Is education research actually helping teachers?

Transcript

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The American Educational Research Association is one of the largest groups in the country that supports and advances educational research. It has more than 25,000 members who are faculty researchers, graduate students, and other professionals who work at universities, academic institutes, federal and state agencies, testing companies and nonprofit organizations.

The association’s mission statement says it’s a “national research society, which strives to advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.” The organization also works to disseminate the research its members publish for practical use in America’s classrooms.

The American Educational Research Association’s annual conference is the place where ideas, research, and goals for education are shared. It’s the premier education research conference in the country. So what education research is being most talked about, most championed there?

Well, according to a recent study by Auburn University, the majority of the research presented at these annual conferences is not what most teachers say they need help with. The lead author of the Auburn study says there’s a profound and potentially damaging disconnect between the politics of education research and the practical guidance schools and teachers are hungry for.

David Marshall is an associate professor of education at Auburn University and he’s one of the authors of that study.

Professor Marshall, welcome to On Point.

DAVID MARSHALL: Hi, Meghna. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So what I’d like to do is start off by going sort of step by step through what you found in terms of what’s being talked about at this annual conference. First of all, what exactly did you search for and how did you do this search in analyzing the American Education Research Association’s annual gathering?

MARSHALL: Sure. So we analyzed, so we used AERA first off as just as sort of a stand in. Like you said, they’re the biggest, most prominent educational research organization in the United States. And so we used their conferences as a stand in for what prominent educational research looked like.

And so we looked at the annual meeting programs from 2021 to 2025, and we analyzed them using the three prompts using our university enterprise license with Microsoft Copilot. And we identified  the top five themes that that emerged from the last five years’ programs. I will say those themes were pretty stable across all five years as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let’s talk about what those themes are, theme by theme. Was there one that consistently came out on top?

MARSHALL: Yes. Themes around equity, social justice, identity appeared at more than twice the frequency of any of the other topics that emerged in the analysis.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let’s actually put an example of that forward. This is from 2024 when Tyrone Howard was the head of the American Educational Research Research Association as president.

At that time, he released a video discussing the themes for that year’s conference, which was called Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. Now in this section you’ll hear him reference the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, and the law.

TYRONE HOWARD: As we theorize about issues of race and dismantling racism and imagining possibilities, I ask that we think about race and its intersection with issues tied to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, social class, gender, identity expression, religion, and disability as well.

Part of our work has to be to look at the ways in which these markers of our identities, as Crenshaw tells us, overlaps and therefore cannot be fully addressed in isolation. But as we do this work, let’s not look at it solely within the confines of siloing race, but how does race play itself out, and how does racism manifest itself across other intersectional identities, which is important to how we have to think about this work in this current moment.

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Marshall, I mean there you hear from 2024, the then-president of the American Educational Research Association doing exactly what you’re saying, putting issues of identity and various forms of equity front and center in terms of what this research association should talk about. But what’s the problem with that?

MARSHALL: Well, I think on one hand you could say that that’s evidence that people responded to the call for proposals. I mean, that was what he had put out there as what he wanted to see the conference focus on. And that’s indeed what people responded with.

I don’t think there’s a problem in and of itself, and I just want to be very clear on the front end of this, there’s not a problem in and of itself of focusing on any of these issues. You know, I think a lot of the things, including things like race and gender, might be deeply important depending on the context of the study in general.

I mean, I’ll give just one example of my most recently published paper focuses on a pair of racially integrated charter schools in, you know, part of the U.S. South that has historically been segregated. The public schools still, for the best part, are rather segregated. And these are two counter examples to that. And you can’t tell that story obviously without talking about race as part of that.

But I also think that when you’re, so, we’ll get to the second part of this, I’m assuming, in a minute when we talk about what the teachers told us, when that is the issue that you’re discussing sometimes at the, maybe the exclusion of other issues, like student behavior, technology, AI integration, teacher burnout, then sometimes I think that’s something we should take a serious look at it.

CHAKRABARTI: So you — and yes, we will discuss what teachers who are on the ground and in the classroom say they need. But just to reiterate, you essentially used the tools you talked about earlier to analyze the themes of more than 25,000 presentations at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting for those four years. So it’s not a small number of presentations that you looked at.

