Productivity continued…
Over at Sara Mead’s Ed Week blog, Mark Dynarski checks in with a few relevant questions and observations. Actually, as it turns out, we agree ALMOST entirely with Dynarski when he says:
And focusing on peer-reviewed research as a form of quality assurance, as Baker and Welner suggest, seems problematic. Peer-reviewed research journals have highly variable degrees of editorial control, and peer review itself can vary from cursory reading to exhaustive and detailed comments. My own observation is that focusing on research with rigorous designs probably is a superior contributor to quality on average. There never seem to be enough of these when difficult debates on education policy issues arise, though.
Our only disagreement here is with his characterization of what we said. We did not uphold peer review as the gold standard. Though we probably used the phrase – peer review – too often in the brief itself. Rather, we believe just as Dynarski stated, that research with rigorous designs is a superior contributor to quality, on average! Hell
