Articles and Opinions

By Kathleen McCartney

Carl Sagan once observed that somewhere, “something incredible is waiting to be known.”

This is as true for education science as it is for astronomy. Somewhere amidst piles of student achievement data and scores of new reform efforts, knowledge that will transform teaching and learning is waiting to be known. But discoveries, whether in the stars or in our schools, are not enough. Discoveries must be relevant to today’s problems in education and must be the product of rigorous research.

Working at the nexus of practice, policy, and research is the most powerful way to improve education. For example, Professor Tom Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education began with a question of the relation between the certification status of teachers and the performance of their students. He conducted a value-added study in New York City’s public schools, under the auspices of his Project on Policy Innovation in Education, and found that student achievement did not vary by teacher status. This research has policy implications for issues ranging from certification to tenure.
Professor Richard Murnane, also from Harvard, identified a challenge facing the Boston Public Schools and other urban districts, under pressure to improve student achievement: how to use data to improve instruction.

Murnane and his colleagues, Kathryn Parker Boudett and Elizabeth City, conducted action research that led to a book, Data Wise, which outlines an eight-step process for school teams to decipher the latent lessons in their data so as to improve instructional practice. This work is advancing via ongoing engagement with practitioners, which has lead to case studies on the real-world applications of Data Wise.

Increasingly, researchers are working to make sure their work is relevant by addressing real problems in ways that are useful for practitioners. A new model of education research has been supported by the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), initiated by the National Research Council, founded to build a coherent, “use-inspired” program of research. SERP projects are focused on the problems of classroom practice as well as school and district management, and its research agenda is formulated collaboratively by university researchers and practitioners from the Boston Public Schools, the San Francisco Unified School District, and the Minority Student Achievement Network. This kind of education research is designed from the start to produce usable knowledge.

These are but three examples of a movement toward more rigorous and relevant research at a time when the value of education to our society has never been higher. Challenges remain for researchers, especially identifying the resources to conduct field research and developing sustained relationships with partners. Schools of education must support research agendas with practitioners and policymakers, engage in a collaborative process that will focus research on the highest-priority needs in the field, and disseminate that research in a way that will make it readily available to those who can put it to work. Education reform will only be effective if it is built on a solid knowledge base. There are incredible things waiting to be known in education, and the social rewards from our efforts will be great—opportunity, achievement, and success for all children.

Kathleen McCartney is the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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