Yet, this contest of political wills offers little assurance that what happens in Washington, D.C., will improve the quality of education in Dayton. As the weekend progressed, it became clear that the White House is directing the Bush administration's education battles in Congress. The U.S. Department of Education is out of the loop, meaning somewhere down the line it will have to make sense out of an education act that is pure politics. It's anybody's guess. And that's the point.
Education reform has to be more than guesswork.
Part of the problem is that more research today is politically driven than ever before, says Gene Maeroff, director of the Hechinger Institute. He could have added that in the absence of good research, the politically astute push their programs by using anecdotes as evidence of success. Or they misrepresent conclusions of research. The latter was the case for RAND Education, a group that conducted two studies on Texas assessment tests last year. Both were used by political forces during the presidential election campaign.