Every occupation has its catch phrases. Tony the barber always said, “You’re right next,” whenever an impatient customer asked how long he’d have to wait for a haircut. When I worked as a carpenter, our daily refrain was a tongue-in-cheek, “Close enough.” In workshops and education courses, teachers are always informed that the breakthrough theory or method that the course is promoting is based on “what the research tells us.” The instructor’s tone is never tongue-in-cheek.

It should be. Consider these sample specimens of actual education research.

A study of juvenile crime, conducted by federal and university experts, determined that most of it happens after school hours, as opposed to during school hours, when most juveniles are in school, or after 11 at night, when most juveniles are in bed.

According to a specialist in teenage sexuality, teenagers who drink alcohol are more likely to wind up having sex. This confirms what teenagers themselves discovered a few generations ago at drive-in movies.

Investigators probing adolescent behavior computed that a 20 cent tax on six-packs of beer would lower gonorrhea rates for 15-to-19-year-olds “by almost 9 percent.” Their precise calculations apparently rest on the assumption that teenagers who are thinking of having sex will decide not to if it costs them each an extra dime.

A bestselling pediatrician-turned-education-expert has deduced that there’s no such thing as a lazy student. His “science” tells him that children never “decide not to make an effort.”

British and American researchers concurred that overweight kids are more likely to be picked on.

A Georgia team discovered that students who study algebra in eighth grade tend to do better in “higher level” ninth-grade math classes. Also there appears to be a correlation between “success” in ninth-grade English and “reading lots of books” in eighth grade.

An ACT-sponsored analysis determined that students who can read “complex” material are more likely to be ready for college than students who can’t read complex material.

Students who are “rejected by their classmates” are “more likely to withdraw from school activities.” Equally astounding, students rejected by their peers in kindergarten are often the same kids rejected by their peers in later grades.

Preschoolers whose parents drink and smoke are more likely to choose alcohol and cigarette accessories for their Barbie dolls.

Students who “rank in the bottom fifth of basic skills have a low probability of completing college.”

Kids with “academically oriented friends” tend to do better academically, while kids whose friends are “delinquent types” are more likely to wind up in trouble.

Impressed?

In 1993 the research conclusively told us that girls were achieving less than boys and were victims of an education “gender gap.” By 1994, these conclusions were “under attack,” and by 1999, the data were telling us that “boys, not girls,” were actually the ones achieving less and the victims of an education “gender gap.” Along the way the research proved that single-sex schooling could solve the problem, at least until a March 1998 report “cast doubt on the value of single-sex schooling,” a charge that was irrefutable until an April 1998 report confirmed the “benefit in single-sex classes.” In 2001, the research demanded that schools “give single-sex classes a chance,” except when it concluded with equal certainty that single-sex programs were a “failure.”

When most people think of research, they picture facts, figures, and experimental results. Unfortunately, in education research most of the numbers we have come from standardized testing, which has proven so unreliable that its reputation for producing meaningful data lies in well-deserved ruins. When the RAND Corp. concludes that today’s standardized tests identify not “good” and “bad” schools, but “lucky” and “unlucky” schools, you’ve definitely got a data problem.

When education researchers aren’t citing faulty numbers, they’re basing their conclusions on feelings. For example, those conflicting gender studies rested on notoriously unreliable student surveys and dubious evidence as weightless as “boys call out in class eight times more often than girls,” which is why scholars and critics complained about “flawed research claims,” a “small body of research,” and “questionable findings.”

Similarly, a 2004 evaluation of Maine’s statewide laptop distribution headlined that laptops made a “significant and positive impact” on the “quality of work and student achievement.” If you read further, though, you found that those rosy conclusions were based on the “perceptions” of “teachers, parents, and students,” on their “opinions, but not actual hard data.” In other words, the evidence consisted of what students and teachers “believed” had happened, not on any documented improvement in student performance.

The American Educational Research Association even endorses a scientific tool they call “data poems,” which experts demonstrated at a professional development seminar offered at the association’s 2002 convention. Employing this method, educators can “focus, interpret, clarify, and communicate qualitative research” by writing and reciting a poem. Researchers have the option of collaborating with a professional poet to revise and polish their “poetic representations of data.”

Don’t look for this species of research at a physicists’ convention.

Education research rarely satisfies real scientific standards. That’s because education isn’t a science. It’s an art and a craft. That doesn’t mean that teachers don’t need knowledge of their subjects, or that I can’t improve my technique in the classroom. But education “research” is fundamentally anecdotal, so that what I observe for free in my classroom isn’t necessarily any less valid or informative than an expensive study of someone else’s classroom, especially when most of those studies are conducted by, and the conclusions drawn by, experts who’ve rarely, if ever, worked in a classroom.

The education establishment has lavished a fortune, often public funds, on research that’s yielded little more than meaningless data and feelings dressed up as evidence. Schools have squandered scant resources and time hopping on a long parade of research-based bandwagons. Even worse, decades of students have been the unwitting guinea pigs of a bastardized pseudoscience that more often suits education experts’ philosophical preferences than it serves either students or the truth.

The nation, its schools, and our students would be better served by common sense.

If the research tells us anything, that’s it.

Source: Rutland Herald
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