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Chapter 8 Can the Ideal of Informed Democracy Be Revived? Bad news and good news are intertwined in this story. The bad news is that the idealized vision of knowledge and democracy is once again shown to be naïve. The Progressives believed that expertise and democracy could be neatly apportioned, each to its own realm. Democracy —messy, emotional, symbol-laden, values-based—would be accorded the key roles of selecting leaders and setting broad priorities. Knowledge, and the research enterprise upon which it rests, would take over from there: experts would fashion policies and programs to maximize the democratically defined public good, oversee their implementation to ensure fidelity and efficiency, evaluate outputs and outcomes to feed new knowledge back into the process and continuously refine the collective effort. The AFT charter school flap makes it apparent that the lines between politics and research, between values and data, between theories and ideologies, are permeable and ill defined. I say that the naïveté of the idealized vision has been revealed once again because, as we have seen, critics on both the right and the left have challenged the idealized vision before. Claims of knowledge, they have said, are socially constructed and typically erected with the specific function of protecting the institutional status quo. Privileged elites, in government and foundations, control the resources that determine which beliefs get rigorously tested and which are left unexamined. Elites, or those at the service of elites, control the various media that determine which claims are presented as evidence, which researchers are defined as experts, how much complexity the public is capable of processing or willing to countenance. A good news side to our findings needs to be attended to as well. Compared to some other educational and social policy issues, charter schools present a tough case for those who would like to see a less politicized use of research in democratic decision-making. As discussed in chapter 3, the charter school issue was quickly framed in terms of privatization, and as a result took on added weight in the ideological war between those who favor markets and those who favor government as the primary vehicle through which to pursue the collective 217 good. Despite this, I have argued throughout that charter school research is exhibiting an arc of illumination. Just as proponents of empirical research might have hoped, studies over time are sharpening our conceptualization , developing more precise measures, becoming better designed , and beginning to converge on a number of findings. The path is not straight. The increased convergence does not eliminate disagreement . The findings are contingent on setting and policy specifics. There is a large zone of uncertainty, still, around what we can say with any confidence . The trajectory of the research itself, however, is a positive one. It is in the translation of research into public discourse, then, that caveats, contingencies, and cautions are abraded, and that findings are simplified and drawn to opposing poles. Why is this? Are research and politics like oil and water? Poured into the same beaker, do they necessarily separate into distinct layers? If so, is it always politics that sits on top? Is it possible—and consistent with the patterns of interaction revealed in this book—to envision a healthier relationship between knowledge and democracy? In this concluding chapter, I sift through the idiosyncrasies of the charter school story in order to offer some thoughts about broader forces at play, about whether and where causal responsibility should be assigned, and how we can acknowledge structural tensions that plague our aspirations without giving up hope for salvaging the vision of a more informed democracy. Finding Leverage Points for Reform The skirmishes around charter schools are not isolated. Rather, they reflect a broader conflict over the nature of science and how evidence can be used to obfuscate as well as enlighten. Chris Mooney has used the term science abuse to characterize politically or ideologically motivated uses of the language of science in ways that violate the dictates of science . The defining characteristic of science abuse is that it does not attack science directly—as when, during the Inquisition, Galileo was tried and found guilty of heresy. Instead, it co-opts science by charging that its opponents do science poorly or falsely asserting that evidence lies unambiguously on its side of a reigning debate. Mooney pins responsibility for the rise of science abuse primarily on the right—particularly conservative fundamentalists opposed to abortion, stem cell research , and the teaching...

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