Communication breakdown
When the research group of a respected university issues a report that leads with the paragraph:
It might be expected that someone would listen. But "High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act," produced by the Education Policy Research Unit of Arizona State University and funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education Policy and Research, has recieved almost no traction in the press so far. Various searches on GoogleNews reveal only a handful of media outlets which have picked up on the report, and none of the major ones like the New York Times, Washington Post or L.A. Times.
The report's conclusions are provocative, and attacking NCLB is not exactly a topic that lacks sexiness. So why the thud? I think it's directly tied to the obtuse and dense style of the document. The report is 118 pages long, and once you get past the executive summary and introduction (which it's hard to simply take on faith), the evidence becomes an impassable swamp of matrices, indices, equations and advanced statistics. If a would-be wonk like myself is having trouble slogging through the pages, its hard to think that education reporters, much less the public, are going to be clamoring to write/read about it.
Education policy, like many other disciplines, constantly runs into a logjam between the desired input of science and the desired output of accurate, comprehensible publicity. The mediators -- those who are supposed to bridge what has turned into a yawning chasm -- are primarily the media (and secondarily advocacy groups). But because the media is necessarily in the middle, the researchers must meet them there. In practice, this means writing in clear, concise language that uses as little jargon as possible and including as many easy-to-understand graphs as will fit. Education reporters are on the whole bright and curious, but they are also very busy; there are only certain degrees of complexity which will hold anyone's attention outside of the academe. Let the academics hash out the tertiary equations in the appendices.
If the science of policy continues to be presented like something you would find in an academic journal, much of it will continue to be ignored. I know via my experience as a journalist and my experience working on the other side of the print with the Education Trust that the initial connection between policy and policy-conveyor is the circuit through which most power runs; sever that line, and the public never even knows it's missing something. EdTrust is a pro at this, which is one reason why they are so effective at getting out their crucial message regarding the achievement gap.
The ASU/Great Lakes study is important; it asserts, for example, that there's no correlation between the pressure of high-stakes testing and scores on the NAEP. It further claims "High-stakes testing pressure is negatively associated with the likelihood that eighth and tenth graders will move into 12th grade. Study results suggest that increases in testing pressure are related to larger numbers of students being held back or dropping out of school." If the report is accurate, it casts huge amounts of doubt on critical pieces of the nation's current education policy. It therefore deserves to be debated, to have statisticians and educational experts and teachers and students and the general public and everyone else chime in. But I'm not sure that's going to happen, because you want to start clawing your eyes out by about page 13.
Science must be translated into public knowledge in order to make a difference. The sooner educational researchers figure that out, the better off we'll all be.
Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), standardized test scores are the indicator used to hold schools and school districts accountable for student achievement. Each state is responsible for constructing an accountability system, attaching consequences—or stakes—for student performance. The theory of action implied by this accountability program is that the pressure of high-stakes testing will increase student achievement. But this study finds that pressure created by high-stakes testing has had almost no important influence on student academic performance.
It might be expected that someone would listen. But "High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act," produced by the Education Policy Research Unit of Arizona State University and funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education Policy and Research, has recieved almost no traction in the press so far. Various searches on GoogleNews reveal only a handful of media outlets which have picked up on the report, and none of the major ones like the New York Times, Washington Post or L.A. Times.
The report's conclusions are provocative, and attacking NCLB is not exactly a topic that lacks sexiness. So why the thud? I think it's directly tied to the obtuse and dense style of the document. The report is 118 pages long, and once you get past the executive summary and introduction (which it's hard to simply take on faith), the evidence becomes an impassable swamp of matrices, indices, equations and advanced statistics. If a would-be wonk like myself is having trouble slogging through the pages, its hard to think that education reporters, much less the public, are going to be clamoring to write/read about it.
Education policy, like many other disciplines, constantly runs into a logjam between the desired input of science and the desired output of accurate, comprehensible publicity. The mediators -- those who are supposed to bridge what has turned into a yawning chasm -- are primarily the media (and secondarily advocacy groups). But because the media is necessarily in the middle, the researchers must meet them there. In practice, this means writing in clear, concise language that uses as little jargon as possible and including as many easy-to-understand graphs as will fit. Education reporters are on the whole bright and curious, but they are also very busy; there are only certain degrees of complexity which will hold anyone's attention outside of the academe. Let the academics hash out the tertiary equations in the appendices.
If the science of policy continues to be presented like something you would find in an academic journal, much of it will continue to be ignored. I know via my experience as a journalist and my experience working on the other side of the print with the Education Trust that the initial connection between policy and policy-conveyor is the circuit through which most power runs; sever that line, and the public never even knows it's missing something. EdTrust is a pro at this, which is one reason why they are so effective at getting out their crucial message regarding the achievement gap.
The ASU/Great Lakes study is important; it asserts, for example, that there's no correlation between the pressure of high-stakes testing and scores on the NAEP. It further claims "High-stakes testing pressure is negatively associated with the likelihood that eighth and tenth graders will move into 12th grade. Study results suggest that increases in testing pressure are related to larger numbers of students being held back or dropping out of school." If the report is accurate, it casts huge amounts of doubt on critical pieces of the nation's current education policy. It therefore deserves to be debated, to have statisticians and educational experts and teachers and students and the general public and everyone else chime in. But I'm not sure that's going to happen, because you want to start clawing your eyes out by about page 13.
Science must be translated into public knowledge in order to make a difference. The sooner educational researchers figure that out, the better off we'll all be.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, September 24, 2005 at 9:33 PM.
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