Nancy Flanagan raises an interesting point yesterday about schooling and public policies in an article titled "Say What?". She questions the relevance of quantitative education policy research.

I responded with the following.

Many of us have shared your observation that graduate study research and discussions seem remote from 1st grade teaching. Then, someplace along the way, we understood more clearly what Joe's comment meant as our thinking expanded after we hit a critical mass of advanced analytic skills.

Sometime in the 1960s, Joe Trippi, then a professor of special ed at UMichigan, told Mike Tracy (later asst. prof at UNC-CH then Indiana U), Spence Gibbons (at Syracse), and many other doctor students who became education professors at major universities, that "a teacher knows in an instant what it takes a researcher a career to discover."

Some of us have come to the point of appreciating both types of teachers: those who work with children and those who work with adults seeking more skills to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of schooling as well as of education.

I hope you give yourself time and make the effort (it may require intention)to develop that critical mass, so you can help others of us more closely link sophisticated analytic skills with public policies that assist students to increase learning rates more reliably and more efficiently.

After all, why else would anyone try to earn a doctorate in education from a world class university?

How think about this topic?

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