One of the panels at the American Educational Research Association's annual confrence covered press-researcher relationships. The thrust of the remarks quoted below is that it is just too hard for education reporters to understand this research stuff, and researchers should make it easier to grasp.

Your editor has only a limited anount of sympathy with the journalists. But the problem is not these reporters per se, it is that k-12 education is beginning a structural shift. The full set of skills and expertise that an education reporter needed even a year ago, will be far from sufficient even a year from now. As education reporters know from their articles on school systems, change is hard - especially when it's happening to you. And that is precisely why reporters are unhappy with research and researchers.

The reason reporters don't understand education research is not so much because education reporters don't take the time to understand - although they don't. It is because education research has not been important to education reporting - in the sense that covering it well has not been important to the sale of newspapers or the field's trade publications.

The media will provide what the market wants. If we were discussing big city newspapers' financial or science reporters,  or the staff of trade journals in aerospace, engineering, pharmaceuticals, or energy - every reporter would be able to identify obvious flaws in technical studies, and explain debates between the experts. Every reporter would scan the technical journals and read the blockbuster articles. Every reporter would grasp enough to ask intelligent questions about researchers' work, and make useful inferences about what it means for practitioners in the field. Every reporter would know this because if they didn't they wouldnt have a job, because such details matter to professionals who work in these fields and they would not buy publications that didn't meet their information needs.

In education, we are not discussing a field driven by research. It has been - and to a great extent still is - shaped by ideology, politics, marketing, and money. And education reporters cover that territory well.

But, on the whole, those who love politics don't thrive on numbers. So now that NCLB is pushing the system to get focused on "fact-based" analysis, and moving policy in a direction where decisions turn on an understanding of the numbers games behind AYP calculations, the implications of methodological choices made by researchers and the like, well, education reporters, like policy wonks, educators, legislators and even providers are pretty much at a loss. And the collective first response is to blame the researchers for not making research interesting or accessible.

Sure, the number crunchers need to bear with the vast ranks of people going up the learning curve. But reporters need to recognize the direction in which public education is headed. Those who want to stay in the field need to start reading the reports and learn to understand the lingo. After all, this really is not nuclear physics. With a bit of diligence it is accessible to the informed interested layperson who subscribes to Newsweek.  Moreover, in your editor's experiernce, most  evaluators are prepared to take some time to explain themselves and the basics of their field.  What is really needed here is some work by the Education Writers Association to improve understanding by engaging the research community to suppport reporters' professional development.. 

The future for any reporter lies in being ahead of colleages rather than running with the pack, and the future of education stories is quantitative.

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If academic education researchers want to see more of their studies covered in the media and influencing public policy and education practice, they need to ramp up their resources and their efforts to compete with aggressive and well funded public policy think tanks that get their message out quickly, often, and in reporter friendly fashion.

In this morning’s AERA session called Going Public: Q&A with the media on communicating your research, a roomful of journalists, researchers, and communicators agreed that education researchers and their institutions need to do a better job of sharing their findings with the media and the public. But they need to help reporters do their jobs....

Journalists just don’t have time to read all the reports that come to their attention. And even if they did, they find that some reports are out of date, by as much as a year. Now that online information is instantly accessible now, what do academics and institutions do to keep up? Research has to get out fast enough that it means something, and the reports need to be presented in a compelling way. Lots of researchers shy away from making compelling statements and are reticent to go beyond just saying ‘this is the data.’....

Panelist Larry McQuillen of the American Institutes for Research,, offered the perspective of a former newspaper reporter and white house press corps member. He observed that much research does not find its way into public policy because researchers too often write their reports for each other. They don’t rewrite for the public or for policymakers, so many research articles go over the heads of policymakers unless they happen to be specialists in a particular education field....

Paul Baker, EducationPR, April 10.


The thing that jumped out at me at the Tuesday panel I did with Stephanie Banchero from the Tribune and former USA Todayer Larry McQuillen is how overwhelmed education reporters are with press releases about studies coming out that day -- useless, pretty much, to her -- and how the difficulty in figuring out what research is solid leads folks like Stephanie to pretty much ignore research altogether. She estimates that she's written just two study-based stories in the past year, she says, and is increasingly using in-house data analysis to put out timely stories on data sets released by the state and others....

My contributions, such as they were, included the observation that think tank research is pushing out academic research -- and its strategies for reaching reporters (embargoed reports, conference calls, outreach, more concrete language) might be a good model for researchers who want to get the word out. I also pointed out that there are relatively few education researchers who blog about their work, leaving the field to the think tanks and the handful of media-savvy folks we hear from over and over.

Alexander Russo, This Week in Education, April 12.