So issues of equity, social justice, et cetera, were by far the number one search result essentially, of your analysis. I also find that you say for 2025, in this year’s conference program, there were more than 300 presentations on resistance and almost 100 presentations on safe spaces. So how does that compare to presentations on, say, student and teacher mental health?

MARSHALL: Yes. And I came up with that just using word searches in the 2025 annual program. And yes, when you look at issues like teacher mental health, there were approximately 75 presentations. Student mental health, there were approximately 24 or 25 presentations. Teacher retention, even, there was approximately 75 presentations. You know, all three of those issues, less represented than the two that you just referenced.

CHAKRABARTI: But, so essentially you’re saying that it’s an order of magnitude less?

MARSHALL: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: If not more than what seemed to be — I mean, did you, were you able to analyze, you know, presentations about resistance more closely? I mean, were they overtly political? Resistance to whom?

MARSHALL: The, I if, if I’m honest, I didn’t take a deeper look into the different presentations that were used in that term. I just, I had a series of keywords that I searched and that was one of them.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So then tell me more though, about what conclusion that you draw from things about like resistance and safe spaces being more represented in these conferences. I mean, again, you made a point that it’s important to understand that, and so what is that point?

MARSHALL: Well, I think the point is I spend a lot of time talking to teachers. I spend a lot of time in schools talking with school leaders. And I have really, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve made it a point to ask them what matters to them.

I wrote a book around looking at the impact of the pandemic on really teachers and students, but schools in general. And part of the research we did for that, we asked teachers, you know, what do you need to do your work? And you know, the, I think the saddest thing is if a lot of them said, “well thanks for asking, because not enough people do.”

But, you know, so I made a point ever since then to try to ask that question anytime I’m interacting with a superintendent, anytime I’m interacting with school leaders, with teachers, I add that question to every interview I do, every focus group, I do every survey I do, and I can tell you I have yet to have a teacher or school leader tell me that they want to know more about safe spaces, but every single day they tell me they need to know more about chronic absenteeism and student mental health and ways to curb some of the more pressing issues they deal with.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Okay. So in your original story about this, which appeared in The Hill, you basically say that the contrast between what was presented at these annual conferences versus what teachers actually say they need was pretty stark.

I mean, I’m gonna quote from your paper here. You say, “At the annual meetings, the dominant themes were equity, social justice, and identities. And specifically these topics appeared at twice the frequency of any other research area. Other prominent themes included critical race theory, methodological innovations, teacher prep, often with more of a focus on teacher identity than practice.”

So let’s listen to another example. This is William Penuel, professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science and School of Education at the University of Colorado- Boulder. He gave the distinguished lecture at the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference this year. And one of the teams he oversaw conducted research into how trust and distrust manifested between students and teachers, and they focused on a group of 18 high school students who identify as Latina.

WILLIAM PENUEL: Once trust was built in the group, students began sharing stories of desconfianza or “distrust.” They talked about not fitting in, feeling unheard, and being the only Latino student in advanced classes. Some took photos to express these feelings, like grammar corrections or melting snow on dead grass.

Their testimonials revealed shared themes: feeling judged, left out or like they didn’t belong. Teachers didn’t always believe in them, but through these stories, students realized they weren’t alone. They found connection in solidarity. By putting their experiences into a broader social and political context, students could begin to see the harm they faced as something larger than themselves.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Marshall, we only have 30 seconds before our first break. What do you think about that last line about students seeing the harm they faced as something larger than themselves?

MARSHALL: Well, I can’t speak as much to that particular study because I’ve not read it. But I will say there is something to the idea that relationships matter. As a former teacher myself, I know that if I didn’t establish the fact that students believed that I cared in them and their success, I probably wasn’t gonna do a whole lot in terms of teaching.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s another example. This is Sylvia Hurtado, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles. She was the distinguished lecturer at the AERA annual conference in 2021. And there she gave a talk titled The Inevitability of Racial Bias and Exclusion: Implications for Identity Based Education and Practice.

SYLVIA HURTADO: All racial groups share this tendency for recognition bias, but research suggests that the effect is most pronounced for white individuals. When viewing racial ethnic groups, researchers say the cross race effect is a tendency for recognition accuracy to be better for same race spaces than for cross-race spaces.

