Debates on high-impact education policies—from “No Child Left Behind” to the Common Core to dueling assessment tests—often play out far from the academy. The education policy landscape, once the preserve of peer-reviewed journals and scholarly conferences, now teems with highly opinionated reports, blogs, and media events staged by advocacy groups, unions, think tanks, and elected officials.
That is why Dean Maureen Kenny in 2013 appointed a task force on shaping policy (which is one of the Lynch School’s strategic “pillars of excellence”). And it is why prominent Lynch School Professors Henry Braun, Marilyn Cochran-Smith, and Diana C. Pullin, members of the task force, devote substantial time to offering insights and best available evidence to government officials, litigators, and journalists who help shape education policy and practice.
As challenging as it is to infuse objective scholarship into the discourse, Braun, Cochran-Smith, and Pullin say the stakes are too high to stay on the sidelines with biased forces jockeying for influence.
Diana C. Pullin
“Most of what I do doesn’t have my name attached to it,” said Pullin, a professor of educational leadership and higher education and an affiliate professor at Boston College Law School. “I’ve had more impact on court cases, professional standards, and writing in a committee” than through traditional academic publications. She also provides expert background to reporters and context to litigators.
For example, Pullin said she has trained lawyers and helped them create litigation strategies for challenges to the federal “No Child Left Behind Act.” The public policy work is unpaid, available primarily on open source channels, and takes time that established faculty can better spare than younger members on their way up in their fields, Pullin noted.
Henry Braun
But the faculty contributions are vital. Recently, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and Secretary of Education James Peyser tapped Braun’s expertise in educational research, measurement, and evaluation to help Massachusetts educators, advocates, and lawmakers decide whether to continue administering the MCAS test or switch to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test.
“I have to worry about the legislative mandates that state departments of education have to follow, yet they are contradictory,” Braun said. “Intuitively a policy may seem reasonable and possible but when you try to square the circle, you fail.”
Marilyn Cochran-Smith
As teacher evaluation and credentialing have become targets of increasing scrutiny and public pressure in the U.S. and Europe, Cochran-Smith, the Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools and director of the doctoral program in curriculum and instruction, has been sought after for her wide-ranging knowledge of assessment in teacher education. She said that governments over the past 25 years have assumed a direct link between a country’s economic health and the quality of its education system, especially its teachers. That has brought unprecedented attention to teacher preparation, certification, and licensing and to monitoring the impact of teachers on student performance.
Cochran-Smith says that she spends a lot of time outside her academic pursuits adding evidence-based results to open source publications and blogs. Otherwise, she said, experts like her cede the public discussion to opinionated posts by teachers’ unions and think tanks that can have an “enormous impact” on the process of evaluating and credentialing teachers.
The Lynch School Policy Task Force meets twice a year to assess progress and plan next steps in advancing faculty work in shaping policy.