"The research says": definitions and uses of a key policy term in federal law and local school board deliberations.

• Author: Asen, Robert
• Position: Report

Education policy in the United States takes shape through the debates of diverse interlocutors interacting in various locales. Parents, teachers, administrators, community members, and others deliberate about education policy in public meetings in middle school gymnasiums, casual conversations at neighborhood gatherings, structured meetings at district offices, and elsewhere. Negotiating these various constituencies, thousands of school board members across the nation bear much of the responsibility for crafting policy as they make decisions about curriculum, instruction, personnel, and finances. Historically, these decisions have been regarded as local matters, given that each community presumably knows best how to educate its children (Graham, 2005; Reese, 2005). However, in recent decades, a national push for standards has confronted the local character of education policy. Frustrated with flagging academic achievement, many federal and state policymakers shifted the focus of education policy in the 1980s from inputs to outcomes, demanding greater accountability and advocating standards and testing as the measures of school success. As a result, local officials, who direct the daily operations of schools and classrooms, face an increasing number of federal prescriptions designed to guide their decision-making (McGuinn, 2006; Rothstein, 2004).

In this policy environment, research has emerged as a key term linking national and local debates. In the view of some policymakers and analysts, research serves demands for accountability by promising a sound basis for decision-making that may avoid partisan conflict (Coburn, Toure, & Yamashita, 2009; Honig & Coburn, 2008; Slavin, 2002). Exemplifying this aspiration, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which represents the codification of the standards movement at the federal level, explicitly mentions "research" over 100 times (Smith, 2003). The legislation calls for a research basis to guide decisions ranging from reading instruction to teacher training to drop-out prevention (Honig & Coburn, 2008). For instance, NCLB (2002) seeks "to enhance the early language, literacy, and prereading development of preschool age children, particularly those from low-income families, through strategies and professional development that are based on scientifically based reading research" (p. 1552). Elsewhere, the law calls for "promoting strong teaching skills for mathematics and science teachers and teacher educators, including integrating reliable scientifically based research [on] teaching methods" (p. 1645). And these constitute only a few of the applications envisioned for research.

Far from resolving disagreement, research may propel controversy about education (as well as other issues), raising important questions for argument scholars. First, while foregrounding research highlights expertise as the basis of education policy, the people debating this topic-board members, administrators, teachers, parents, students, and others-address issues that exceed the institutional confines of education research. As John Dewey (1916/ 1944) noted in his discussion of its democratic impulses, education in its broadest sense constitutes the communication of social practices, beliefs, and values. Education sustains the "social continuity of life" by communicating "habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger" (pp. 2, 3). Expertise offers no privileged perspective on this communicative process, which instead interpellates people as citizens. Second, school board members, who remain the key decision makers at the local level, negotiate complex and potentially conflicting roles as elected officials, experts, and community members; these different roles cannot be subsumed under a communication model based on an idealized vision of research. In these roles, school board members often must balance their understanding of technical policy problems with their awareness of community interests and values (Tracy, 2010). Third, key policy terms convey different meanings among the various participants and across the multiform sites of policy debate. These differences in meaning themselves reflect differences in outlooks and values that shape understandings of policy issues.

Examining these issues, this study compares the meanings and uses of research in two sites of policy debate across a networked public sphere. The first site is the definition of research articulated in NCLB itself--a definition that may prompt objections by people who actually conduct education research (Hostetler, 2010). Nevertheless, as rhetorical scholars have argued, definitions inform policy debates by framing issues, constituting relevant audiences and competencies, and privileging particular modes of inquiry (Schiappa, 2003). Attending to the definition in NCLB, then, offers insights into federal understandings of research, which may or may not be taken up at the local level. To investigate the latter, our second site consists of school board deliberations in three districts in Wisconsin. Although rhetorical scholars often focus on policy debates at the national and international levels, local debates stand as important forums of policymaking. Education policy in particular brings together state actors and citizens, experts and laypeople, to craft mutually acceptable proposals for pursuing commonly identified community needs, interests, and goals. Considering these two sites of policy debate, we situate our analysis within the theoretical literature on the public sphere, which increasingly has focused on examining relations among disparate discursive forums. In particular, we reference G. Thomas Goodnight's (1982) theory of the personal, technical, and public spheres of argument to elucidate the tensions between expertise and democracy that arise in the foregrounding of technical research as a basis for education policy. As we discuss below, accessing the local school board debates generated a methodological challenge because these discourses, unlike their federal counterparts, are not available in public databases or archives. To gather texts of the local debates for our rhetorical analysis, we engaged in ethnographic observation of school board meetings, recording these meetings and creating our own transcripts.

We argue that the definition of research in NCLB presents an oversimplified model of decision-making that discounts deliberation and ignores the complex issues faced by school board members and other local officials. NCLB presents an overly narrow view of research that privileges specific methods and imagines research as a means of reducing uncertainty and resolving disagreement in education policy. In contrast, the school board debates we observed operated with an expansive meaning of research and combined the use of research with other evidence types such as examples, experience, data, and testimony. Moreover, these local debates balanced technical and public modes of reasoning, appreciating better than NCLB the role that values play in crafting public policy. Our study begins with an explication of relationality in a networked public sphere. Next, we explain our methodological use of textual analysis and ethnography. Our analysis first examines the definition of research in NCLB and second considers the meanings and uses of research in the school board deliberations we observed.

POLICY DEBATE IN A NETWORKED PUBLIC SPHERE

Although legislative bodies retain the responsibility for crafting laws and policies, policy debate in the contemporary United States unfolds in a networked public sphere. Innumerable discussions animated by diverse participants circulate policy discourses across institutional and non-institutional forums. Our reference to a "networked public sphere" invokes a scholarly shift, which has emerged over the past few decades, emphasizing multiplicity in studying the public sphere (Brouwer, 2005; Brouwer & Asen, 2010; Fraser, 1992). In his landmark account of the bourgeois public sphere, Jtirgen Habermas (1962/1989) gestured toward multiplicity, examining various national contexts and acknowledging a proletarian variant. However, we discern a shift in emphasis from universality to relationality as a key difference between his discussion and contemporary scholarship. The bourgeoisie claimed a universal quality for their discussions, believing they could represent the perspectives of excluded others. Public opinion in a networked public sphere does not refer to the extrapolated discourse of a single forum, as the bourgeoisie claimed, but to an "anonymous 'public conversation'" produced through variously connected nodes (Benhabib, 1996, p. 74).

Read through the lens of a networked public sphere, Goodnight's (1982) theory of the personal, technical, and public spheres of argument provides a framework for thinking about relationality. In particular, he calls attention to the "grounds" and "authorities" of argument (p. 216). Grounds refer to the implicit and explicit norms and practices that structure arguments. Authorities refer to individuals who may be invoked to substantiate claims and audiences who judge the reasonableness of arguments. An important distinction between technical and public spheres of argument, which informs and often complicates their relations, concerns degrees of homogeneity or heterogeneity. Arguments in technical spheres tend to draw from and appeal to a body of experts, even as different technical spheres constitute expertise differently, whereas a public sphere of argument invites the participation of all people potentially affected by an issue. Further, in a technical sphere, regular participants operate according to explicitly and implicitly established rules and procedures. For instance, education researchers trained in the social sciences concur that a well-selected sample may be used to study a population. In important respects...