Two hypotheses explain this recognition bias and both may be operative. The first is a lack of familiarity, contact, or perception expertise with specific racial groups to recognize heterogeneity and individual differences. A second hypothesis is that we have a natural tendency towards social categorization, developing a preference for the ingroup and low regard for outgroups, and in some cases demonizing outgroups.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that is Professor Sylvia Hurtado from the 2021 AERA annual conference. Now, by the way, we did receive — we asked the AERA if their president or any current member could join us today. That request was declined, but we were sent quite a lengthy statement by the organization. And I will be giving voice to major parts of that statement as we go through this show.

But first of all, let’s switch now a little bit to the focus on what teachers actually say they need. We asked On Point listeners who are educators to answer that question, received a whole bunch of them.

Let’s start with middle school teacher Edward Stother Bullen from rural North Carolina, and he says he can see the full picture of educational research as it relates to the classroom. He teaches eighth grade with his own kids also being in college. He says he comes from a public school family who has worked in the private sector as well, and that is what is helping him inform this perspective.

EDWARD STOTHER BULLEN: If researchers say they want to study identity in education, they’re really missing what we need. What teachers really need studied is academic growth, building reading comprehension, critical thinking and math reasoning, the skills that actually change a student’s future. Public school staff and districts don’t need to be everything to every student’s online-shaped identity. When they do that, academic purpose is being diluted.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, David, so tell us more about what you found with your, you did a, basically a national survey of teachers about what they say they need in the classroom.

MARSHALL: Yes. And what was reported in The Hill was actually preliminary findings of about 240 teachers. We ended up with a sample of over 300.

But you know, we asked them, what matters? And actually our question specifically that we asked,  we said, “We’re educational researchers and we want to make sure that what we study matters to you. What are the top three issues that you think we need to know more about?” And so we didn’t hide the ball. We told them exactly what we were doing, why we were doing it.

And the top issues, the top two were student behavior and discipline and technology and AI integration. And you know, but the other issues I will say, you know, were teacher burnout, the teacher workload, which seems to have increased, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of teachers feel as if they have more and more things put on their plates and fewer things removed.

Of course, teacher retention has been a big issue, teacher funding resources, having adequate support from their administrators and from parents, literacy and core academics — which the teacher that we just heard from referenced — and student mental health.

I think perhaps the thing that surprised me the most that sort of appeared within the data was the number of teachers that that said that attention spans were the biggest thing they wanted to know more about. They, especially more veteran teachers, said that they had noticed just marked difference in the attention spans of their students and they saw that as impacting their learning in meaningful ways.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, on the issue of discipline, this is something that we’ve been hearing a lot about more and more over the past several years, and as you said, especially during and after COVID.

So another educator, Dennis Pastore, from Montgomery County Public Schools in California, actually he’s a former educator and also doing research right now. He says not enough attention is being paid to researching about discipline and how that ought to be effectively used or enacted in classrooms. And he says the responsibility shouldn’t just fall on teachers to figure that out, because that leads to poor outcomes.

DENNIS PASTORE: Someone’s gonna lose, either the level of education in the classroom or either you water it down or it’s not gonna work for the teacher because they can’t handle the disruption. You have to find a way that when a class is out of control, you find the people that can stay in control and keep them in the classroom. And figure out how to handle the ones that can’t. I see that as the only way to do it without lowering the level of education that takes place in the classroom.

CHAKRABARTI: David Marshall, I wanna ask you, you are actually right now, like you are in the middle of this very field that you’re critiquing, right? I mean, you were an associate professor of educational research at Auburn. I’m gonna ask you to theorize why issues such as, you know, more effective means of discipline are not as popularly researched as, you know, the other ones we talked about — identity, equity.

MARSHALL: I can’t say that I’m altogether sure. But I do know that, like I said, the conversations that I have with teachers, with school leaders, this, especially since the pandemic has, has emerged as, as something that has been concerning. I can’t, you can’t have a conversation almost with a teacher or school leader without them talking about school discipline and erratic student behavior, or especially more erratic, I should say, since pre-pandemic times.

