Is Education Research Becoming Partisan?

Professor Jal Mehta knows that education research matters — it has the power to shape schools, classrooms, and policy. Yet, today, in increased political polarization, many may question whether education research can be neutral.

“As a researcher, you have a lot of choices about what topics you study. Those choices are driven by a whole variety of things. They're driven by what researchers would think is interesting and sort of like where the edge of the field is. They're driven, to some degree, I would imagine, by people's own kind of values. And they're also driven by the interests of the moment,” Mehta says. He points out that education research inevitably echoes the issues and values of its time — from No Child Left Behind to Black Lives Matter to the current backlash against diversity and inclusion — but that doesn’t mean its partisan. Instead, it mirrors the social and political moment in which it’s conducted.

“There's a lot of interest among researchers about how can we talk to each other, how can we work across difference, how can you have constructive conversations,” he says. “And it's not that those things were any less important five years ago. They just weren't at the kind of the center of the zeitgeist. So, sort of wherever the middle is, you'll find a lot of researchers kind of studying that at that moment in time.”

Funding and politics, Mehta notes, also play major roles in determining which studies get done, particularly as recent cuts threaten the data infrastructure needed to track student progress. Yet despite those challenges, he sees hope in growing partnerships between researchers and schools, where the questions being asked are grounded in the realities of teaching and learning.

In this episode, we take a deeper look at whether education research can ever truly be neutral and what happens when ideology and evidence collide.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Almost everything feels political, from classroom lessons to debates over diversity but what about the research that shapes those debates? Has education research itself become partisan? Harvard professor Jal Mehta has been thinking a lot about that. He's been researching education for more than 20 years and understands how researchers choose what to study, why funding and policy priorities matter, and how values inevitably shape the questions that get asked. I wanted to understand whether research can ever be neutral, how it affects what's going on in classrooms, and how this moment in time might shift the future of research. First, I asked him how education research helps us understand schools, classrooms, and students.

JAL MEHTA: I think the one thing that researchers have that teachers and folks in schools do not have is the gift of time. They have space and time to really focus in on issues in a way that when you're teaching, everything is just sort of flowing so quickly and there's no time to step back and reflect.

Dewey has this famous quote that you think that when research discovers something, it narrows the range of action. Like the answer is, "Because we learned this, we should do X." And he said, "Most good research actually sort of helps a teacher expand their range of action because it helps them see kind of more lenses or possibilities on a given situation." So you might notice that there are patterns in the gender of the kids who's being called on and that that affects who leads to who talks first, which in turn affects their confidence and so forth. And then once researchers have documented that, then a teacher can be sort of in a situation and it just sort of gives them another sort of layer of things to look for as they're kind of maneuvering through the classroom.

JILL ANDERSON: Right. Research isn't just something that's academic. It actually has consequences.

JAL MEHTA: It has a lot of consequences. Consequences for policy. Carol Weiss, who was at the Ed School quite a few years ago, did a study called the Enlightenment Function of Social Research. And she went and interviewed policymakers about whether they used research and which research they used. And it turned out that policymakers couldn't name individual researchers, but that when she did the research over time, the ways the policymakers were talking, the issues that they found salient and the things that they were saying were very much informed by research. So in other words, they weren't even quite aware, but the ideas had kind of penetrated the discourse and gradually shifted the way that they were talking and thinking.

JILL ANDERSON: Right. And so it's been interesting in this moment because there has been some chatter at least in the field of education that the research is feeling partisan. Do you think that education research actually has become political or is it just feeling that way?

JAL MEHTA: Man, that's a $64,000 question. As a researcher, you have a lot of choices about what topics you study. Those choices are driven by a whole variety of things. They're driven by what researchers would think is interesting and sort of like where the edge of the field is. They're driven, to some degree, I would imagine, by people's own kind of values. And they're also driven by the interests of the moment. So I've been doing this for maybe 25 years now, and in the first 10 years, 80% of the research was about no child left behind because that was the big thing happening in the policy sphere. So if you went to a conference, it would all be NCLB, we're studying it in this state, in that state, and did this intervention or that intervention, raise elementary reading and math scores. And that's because that's kind of where the policy landscape was at the time.

