Educators and Researchers Don’t Always Speak the Same Language. Here’s How
to Change That
Morgan Polikoff is an associate professor of education at the USC
Rossier School of Education. He is writing his second book, aimed at parents,
critiquing bad ideas in education policy and pointing the way toward more
productive forms of parent engagement in state and local policymaking:
One
of the reasons I enjoy being an educational researcher so much is because it
really is an incredibly applied field. Yes, there are important theories to be
tested and there is a place for more conceptual or “basic” research. But if
you are someone who cares about real-world impact, there are few fields where
you can achieve that as concretely as you can in education. As someone who
reads application essays for graduate school, this feature—the ability to
affect education at a higher level than the individual classroom—is one of the
main drivers of folks who choose to do education research.
And yet, once prospective researchers get to the academy, many of them
end up doing work that, for a variety of reasons, doesn’t really achieve much
impact. Some of this is simply about the incentives of academia, but some of
it is also about choices that researchers make in the research they do or the
way they talk about their work.
I think most in the field would
agree that there is a spectrum in the education academy from public-facing to
researcher-facing, and that I am pretty far toward the public-facing end. I
think about my work and my identity as a scholar a lot and I make lots of
choices—some of them conscious, some not—about how to position myself and my
work to achieve impact. I recently wrote a Twitter thread about these issues,
and Larry saw it and asked if I’d turn it into a blog. So here is my attempt
to distill a few (noncomprehensive) thoughts about how scholars can achieve
more public impact, if that’s something they want to do.
Have a
message, stick to it. The reality of the universe is that most people don’t
listen. The consequence of this is that if you want people to hear your
message, you have to say things over and over again. The particulars of your
message may of course change over time, but it’s good to have a few core
messages that drive your work forward and that you emphasize in your
communication. For me, two messages that I return to a lot these days are
“Teachers’ jobs are too hard, and we keep making them harder” and “There are
13,000 school districts in the U.S.” I think many policy problems in education
are tied to these two points (certainly they play a prominent role in my book,
Beyond Standards). I also think people start to pick up your framing if it
resonates with them—certainly I hear more people talking about 13,000
districts than I used to.
Be more prescriptive. Academics in general are loath to offer specific
recommendations about what policymakers and practitioners should do. Too many
of us apparently think that it’s the job of the reader to discern the
implications of work. This is unfortunately a recipe for your work not to
matter, because if you don’t offer specific, actionable guidance, someone else
(probably someone less informed than you) will do it. This means not only that
you should offer concrete guidance when you’re speaking to nonresearch
audiences, but you should also use language that is direct and clear (watch
the jargon!).
Contextualize your work but not too much. Closely related
to #2 is that researchers tend to want to nuance and contextualize their work
to an excessive degree. And, of course, it’s true that every child is
different and every school is different, so no one intervention is going to
work in every context. But the reality is that research is never going to be
sufficiently contextualized for every individual setting and what works “on
average” is, in most cases, going to work in individual settings, too. Nothing
works 100 percent of the time—not in education and not in medicine—but
something that is effective on average is good, and we should do more of
it.
Write for the people you want to reach. One of my earliest memories as a
professor was attending a workshop in D.C. for early-career education
researchers focused on impact. The main memory I have of that meeting was
someone saying “policymakers don’t read journal articles.” This is in some
sense obvious—I don’t even think many academics really read journal articles,
but policymakers clearly don’t have the time or inclination—but it’s also
something I never learned in graduate school. The reality is that if you want
to influence policy or practice, you have to do a substantial amount of
communication aimed at nonacademic audiences. And this doesn’t mean a 15-page
white paper. It means 700-word commentaries, podcasts that reach
practitioners, and interviews with any journalist who wants to talk to you.
Stop ignoring political realities. I have been fortunate to study a
range of highly relevant policy issues over the years, from standards to
testing to COVID. Americans have views about many of these issues, and those
views matter. You can’t simply will away people’s views or force reforms upon
them. And this means that you have to understand people’s views in order to
influence reform. Half the voters out there vote primarily for Republicans. I
do not, nor do my friends or colleagues. But I have to be able to understand
what Republicans think if I want my work to play in places where Republicans
have power. Of course, the same goes the other way, but in the education
academy, it is almost always extremely liberal folks trying to get their ideas
implemented in more conservative places.
Your mileage may vary on any of
these ideas, but I have found them to be really helpful to me over the years
as I’ve thought about how to do work that matters.
