Are educational researchers more "analytical" than teachers? I doubt it.

Educational research has a lot of problems--statistical incompetence, a tendency to leap to generalizations, and the Kuhnian inability of all scientists, even when the data is decisive, to "renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis", among many others.  Why these weaknesses?  Is it because many of the people doing this research used to be teachers, and teaching makes you less "analytical"?  No! This is not the reason!  Teachers can be analytical too!

Stanford's David Labaree
David Labaree, a sociologist by training and a longtime Ed School professor, is always provocative and interesting.  I've read a number of his articles, and I like what he's written about statistics in Ed research (he suggests Educational researchers use statistics because, working in the least respected field in the academy, and perhaps the only field that is both "soft" and "applied", they're grasping for authority), and I am very interested in his work on education as a public good (he uses Hirschman's distinction between exit and voice as a helpful lens, and he makes useful distinctions among the different purposes schooling can have, from educating citizens to training workers, both clearly public goods, to allowing for individual social mobility and competitive advantage, which Labaree sees as a private good, though I think this too has a public good aspect).  I'm also interested in his writing about ed schools, but that writing seems a bit more muddled to me.  Perhaps it's the subject.

Are practical-minded teachers to blame for the problems with educational research?
Labaree suggests, in a 2003 article, that educational researchers are more "analytical" than teachers. He claims that one of the tensions in Ed schools is the cultural shift that doctoral Education students must make when they enter Ed school and have to shift from the practical exigencies of teaching to the scholarly culture of being an educational researcher.  It seems to me, however, that a more important problem is the way educational researchers shift from being analytical and scholarly in their professional papers to being polemical and unscholarly in their popular writing and their policy advocacy.

The 2003 article I'm focusing on here appeared in Educational Researcher, a publication of the American Education Research Association.  The article discusses the cultural initiation undergone by educational researchers-in-training. Labaree claims that these graduate students, who are nearly always former teachers, must make a difficult transition from the culture of the practitioner to the culture of the scholar.  According to Labaree, these students' reluctance to think in analytical, scholarly ways "leads students in education doctoral programs to shift the discourse about educational issues from what is to what should be, looking for practical solutions before explaining the problem." In other words, Labaree seems to be blaming the tendency of educational research to be always chasing after the next fad in educational practice on this cultural divide.  As Labaree puts it:

The idea is to pick an intervention that promises to improve education—a new teaching technique, curriculum approach, instructional technology, reform effort, or administrative structure—and study it in practice. The desired outcome is that the intervention works rather well, and the function of the study is to document this and suggest how the approach could be improved in the future. This often leads to an approach to scholarship (and eventually to a kind of scholarly literature) that is relentlessly, unrealistically, sometimes comically optimistic—one that suggests that there is an implementable answer to every educational problem and that help is always on the way.

I love this focus on the way education research often puts the cart before the horse, and I think Labaree's urging of modesty on the often-hubristic educational researchers is right on.  In another article Labaree calls on education scholars to adopt the Hippocratic "First, do no harm" as a slogan, which strikes me as exactly right.  For the first few years of my teaching career, that slogan was my daily mantra.  Nevertheless, I think Labaree is putting the blame in the wrong place here.  Rather than blame first the culture of the working practitioner for the intellectual hubris of ed research, I would put most of the responsibility on the culture of the scholars and professors.

Part of the problem is one that Labaree himself has written about extensively: education research is the lowliest academic pursuit.  Because education research is marginal and low-prestige, ed school professors have chips on their shoulders, are even more susceptible to political and cultural influence than scholars in more prestigious disciplines, and are statistically incompetent. But the real problem is that this is an "applied" social science, and applied social sciences struggle mightily because they are up against an essentially impossible task. The old poem I quoted yesterday is relevant again:

No known way of human seeing

Can clearly see the human being.

If social science is a well-nigh impossible task, and if Doctoral students in Education are insecure because they see legions of doctoral students in Economics about to take their jobs, then why should they be any more scrupulous about curbing the many types of researcher bias than any other social scientist? For the truth is that social science has been for years in the throes of a crisis: a study published in Nature found that more than a third of a group of peer-reviewed social science papers published in top journals (Nature and Science) couldn't be replicated. Researchers in other social sciences are, clearly, also swayed by the hope of finding meaningful and applicable results.

On the other hand, teachers can be and are often quite analytical, and are in fact more truly scientific than many social scientists. One key element of science is maintaining an open, skeptical, humble mind, and few people are more humble in my experience than working teachers.

Two recent critiques of the education establishment, and teacher practice, are Natalie Wexler's book, The Knowledge Gap, and Emily Hanford's many radio stories, op-eds and film about the "science" of reading. Both Wexler and Hanford are reporters who base their critiques on supposed "science" that they got from academic researchers (Mark Seidenberg in Hanford's case, and Daniel Willingham (mostly) in Wexler's case); and both Wexler and Hanford cast Lucy Calkins, an ed school bigwig, as their main villain, with the teachers in the role of mostly unwitting dupes who need to be informed that they are doing everything wrong. In these feuds, it is absolutely not the ed school people (and of course it's not the teachers), who are "relentlessly, unrealistically, sometimes comically optimistic."  Instead, the people who most wildly overstate their case and pretend that "there is an implementable answer to every educational problem" are not only the journalists, no doubt incentivized by the pressure of coming up with a good story, but also the scientists themselves. After all, the hubristic subtitle of Seidenberg's book is "How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It", and Willingham's book has a whole table of implementable solutions. In both of these cases, the problems are ones that Labaree points out, but the fault lies not in teachers, nor in ed school.

The next question, for me, is how much any of this really matters. Fortunately, none of it is probably all that significant. Even what I was worrying about today--the crazy numbers of screens we have these days in English classrooms that are supposed to be helping kids get better at reading and writing--probably doesn't matter all that much. But more on that issue later.