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Chapter 2 Informed Democracy: An Ideal and Its Skeptics Mankind in a test-tube is the hope and aim of social science. —Stephen A. Stephan (1935, 515) In America, we need to have education reform based on science if we’re going to make progress. Science is the standard we set for medical research . Why should we accept quackery for education? —Caroline Hoxby (2005b, 3) To really understand what is going on here you’d be well advised to spend as much time delving into the political theory literature around power as the literature around public schools and charter schools. —Eduwonk blog, August 21, 2006 The idea that wise governance should be guided by science has deep roots. Some would trace them to the founding of the nation. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others who set the country on its course were, by almost all accounts, wise statesmen who framed their deliberations about governing in terms of the best available knowledge of the physical and social worlds. One assessment goes so far as to characterize President Jefferson’s funding of the 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the northwest areas of the nation as perhaps “the first major federally supported social research” (Lynn 1978, 12). Confidence in this vision of a harmonious relationship between governance and scientific expertise ebbs and flows, but has peaked at various points in American history: the Progressive Era during the early twentieth century, the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt, the War on Poverty under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In education policy, this ideal of an informed democracy has undergone similar cycles, alternately celebrated and bemoaned as being hopelessly out of reach. One traditional argument for why education 15 should be considered a “public good” and especially worthy of public attention and resources is that it creates a citizenry smart enough to digest available evidence and use it to make the best decisions in the voting booth. The turn-of-the-century Progressives, who argued in favor of a knowledge-based approach to governance across a range of policy arenas, arguably had their greatest impact in restructuring school governance precisely because schooling was seen as too important to be left to politicians. However, though the arguments in favor of researchbased policy may be particularly compelling in education, the weight of contemporary judgment is that education research is unusually poor in quality, shaped by ideology more than evidence, and thus politically ineffectual. Both the residual hope and the contemporary disappointment are echoed in the federal government’s emphasis on establishing a scientific basis for its efforts to reform the nation’s schools. The Institute of Education Sciences, formed within the United States Department of Education in 2002, describes its goal as “the transformation of education into an evidence-based field in which decision makers routinely seek out the best available research and data before adopting programs or practices that will affect significant numbers of students.”1 The massive No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation makes more than 100 references to the importance of basing educational policy decisions on scientifically based evidence (Cradler and Cradler 2002). When political advocates feel a powerful need to counter a study such as the AFT’s charter school report, when they mobilize immediately even in the lazy days of August, when they dig deep in their pockets to purchase full-page advertisements in major newspapers, and when they frame their ad as a tutorial in research methodology and enlist prominent scholars to sign their names and print these in large font instead of the microscopic size more common in such public petitions— when things like this happen, it is tempting to conclude that policy research has finally come of age. At least on the surface, one might expect these behaviors in a society in which research and knowledge are taken seriously and in which citizens are seen as intellectually engaged, well schooled in the language and standards for good research, and likely to form and re-form their policy preferences based on new information. Was the back and forth over the charter school study and its aftermath , then, an indication that an increasingly educated public has been integrated into a mode of collective deliberation once seen as limited to a small cognoscenti? A sincere effort to elevate democratic discourse to a level aspired to but not yet realized? Or, despite its seeming affirmation of the authoritativeness of science and methodology, was the advertisement criticizing the AFT report better understood as...

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