Anyone intimately familiar with U.S. education research of the past half century recognizes its marked difference from that of other fields. Some attribute the difference to an inferiority of methods, implying that education professors are not quite as bright as, say, economists. I would argue, instead, that bias is, by far, a greater problem—that bias is fueled by both progressive education ideology and professional self-interest.
On April 24, with the assistance of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the country’s most elite education researchers in the National Academy of Education (NAEd) sued the U.S. Department of Education (ED).
The lawsuit responds to a series of recent actions by the Department of Education to dismantle itself and its research centers and undermine federal research laws, including: a reduction in force within key education data offices; the restriction of public access to existing datasets; and the vast and abrupt termination of longstanding contracts within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Regardless of the merits of the suit’s rationale, NAEd’s involvement embodies hubris. That is because many NAEd members are themselves responsible for dismissing the research record that they either disfavor or desire to replace with their own. They complain that the current ED is suppressing useful information, even while they suppress just as much or more themselves.
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Three types of scholars comprise the bulk of NAEd membership. First are those deeply entrenched in the more politically charged research and supportive of flawed research that helps form the bedrock of contemporary dogma among the education school professoriate.[1]
Second are politically neutral scholars, many of whom primarily conduct more technical, non-politically charged research. They stand acceptable as NAEd members so long as they stick to their specialized knitting and do not openly contradict the dogmatic myths propagated by the first group.
Third, there are a select few from the “other side” of the political fence—those who conduct research primarily in and for the world of politically more conservative clients and institutions. The first group needs the third group to present some semblance of political balance for the NAEd as a whole.
Another characteristic differentiates the allegedly conservative members. They vigorously assist the first group—the education insiders—in suppressing most education research, much of which diverges from favored dogma.
It starts with “cherry-picking.” Cherry-picking scholars restrict their research information pool to that which supports their preferred point of view or the work of in-group colleagues, while ignoring all the rest. References and citations back a scholar’s desired conclusions, and those that would not are excluded.
Some scholars go a step further, though. They declare that the other research, or any research before theirs or contrary to theirs, does not exist, or is so inferior that it is not worth mentioning or citing. I call these “dismissive literature reviews.”
Among the third group of NAEd members, for example, is an individual with over a hundred dismissive literature reviews. His journal articles contain such phrases as: “little information is available,” “we have no evidence of,” “few such studies include,” “analyses of these issues … have not been undertaken in any systematic manner,” “available research provides little guidance,” “analyses available are often crude empirical forays that are difficult to replicate and to evaluate in a definitive manner.”
Another NAEd member of the third group claims to be the first person in the history of the world to have researched over twenty different topics, as in “this is the first study [of/to] …”
Over the past several decades, almost a dozen current NAEd members participated in a federally funded “Content Center” that steadily degraded the acknowledged research base on educational testing and student standards over the course of those years. For example, hundreds of studies existed on one subtopic—the effects of testing—on students, teachers, etc. But the research center would acknowledge the existence of only 55 in 1980, 39 in 1991, and zero by 2001, when the federal government would consider the implementation of a national testing program, and most critically, needed to consult the research literature. Like the firemen in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, they worked more to eliminate information than to add it.
For the pièce de résistance of information suppression, consider a few-hundred-item-long list of dismissive reviews from one long-time NAEd member, including many claims that no one, besides him and his co-authors, had conducted research on the effects of test coaching—i.e., test prep. His magnificent boast denies the existence of other studies on the topic dating as far back as 1927. At least 79 relevant studies were published between 1927 and 2019. Meta-analyses or research summaries were published in 1981, 1983, 1983, 1983, 1984, 1990, 1993, 2005, 2005, 2006, and 2017. In their place, he promoted his one study from over 30 years ago, which was conducted at a location and used outcome measures he would not identify—confidentiality!
Typically, he acknowledges only that research conducted by colleagues in his small, mutual support circle. If only a handful of studies conducted by him and his close colleagues support his views on a topic, they become the only studies that exist on that topic. The U.S taxpayer funded most of those studies, essentially helping one group of scholars to replace entire research literatures—paid for by earlier taxpayers—with their own limited fare.
To be sure, some of the NAEd’s large memberships deserve recognition, having worked hard, played by the rules, and advanced society’s understanding of education. They sit across the table, however, from careerists who have gamed the system, skirted the rules when they could, actively aided the suppression of useful knowledge, and kept their mouths shut about the frauds.
I respect the work of some National Academy of Education members with whom I am familiar. I consider several NAEd members to be friends. Nonetheless, while their own appointments to the prestigious group may be well-deserved, their presence in the group legitimizes the appointments of others that are not. If information suppression bothers them, as their lawsuit suggests, why do they remain silent about its prevalence in their midst?
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[1] Here’s a small sampling of popular, but erroneous, education research claims:
- Student-centered (i.e., “discovery” or “constructivist”) instruction increases student achievement more than more “direct” teacher-centered instruction, even among the poor and those with disabilities.
- There exist “multiple intelligences,” and each student has a unique assortment and learning style.
- Unnecessarily complex classroom problems and test questions can be superior when they elicit “deeper” learning.
- Selected-response test formats (e.g., multiple-choice) evaluate only low-level knowledge and skills.
Image: “Keck Center of the National Academies” by AgnosticPreachersKid on Wikimedia Commons
*”The National Academy of Education is located at 500 5th St NW, Washington, DC 20001. It is housed within the Keck Center of the National Academies, which also serves as the headquarters for the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Medicine. The address is also shared with the Executive Office of the National Academy of Sciences.”