And as a former teacher myself, I know for a fact that every minute you’re spending dealing with an issue with a student is a minute that you’re not achieving your learning goals for that day. It is a minute you’re not achieving your objectives. So I don’t know that I can say why, and I’m hesitant to say why without evidence of one way or another, that that’s not showing up more prominent. But I do know that when the conversation I had with teachers, which is this, you know, that showed up in our survey data again as one of the top issues.

And, also just to say, I recently also did surveys with charter school leaders from both Florida and Utah. And that was one of the top two issues that they emerged. I asked them the same question that I asked the teachers. And so I know that that is something that is being seen in schools, and I think it does behoove us to try to find ways to better address that.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let’s dig into the response that we received from the American Education Research Association. Their response was also published in The Hill as well. But the current president — the current executive director, I should say — Tabbye Chavous, basically starts right out by saying, “Words like equity, justice, inclusive, and diversity are now often targeted based on political or ideological biases, misdefined, or taken out of context.”

And then the response says that you, David Marshall, drew “an oversimplified contrast between research focused on equity and research he argued actually matters to teachers.” What’s your response to that?

MARSHALL: Well, first off, I appreciate the response. I think it’s good for the field to debate things like this openly.

But I would say two things. One, these aren’t the issues that I say matter. These are the issues that teachers told us matter. I’ve simply — my aim was to give voice to teachers and that’s it. In terms of this being, you know, a motive behind this, perhaps being political or anything of that sort, it honestly is not.

We, every, I think researchers, as researchers, we all come from our own perspectives. We’re all — and I cast no judgment on that. I believe in academic freedom and I believe that we, you know, we should pursue the topics and that we believe that are most pressing. For me, as a former teacher, as someone who works with people who are former teachers, my angle is, is always gonna be what matters to the teachers, because what I know is that if you’re trying to achieve anything in schools and you’re trying to, especially if you’re trying to implement a new intervention or do anything, you have to make sure that teachers have a voice at the table.

You have to make sure that they have buy-in. That’s really what we were coming up with. I mean, the, the concerns that they aired really dealt with their professional realities — student behavior, student mental health, their mental health, again, additional workloads, things like implementing the science of reading, literacy and literacy instruction. At the end of the day, these aren’t partisan concerns. So that’s where we were coming from with this.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I think that the AERA is arguing in their response — and I’ll read another quote here in a second — that their research, equity focused research, or the research of their members, I should say, is actually practical and needed in American classrooms.

And here’s what the response says. “Equity focused research does matter. The equitable access to use of AI in schools matter. Classroom management practices that support work across diverse student groups matter. The need for this work is only increasing as the nation’s students, educators, and broader population become more diverse, and as practitioners and policy makers at all levels seek evidence-based solutions to addressing declining reading, science and math scores amongst the lowest performing students.”

So there’s actually two ideas sort of mashed up together there. The first one, though, they are accurately saying that student bodies especially are becoming more diverse with every passing year, and so the issue of equity has actually even become more important, not less practically important. Your response?

MARSHALL: I mean, I think that you could look at, you could look at the fact that some of these issues intersect with one another. I mean, schools are complex organizations. There are certainly things that you would consider as equity issues that would overlap with a lot of these issues.

But I think that students, regardless of their background, mainly need the same things. They need to learn how to read. They need to learn numeracy skills. They need to learn scientific skills. They need to learn how to be good citizens of this country. And I think that the issues that teachers, which cut across teachers of all backgrounds, you know, conveyed to us, I think that they need to be addressed as well.

I mean, I think that any way we look at it, the issues that teachers voice to us and surveys and also, and some of the other work that we’ve done are not as represented as some of the issues that they’re discussing.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So it’s the lack of representation for those practical discipline, teacher and student mental health, AI, et cetera, that is really what matters here, because I think the response from the American Education Research Association, in fact, kind of echoes a point that you just made.

I mean, they say that a lot of the research presented at their conferences are actually sort of multifaceted that they say, for example, “a conference paper on teachers’ effective instructional method. A real world concern might examine the benefits of co-designing with students and their families an equity and inclusion approach.” So I think the two of you agree there.

But I wonder: This is a conference by education researchers for education researchers. Why is it that we should presume that what education researchers are taking a look at, which ostensibly should be that the cutting edge of the research, why should we presume that that automatically align or should align with teachers’ practical needs? I mean, isn’t there — hasn’t there always been a difference between the pursuit of academic research versus its practical applicability?