And then in the sort of 2015 to 2021, 22-ish range, Black Lives Matter was a big part of the landscape and was shaping a lot of what was happening in schools and districts in higher ed. And so you saw a lot of questions about equity and culturally responsive teaching and those sorts of things. And now, with the current administration's pushback on all things diversity, equity, and inclusion, there's a lot of interest among researchers about how can we talk to each other, how can we work across difference, how can you have constructive conversations. And it's not that those things were any less important five years ago. They just weren't at the kind of the center of the zeitgeist. So sort of wherever the middle is, you'll find a lot of researchers kind of studying that at that moment in time.

JILL ANDERSON: Right. So it's just a reflection in a way of society or whatever is happening, not necessarily that it's actually being politicized in some way.

JAL MEHTA: That's right. Yeah.

JILL ANDERSON: Was there a moment when you maybe noticed any tension between evidence and ideology and the work being done?

JAL MEHTA: I think at least in the questions that people choose, it's unavoidable that, to some degree, people's values inform the kind of work that they do. If you're really interested in why the American school system is not serving black and brown children very well, your research can be objective in the sense of, well, is it tracking? Is it money? Is it segregation? Is it this? Is it that? It can be objective in that sense, but the question you chose to focus on is informed by your commitment. So the reason I kind of paused at your question is I think that to some degree, people's values and the questions they asked are intertwined.

Now, I think if one heard that and someone were to say, "Well, oh yeah, there it is. He's validating the idea that all of this is just values driven stuff. It's not really science," I wouldn't agree with that either. I would say that once you've centered the question, then there are agreed upon kind of standards and methods and so forth that you use to pursue the question. And a lot of the most interesting research comes to unexpected conclusions.

JILL ANDERSON: So you've already talked a little bit about this idea of whether research can really be neutral in that researchers bring their own values, but at the same time, there's a true way to do research that keeps that from being at the center of the outcomes.

JAL MEHTA: I think that's right. I mean, I think if we look at the public discourse, like if you take a crazy academic notion like post-modernism, which was this idea that the university pretends to be an objective thing, but actually there's a lot of values in what's driven. And somehow the public discourse, like we sort of leapt from, in a subtle way, values can inform people's questions to there's no such thing as science.

JILL ANDERSON: Right.

JAL MEHTA: It's just whatever I say the answer is what the answer is. If research shows that X reduces COVID cases by Y amount, oh, that's just your opinion. That's not your opinion. That's research, which demonstrates that. And so we somehow took this partial truth, which is that there are some values that inform some of the questions people asked. And public discourse, particularly in certain parts of the current administration, it just sort of leapt to, "Well, there is no truth. It's just like, I say, you say."

JILL ANDERSON: Right.

JAL MEHTA: And that's really dangerous. So the actual truth is just complex. Values do inform a bit the questions people ask, but then there are agreed upon processes, methodological standards, peer review processes, et cetera, that ascertain truth. And all of that can be true at once, but people want simple answers.

JILL ANDERSON: Do you think that the general public has a good understanding of the value of education research or the role that it plays?

JAL MEHTA: No, I do not think so. One way that research could change to be more useful is if there were more closer relationships between schools and researchers. There are a lot of folks in higher ed institutions that bridge those things. We have some at our school, places like the University of Washington, Colorado, Michigan, Penn have built really strong relationships with their local schools and communities, but sometimes researchers treat schools as if they were guinea pigs in a massive social engineering experiment. And I think a lot of the best research comes out of partnership because teachers and administrators, principals, are the folks who have a good sense of what kinds of questions are most relevant to students. And the more we ask those questions, the better answers we'll get.

If you just think about how we spend our days, folks in schools spend 98% of their time with other folks in their own school. And same is true in higher ed. We spend most of our time around our higher ed colleagues and our higher ed students. And so sort of fighting against that and building bridges will lead to more relevant work. Most of the way that the public interacts with schools is through their kids and their teachers. And so they hear from their teachers or at parent night or from their principal that such and such research-based program has been really useful. That's probably the most likely way that the public is going to get a sense that research has been helpful.

