New Wave Utilization Research: (Re)Imagining the Research/Policy Nexus

My interest over the past few years in books on the research/policy nexus—beginning with the National Academy’s Scientific Research in Education report (National Research Council, 2002) and moving through focuses on evidence, standards, and the relationship of research to policy—has been and continues to be based on my refusal to concede science to scientism. What science is, who determines what it is, the costs of a narrow scientism, and what a more capacious sense of science adds to such debates I have addressed elsewhere (Lather, 2007). Here, I attend to a turn toward what used to be called “research utilization” that involves a certain reflexivity regarding the impact of education policy research itself. In other words, I note a certain shift in education policy discourse from cheerleading for experimental design to assessing the uses of education research in policy arenas. A recent Education Week article terms the latter approach translational research, defined as putting clinical findings to work in classrooms (Brabeck, 2008).1 This translational work might instead be termed new wave utilization research, after Carol Weiss (e.g., 1979), who laid down earlier tracks in the 1970s. Many examples of this new wave of research are collected in When Research Matters: How Scholarship Influences Education Policy, edited by Frederick M. Hess (2008c), director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. The book contains a foreword by Lorraine McDonnell (2008a), who is the incoming president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and a policy expert in the political science department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. McDonnell has worked closely with the National Research Council over the past decade or so. The Hess edited collection grew out of a 2006 Brookings Institution conference on class size and small schools and a 2007 conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute on the uses of research in policy. Many of the book’s contributors argue that too much attention has been devoted to research design and analytic methods. Many agree as well that education research is in a sorry state, dominated by qualitative and case study approaches and resistant to large-scale studies. The situation is attributed both to structural causes and to “obstinate indulgences of abstraction and narrative in preference to quantification” (Henig, 2008, p. 53). What the contributors to this volume want is to “break new ground” (Hess, 2008b, p. 11) in addressing the “stagnation” into which utilization studies have fallen, thus improving our understanding of the research/policy nexus. The hope is that it is not too late, given the reauthorization troubles of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the political regime shifts on the horizon, including the end in November 2008 of Grover Whitehurst’s 6-year appointment as director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Hence “what’s ahead” for federal education research might indeed be the “perfect storm” prognosticated at a recent American Enterprise Institute conference, where some noted a “brewing backlash” in Congress that threatens to “undo” the evidence-based movement (James Kolmoos, president of the Washington think tank Knowledge Alliance, as quoted in Viadero, 2008). My focus in reviewing the Hess collection is this new wave of interest in “how scholarship influences education policy,” as reflected in the book’s subtitle. I organize my remarks around three points that come to mind in response to the book: (a) The “new ground” to which the contributors aspire appears to be a frank assessment of the limits as well as the possibilities of the research/policy nexus; (b) among most of the contributors, the view persists that education research should be disciplined and punished; and (c) the process of (re)imagining the research/policy nexus needs to push beyond this book.