Ronald Wolk comes to this conclusion in an Education Week editorial. He has five basic points:
1. Research is not readily accessible?either physically or intellectually?to the potential users.
2. Research rarely leads to significant change because it is often expensive to apply or is a threat to the status quo.
3. In rare cases where research findings are neither too costly nor too controversial, and are therefore embraced by policymakers, they are often applied so ineptly that they are ineffective?or worse, they wind up doing more harm than good.
4. Much education research is suspect because it depends heavily on the flawed measure of standardized-test scores.
5. Efforts to apply research findings are not likely to produce the desired outcomes because the educational system will not work efficiently if any of its critical parts, namely teacher training and quality, are broken.
Unfortunately, Wolk’s recommendations are baffling. He argues that researchers could 1) do more to create an audience for their work, and 2) place more emphasis on longitudinal studies that do not rely on test scores. Both are foiled by one or more of the five points. What good is user-friendly research if the status quo still buries it? Why would users care any more about longitudinal studies than they do about existing types of research?