JILL ANDERSON: One of the things that I've been thinking about is how when you look at medical research or you look at research in public health, it seems like it's very easy for the public to understand it because most of us have been affected in some way by cancer or something like that. So you understand the magnitude of maybe a drug that can treat cancer, whereas education research feels a little bit more difficult to connect to, even though most of us experience education and are probably being impacted by research on some level without knowing it.

JAL MEHTA: We are being affected by research all the time. Like for example, there's a famous set of studies that dates back to the late '60s about teacher expectation effects, for example. So like essentially, they took two groups of students and they randomized them and they gave them each to a teacher and they said to the teachers, "So-and-so are the fast ones and so-and-so are the medium ones and so-and-so are the slow ones." But in fact, it was just a random group of students. Those labels had no bearing on what they were doing.

And then they looked up at the end of the year, and sure enough, the ones that they had said at the beginning of the year were the faster students had learned more and the ones that they had said where the medium students had learned the middle and the ones that they said where the lower students had learned the least. And that's because the teachers kind of calibrated their expectations. They said, "Oh, Susie can do this extra problem because she's like one of the bright ones. Whereas Bobby, he needs a little support, but we need to slow it down for him." And so schools know this now. And so they're very careful from year to year, when this second grade teacher is getting the handoff from the first grade teacher, not to pass on too much information that might kind of bias them. They're like every year should essentially be a fresh start.

And so I'm not even sure that people think of that as research at this point. It's just kind of like standard practice, but it came from research.

JILL ANDERSON: And what's interesting about this is just this idea that the research feels very, I think, disconnected from the public. People aren't thinking about it, but that education often feels very much at the center of political debate. Do you think that's because schools reflect some broader questions about identity and values or because education just really touches everyone's lives?

JAL MEHTA: It's a great question. So on the first part, do people think of education research as being a sort of big part of what's happening in schools or informing schools? It's not so clearly science, right? COVID was scary and these little processes that we couldn't see were infecting us and killing people in large numbers. And so for a lot of people, that led them to the epidemiologists and like, "What is going on here?" Whereas school, it seems we've all been there, we've all learned things, it doesn't have this sort of esoteric knowledge-base that you would find in public health or you go to a lawyer and they're quoting precedents that you've never heard of and so forth.

So I think the fact that it sort of seems natural kind of belies the complexity of what's actually going on. There are various people who have made the point that teaching is actually more complex than rocket science because rockets don't talk back. It's complicated, but like once you figure it out, they obey the laws of physics. But the laws of social physics are always changing and context-dependent and did that kid have a good breakfast or an argument with his mother this morning and so on and so forth. I feel like the knowledge piece is underappreciated because people are so familiar with it.

And then your second part of your question was about values, and it is this sort of political football, moral, panic opportunities for politicians of all stripes to kind of make hay by declaring their values through the schools like some tiny number of kids are affected by transgendered athletes, but it seems unfair to a fair number of people and so it can become a huge political issue.

Politicians have discovered that the kind of identity, salience, for the most part, you don't get elected by rationally illustrating 10-point plans and people thinking, "Well, that 10-point plan is better than this 10-point plan, so I'll vote for this guy over that guy." People sort of sense, "Oh, this person is kind of more with me than that person." And one of the ways that they signal that is through policies that indicate values, and schools are really good for that because we all really care about our young people.

JILL ANDERSON: One of the things we haven't talked about is the funding aspect of this. Funding plays a huge role in what gets studied and what doesn't. So can you talk a little bit about how the political climate or funding sources might nudge the field towards certain topics?

JAL MEHTA: Well, as you know, the department in the current administration has shut down a lot of funding for education research and for IES and the Institute of Education Sciences, and that will have big effects, especially for larger longitudinal studies, randomized control trials, the sorts of things that the government funds in larger numbers. Smaller studies that involve one school, qualitative research where someone goes to a place and examines things, those things will be less influenced by some of the funding cuts.

Researchers are really worried about basic data, like are we going to continue to collect the NAEP, which is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or are we going to continue to be able to just sort of track how well our students are doing over time? We've been collecting that for 50 plus years. I mean, I certainly think we should fund research of all types, but there's a certain kind of basic data infrastructure that's important just to have some sense of whether did COVID cause test scores to go down. Or there's been a big thing about chronic absenteeism the last few years, our kids going to school. You can't really do anything without some kind of basic diagnosis of the system. So people are very worried about what's going to happen with the data sources.

