Inflicting Good on the Poor: As Research-Based as We Wanna Be

For years, MMSD staff have advocated for their proposals and programming choices by arguing that they are research-based data driven best practices. At times, I have wondered whether the research selected has undergone critical review. That is, do the people selecting the research stop to ask whether the research is methodologically sound with verifiable results, much less whether it was conducted on populations or under conditions that are comparable to the Madison public school district.

I've also wondered at an understanding of research that ignores entire bodies of data or work that falls outside of the narrow educational research paradigm. (Prime examples of the latter case include the district's unwillingness to consider the considerable body of research on how children learn to read that is carried out by cognitive psychologists, linguists, and communicative disorder researchers. But that's another post.)

My questions about the level of critical review of the work selected to inform programmatic choices reached new levels this week, after TJ Mertz raised serious questions in his AMPS blog about the only resource identified by name in the update's section on including underrepresented populations.

At the top of page 4, the update states:

Support for underrepresented populations: Research and review of support models for students from underrepresented populations is on-going. District staff (high school teachers and resource teachers) are conducting a book study of Removing the Mask by Ruby Payne.

So what's the big deal? For starters, Ruby Payne is an interesting choice for a district that embraces research-based best practices. Simply put, she does not conduct research herself, cites little work that is more recent than the late 1960s - 1980s range (thereby missing a lot of the advances of the past 3 decades), and mis-appropriates the research that she does cite.

Much of her work is self-published through the Aha!Process business that she heads, and which has become quite a cottage industry peddling its (unreviewed) books to districts who contract with her or one of her employees for in-service training. I note that one of the key areas of specialization for Ms. Payne and her associates is in-service training for school districts that are under the gun to improve student achievement while confronting growing issues of poverty and inequality within the classroom. (Sound familiar?)

The remainder of this post is on-line at School Daze

Posted by Lucy Mathiak at January 6, 2010 9:25 AM
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