Ed Week: Political Punch of Scholarship Debated

Bemoaning the quality of education research—and offering prescriptions for improving it—have become popular pastimes in recent years. Now, some scholars say, it is time to take a hard look at the consumers who use, underwrite, ignore, or misconstrue the knowledge born from studies in the field....

Mr. Henig, for one, also raises a red flag about more-objective research organizations, such as the American Institutes for Research in Washington or the Rockville, Md.-based Westat, that do studies under contract to the Department of Education and other sponsors. For fear of offending potential clients, he said, such organizations can “fall into a kind of blandness in their reporting and accept restraints on what they can say in public from the folks paying for the research.”