Frederick M. Hess's Blog
Tackling That Stubborn Research-Policy Divide
by Frederick M. Hess • Jul 29, 2010 at 9:56 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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Just spent the past couple days with a top-shelf group of young researchers that I hosted in a partnership with my good friends at the Fordham Institute. Together, we held the first gathering of the Emerging Education Policy Scholars (EEPS), which brought to D.C. about two dozen young scholars and thinkers to discuss how research does and should impact ed policy. Visiting with the fellows was a pretty neat roster of policy mavens, ed journalists, and reformers that included USA Today's Greg Toppo, Bellwether's Andy Rotherham, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Ed Week's Deb Viadero, ace Hill staffer David Cleary, former IES chief Russ Whitehurst, Department of Ed's Judy Wurtzel, ConnCAN's Marc Porter-Magee, and the Gates Foundation's Ebony Lee.
I was struck by two things. One, I was again reminded of just how little universities do to help aspiring scholars understand the ways research is digested or used and how to communicate their findings to the broader world. It's always fascinating to see the reactions when young researchers--who already kind of know it--hear first-hand just how haphazard, personality-dependent, and politically shaped is the consumption of their careful
