensive as
well as even-handed history of progressive education. "Literacies for Life" Educational Leadership, Vol. 59, No. 2, October 2001. We travel around the solar system, under the seas, and inside the cell; we are wired and wireless; we can cure disease and treat disorders. With all these advances, the issue of deciding what to teach has never been more difficult. Curriculum designers face exciting but daunting challenges. The volume of data has grown exponentially, and information technology has made accessing that data possible by many means. Traditional categories and disciplines are breaking down and recombining, and new fields of study are emerging. Paralleling this growth in content is the public's heightened expectations for education. Those who design curriculums also face the challenge of responding to a changing social context. New family structures and reconfigured. gender, ethnic, and racial identities have reshaped the communities that schools serve. English language and European ethnicity no longer define the U.S. population. Diversity and globalization have blurred cultural barriers. This article addresses school curriculum in three broad classes of literacy: economic, social and emotional, and aesthetic. It urges as new relationship between the practical and the abstract that will transcend the blandness that marks much of contemporary curriculum. "Teacher Education, Pro-Market Policy
and Advocacy Research" Across a wide variety of fields, research has long been promoted as a useful tool in helping policy makers devise and enact policy. In the United States, the recently enacted federal No Child Left Behind Act, specifically requires the use of high quality research in education policy making. In this rush to emphasize research, policy makers have overlooked a number of important considerations, including issues related to research methodologies and structures (qualitative verses quantitative, descriptive verses analytic, etc.), and ethical issues around the use, design, and funding of research studies. Policies justified by research funded, conducted and published by pro-market advocates who bypass traditionally accepted norms for completing and applying research is of particular concern. This paper examines these three critical issues, as well as their impact on teacher education and teacher educators. Additionally, the larger role of pro-market advocacy organizations is examined, as well as the response, or lack there of, by the education establishment. Teacher educators must actively and effectively engage in this debate if they wish to retain control of their profession and continue to promote policy based on ethically sound and methodologically appropriate research conducted in the public interest. "The New Common Sense of Education: Advocacy Research vs. Academic Authority" Teachers College Record, July 2004. Co-author, Elizabeth Heilman. Current education policy is increasingly controlled by partisan politicians and the corporate interests that speak through them. Attacking American education and blaming economic troubles on failing schools and low standardized test scores coalesces the rhetoric of the right and draws attention away from many other fundamental social and economic problems. Add to this political opportunity the economic fact that attacking K-12 education leaves this "market" of $732 billion vulnerable to development by corporate America. Though such attacks have been with us since A Nation at Risk an increasingly broad array of cultural and institutional forces are at work creating a new "common sense" of education and radical policies that malign decades of educational research and attack promising practices and reforms. A new type of education scholarship has emerged that is delivered in alternative ways, funded through unorthodox sources, motivated by non-academic purposes, and supported through direct access to media and political organizations, including the federal government. This article examines the details of the new commonsense policy and rhetoric and considers what is being lost and what educators need to do to restore to education its position of civic and moral leadership in our society. "Is Washington Serious About Scientifically-based Research?" Journal of Educational Change 00:1–7,2004. Under the influence of John Dewey, W. W. Charters,
and others during the past century, educators have made an ongoing
effort to integrate and apply varieties of modern science to the
practice of our profession. As with all fields in the human sciences
the passage of education to the status of hard science has, nonetheless,
been frustrated. We inherited from 19th Century thought the idea
that social science could follow in the path of natural science
and free itself from subjectivity, imprecision, and weak predictive
validity. The message of the 201h Century may be, however, that
this is for at least two reasons a vain pursuit. First, the mainstream
of philosophy of science today and for more than three decades
has accepted that social science will not replicate the methods
of natural science and is not likely to achieve the apparent exactitude
of those fields. "We need to go beyond the bounds of a science
based on verificationism to one which would study the inter-subjective
and common meanings embedded in social reality" (Taylor,
1985, p. 52)... |