Kevin Carey expounds upon the reasons that research doesn't always or even often make it to policymakers and into their policies. His suggested remedies are fine, especially the appeal for better writing. And yet, conspicuously absent from his piece is that research--at least education research--is rarely conclusive, and sometimes mere weeks pass between the publication of two different studies of the same topic that unearth about that one topic two utterly different and opposed findings.
Rarely addressed is the mutability of education research; certainly, reports can be tweaked in one way or another to reveal the data the authors desire. Furthermore, how many of such reports end with the limp, depressing words, "More research on this topic is needed"? (The practical reader??wonders: "Well, why??didn't you do it, then?") Policymakers generally have ideas about education that they've formed from their own experiences, listening to their constituents, or considering political ramifications. They use studies not to form their opinions but to bolster those they already harbor--and maybe, in rare instances, to??develop an area in which their opinions are not yet fully formed. Who can blame them, though? Were they to predicate every decision on the conclusions of the extant research, they'd have no clarity on anything. In education, as in most policy topics, policymakers' instincts and first principles matter--and few are the research studies that will change them.