JILL ANDERSON: I was going to ask you about whether you feel that the news cycle in social media has made it harder to convey nuance in research or even just convey research in general.

JAL MEHTA: I think it's kind of a double-edged sword. I had a friend who was on NBC News once and they asked him a question and he gave a minute-long answer and they said, "Can you make it more concise?" And they did it again and he gave a 30-second answer and they said, "No. Do it again." And he ended up getting like six seconds. It's not as if there was this world before where the public was like oraring through journals and reading about T-tests and things like that.

So I actually think that there are some folks out there who are really good synthesizers, and they have followings, they have some experience with research. I'll give one example. There's a woman whose Instagram handle is the teachermama. She was a teacher, she is also a mother. And she just gives very concrete parenting advice, particularly around the importance of kind of scaffolding things for kids and that you're inclined to think that the child is just not listening, but like get lower, get closer to the child.

One of the things she says is like, "Never repeat a direction more than twice." So if you've said something once and the child hasn't responded, if you say it a second time and they don't respond, you're just like losing all of your power in the situation. And so if it didn't work the first time, you need to stop what you're doing and actually like get on level with the child and communicate that you actually are communicating something that they need to respond to and so forth.

But anyway, long story short, I've been following her account for a while. And she knows quite a bit of things that I know from the academic literature, but the way that she does it is she posts videos of her kids and she explains like what they're melting down. And so like, "Here's what you would think and here's what you could do" and so on and so forth. So I think there are a lot of people like that. And I think there are definitely kind of opportunities in the social media ecosystem.

JILL ANDERSON: Yeah, that's interesting. So it's funny. On one hand you have the news cycle, which is making you break it down to something as simple as possible and ends up being the shortest thing ever. And social media is short too because of our attention spans are really short, but there's a way to kind of use it.

JAL MEHTA: Well, also individual clips are short, but people acquire followings and so you end up consuming a lot of information about those people. And then there are podcasts, like I've learned a lot from Esther Perel, for example. So like a podcast is like a wonderful vehicle. You have tens of thousands of people having hour-long conversations about this and that. That didn't exist before. There's sort of so many opportunities to learn things if you want.

JILL ANDERSON: Let's talk about just the future of research. Do you notice this moment in time that we're in where research is kind of under question impacting people's interests and pursuing research?

JAL MEHTA: There are cods at a number of universities in terms of the number of doctoral students we take. So that will affect education research and that is contingent on funding and political climate and economic climate and there's that.

I think the topics will continue to evolve. Obviously lots of people are interested in AI and the relationship between AI and the very human enterprise that is schooling and how are those pieces going to fit together and should we push it out, should we incorporate it, how, under what circumstances and what context, for what age learners, et cetera. So I think that whole thing will kind of continue to roll along.

I guess if I had my way, we would sort of both have a very sort of inventive education research enterprise. Like my own quibbles with the education research enterprise is we don't study the innovative stuff enough. So there are all sorts of school environments and afterschool places and youth development and Marshall Ganz's class at the Kennedy School. There are many, many amazing things in education and we don't study them much. We tend to just sort of like look at the kind of modal thing that's happening most of the time and reach conclusions about that. So I would love to see more varied research on more varied topics.

And then at the same time, I would love it if we could get back to a world where there was just sort of baseline bipartisan consensus on, we should collect basic data about how kids are reading and doing math and graduating from school. That that was not something that was a kind of partisan thing that went back and forth.

JILL ANDERSON: What gives you hope in this moment where things are shifting often and maybe getting a little off track from what we've historically had in research?

JAL MEHTA: The one kind of constructive development that is coming from this push on education research is it forces you to defend the utility of what you're doing. I think that's true at universities. I think the whole push on universities, the most positive case I can make for that is universities need to be clearer about what it is that they're trying to accomplish, how well they're accomplishing it, what it's going to do for students who aren't going to go on to PhD programs, but are going to go out into the world. So I think in that sense, you can get too comfortable. You can do the same thing year after year after year.

I think the hope would be that the push kind of forces people who are doing education research to be clearer about the value that they're delivering.

JILL ANDERSON: Jal Mehta is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of the Deeper Learning Institute. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.