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There Is No FDA For Education. Maybe There Should Be
Has American education research mostly languished in an echo chamber for much of the last half century?
Harvard's Thomas Kane thinks so.
Why have the medical and pharmaceutical industries and Silicon Valley all created clear paths to turn top research into game-changing innovations, he asks, while education research mostly remains trapped in glossy journals?
Kane, a professor of education at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, points out that there is no effective educational equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration, where medical research is rigorously vetted and translated into solutions. Maybe, he says, there should be.
It's been 50 years since the publication of the highly influential
"Equality of Educational Opportunity" study — better known as The Coleman Report, after its author James Coleman. And after half a century, Kane writes
in a new article, we should have made much more progress towards closing the achievement gap: the educational equivalent of the fight against cancer.
Failure to do more, Kane argues, underscores the deep shortcomings of education research.
The Coleman Report drew national attention to chronic educational inequality and achievement gaps by race. And while scholarship and research since 1966 have challenged some of his conclusions as misleading, even wrong, many of the core problems he highlighted remain.
I spoke with Kane about this recently — here's a version of our conversation, edited for length.
Give us a snapshot of how important the Coleman Report was in terms of looking at the achievement gap.
The Coleman Report was extremely important. It was authorized as part of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. They were given two years to do a nationally representative study just documenting the magnitude of the achievement gap and differences in access to quality education.
As you can imagine, the technology for collecting and analyzing data back in 1964-65 was very different from what we have today, so it was a remarkable feat, and has a lasting legacy to this day.
The tools he had were limited, his methods and conclusions were flawed. But he was nonetheless on to something. Is that a fair characterization?
I would say my main complaint is not with what Coleman did, although, as you say, there are some weaknesses to it. My main complaint is what we've done since then.
We have spent the last 50 years essentially recapitulating the same descriptive work that Coleman and his colleagues did, and not finding solutions and spreading information about solutions.
The point of education research is to identify effective interventions for closing the achievement gaps that Coleman observed and ensuring that that information is usable.
And by that metric — by our ability to build consensus around a set of interventions that work for closing the achievement gap — I would have to say that the last 50 years have been a near complete failure.
Let's drill down on that. That's a pretty scathing and strong indictment.
Yes. I don't point fingers at the school officials out there. We just have not organized ourselves and organized the research function in a way that we're actually informing decision makers with the type of evidence, and on the timeline they need, to make decisions.
Have education experts been writing and researching for these glossy journals in a kind of eco-chamber? It's mostly produced for each other and not for the actual practice that's implemented?
I would say for the first 35 of those 50 years, we were primarily writing for academic
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