That’s a problem in a field that (unlike, say, math or poetry) is explicitly charged with being useful to practitioners and policymakers. That gap isn’t new (see Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands from 1953 for a sense of how far back this goes), but I fear it’s been getting worse. I say this as someone who’s had a front-row seat, teaching at a half-dozen universities, publishing When Research Matters, compiling the Edu-Scholar rankings for more than a decade, convening AEI’s K-12 Working Group for nearly two decades, and toiling at the intersection of research and policy since the lastcentury.
When I talk to K–12 officials, the top-of-mind issue may be the looming expiration of federal pandemic aid. Yet, questions about where those funds have gone, whether they’ve made a difference, and how to handle the requisite cuts just aren’t a focus for more than two or three of the 200 Edu-Scholars. While there are lots of education economists and finance specialists, they gravitate to analyses that feature causal claims, racial disparities, and for which timeliness isn’t a concern. This work yields some interesting results but ones which tend to be more useful for New York Times think pieces than real-world decisionmaking.
To learn more about the methodology used by Rick Hess and his panel of 40 education scholars, visit. To see how the scholars ranked overall, visit.