Resources are too limited to do more. Nevertheless, we would argue that we know a lot more about learning, current schooling practices, and so forth, than was known a quarter century ago. For example, our understanding of how children learn to add and subtract whole numbers is today quite different from what it was in the past. Federal funds from NIE, NSF, and OERI have supported work for over 20 years that has produced a consensus on a framework, instructional materials, staff development, comparative data with traditional approaches, and longitudinal data for both student development and teacher change. Second, the political assumption that basic research findings can directly change educational practice needs to be challenged.
Good research produces only reliable knowledge.
Using that knowledge to produce new products or change practices involves problems of a different sort, engineering and design problems. Changing schooling practices is an engineering design problem, but design studies are hard to do and rarely funded. Also, much of what is now understood from basic research challenges the current design characteristics of contemporary schooling. For example, much of the research about the teaching and learning of mathematics clarifies problems that need to be addressed. Many middle school mathematics teachers have never been taught with understanding some of the mathematics they are expected to teach.