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Scientifically Based Research School Reform

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The policy mandates that school reforms and practices should be grounded on “Scientifically Based Research” and employ educators that are “Highly Qualified” (Manna & Petrilli, 2008, p. 63). The “Scientifically Based Research” (SBR) and “Highly Qualified” (HQ) teachers are supposedly, fruits of collaboration between educational researchers and the policy makers. Regretfully, the overuse phrases have become mantras and in the process the real definitions of the words or how they are supposed to be implemented is convoluted. Combined with school leaders’ professional wisdom, HQ should be the foundation of school reforms and SBR supposed to inform teaching practices, curriculum decisions and school programs to improve student learning. …show more content…

Reflectively, if policy makers have invested their own funds and time, or the cause or goals are more in line with that of their own ideology, then clearly they will have to pay much more attention to the data before making their decisions. The finger-pointing reveals the miscommunication between researchers and policy makers, and is a major dilemma in the fragmentation of research effort. To further their own agenda, sometimes political entities higher influential “synthesizers” to carry out their own research in order to promote what their organizations deemed important (p. 77). As Petrilli states, the synthesizers put together the “High Qualified” research, package it into something that is ideologically suitable for their own agenda and pass it down to policy makers. The user-friendly language, same ideology and compelling evidence why policy makers should embrace the definition of HQ will ultimately help policy makers to make their decision. Education field as a whole, whether it is academic, research, structures, management or a combination of them all is a complex entity and full of political, social, economical and ideological agendas tangled deeply within it.
One would think that if a program that has been researched extensively and the findings are conclusively effective, school leaders might want to use it to improve education practice. However, quite often personal philosophy, ideologies and beliefs of school

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