Spin Cycle: How Research Gets Used in Policy Debates--The Case of Charter Schools

4. Research in the Public Eye:Personalization, Polarization,and Politicization

Chapter 4 Research in the Public Eye: Personalization, Polarization, and Politicization Everybody is waiting for Godot. They are waiting for the final word that will then tell them whether vouchers and things like this are good. And that is never going to happen because the ideological filters are more powerful than any data results . . . [R1] We’re talking about such a polarized field here, that there’s nothing the AFT is going to put out that’s not going to generate a response from certain groups. . . . I think that it’s just a very politicized debate. People are assuming that research is coming from a particularly ideological perspective . [R19] Once somebody else brings a knife to the fight, you have to bring a knife to the fight, too. [R5] In 1991, when Minnesota put into place the nation’s first charter school law, charter schooling was a little more than a notion. The notion was that schools would perform better if held accountable for results than constrained by bureaucratic regulations about process. This simple notion quickly became attached to more a general theory, one with broader application and more politically potent ramifications. The theory was that markets, and specifically competitive pressure to win and hold consumers, would generate efficiencies, stimulate innovation, better engage families, and weed out nonperformers. It was the link between charter schools and the general theory of markets, we have seen, that accounts for why this area of research has become a surrogate political battleground. In 1991, however, the first charter school had yet to 56 open. With no empirical evidence of their effects to battle over, debate was limited to clashing ideas, loosely aligned analogies, and symbolic and rhetorical appeals. Since then, much has changed. Choice programs have moved from idea to reality. School vouchers—potentially the purest of market approaches to education reform—have titillated conservatives since Milton Friedman first proposed them in the mid-twentieth century, but remain limited in scope. Despite the 2002 United States Supreme Court ruling that voucher programs that include religious schools do not necessarily violate constitutional limits on church-state entanglements, voucher champions continue to be stymied by political resistance and legal obstacles at the state level. With the rapid spread of charter schools, however, market-oriented approaches to education are no longer simply a theoretically informed notion; they have become a significant element in the American education landscape. For choice proponents , this presents the opportunity to show that market processes could perform better than public monopolies. For skeptics, this provides the opportunity to show that their concerns about re-segregation, inequality, underfunding, and the loss of democratic control were not exaggerated. For those who believe in the ideal of informed democratic discourse, it means the opportunity for social scientists to inject conceptual clarity and a bracing dose of evidence into a debate too long driven by ideology and partisan maneuvering. The expectation that research can help us learn from experience is the one we address here and in chapter 5. Has school choice research delivered the goods? A close and careful look at the research and its trajectory , I will argue in the next chapter, supports the encouraging conclusion that we can and are learning from the charter school experience, not only about charter schools themselves, but also about broader issues relating to government, markets, community, inequality, and race. This chapter focuses on the public face of research and highlights both a problem and reasons for alarm. For those who believe in the potential for social science research to fuel a more reasoned and informed democracy , the track record in the area of school choice and charter schools is—at least at first glance—hugely disillusioning. Based on what they read in the newspapers or hear from competing political candidates on Sunday morning news shows, informed citizens attempting to make sense of the school choice research can be forgiven if they are tempted to throw up their hands and say “it’s all politics.” “In a perfect world, policy makers more interested in fashioning effective programs than in scoring partisan points could turn to academics to help cut through the rhetorical brawling,” writes University of Nebraska political scientist Kevin Smith. “Unfortunately, it has not turned out that way” (2005, 285). Rather than cooling the histrionics, Research in the Public Eye 57 research—at least as it has stepped onto the public stage—has seemed to replicate...