MARSHALL: I mean, sure. I think that there is. But I think there’s room for all the above. I mean, there’s always going to be some theoretical takes and some cutting-edge work that is going to be maybe ahead of or even larger than a teacher’s immediate pressing needs in schools. And I guess my argument isn’t that people shouldn’t — my argument is not what people shouldn’t pursue, my argument is what I think that we also need to make sure we’re taking care of at the same time.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. That makes sense. It does. But why? Right?

Because again, I think what I’m trying to understand is look, much of the academic world, like, when a physicist publishes a paper about, you know, the mathematics behind why a particle that doesn’t exist should exist, no one in a manufacturing facility that also has to deal with physics is gonna be like, “Wow, that is super helpful.” But we don’t decry the theoretical physicists for studying what they’re studying. Why is there a sort of a different expectation in the world of education research?

MARSHALL: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I think that, so I’ll share that I think that there is, again, there’s room for people to study what they want to study. But I, again, I guess my lens that I’m gonna look at, that I’m always going to look at my work is what matters to people who are working in schools.

I had a mentor of mine who once really, he said something that resonated with me and has always stuck with me. He said, look, you know, we have good jobs. We’re professors, you know, we both have tenure. We both study K-12 education. And he said, you know, we get to work with students and so if you would like to work with students, I do, then you get to do that. And then the other part of our job is we get to study, really, we get wide latitude and what we choose to deem what is important, what we choose to study, and how we choose to study it.

And because we study K-12 education, what we do really ought to matter to people who are, you know, real teachers who are working in real schools who probably work harder than us and make less money. It is incumbent upon what we do to matter to them, and that’s the lens I’m coming from And I do wholeheartedly believe that.

I mean, it is just, if you took, if you look again, if you look at the top topics that were, that are, you know, found in the research that identified and the top issues that teachers surfaced, you know, there is a mismatch. And it’s like, imagine going to a doctor for knee pain and then you get a detailed report about cholesterol. Now, cholesterol’s important, no one’s challenging that, but that’s not the problem that’s gonna keep you from walking. I think that teachers are coming in with knee pain, so to speak, and the research is writing cholesterol reports.

CHAKRABARTI: You know, Professor Marshall, I hear you being very careful in how you’re communicating this. But I have to just ask you like, this is such an important issue, right? Because right now the entire system of education as we’ve understood in this country is essentially under attack by the Trump administration, so we have to be honest in our assessment here. Do you think that the world of education or research has been politically captured, and is that part of the reason why we see this overweighted focus on equity, on resistance, on safe spaces, et cetera?

MARSHALL: I think that education, I mean, so this is a self-serving take, but I, you know, given what I do for a living, but I value educational research. I think what the, what we do matters.

I think that you can look at examples. I mean, the science of reading, which is an emerging thing that you see discussed in schools, that’s born out of research. You know, cell phone policies, you know, those are born out of research. But I think the best way to defend what we do is to make sure that what we do engages with priorities of those who work day in, day out in schools.

So to, you know, I’ll leave it to others to make partisan commentary, but I’m just gonna say I think what we need to make sure, and I think it would make everyone happy —

CHAKRABARTI: Professor, I’m so sorry to cut you off. I’m gonna let you finish in just a second.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Marshall, I’ll let you finish your thought in your response to my question about whether the world of education research has been politically captured. But in order to do that, let me read back to you something that you had written in The Hill.

You wrote that, “Too often, research agendas are set in academic silos, guided by theoretical trends or what is most likely to be published in top journals. Almost all of which privilege the topics we found to be most prevalent at the conferences, issues of equity, for example. Teachers rarely have a seat at the table.”

So with that statement or writing from you in mind, go ahead and complete your answer about whether education research has been captured by one narrow political view.

MARSHALL: I mean, I do think that that educational research certainly overemphasized certain topics including, and again, I wanna be very clear. I think, I hope I’ve been clear. I’m not telling people what they shouldn’t do. I’m not saying that topics around social justice or race, some of these aren’t important at all. Of course they are.

But what I’m saying is that I do think that there’s a lot of people who conduct research on K-12 education who don’t spend enough time in schools, who don’t spend enough time in conversation with teachers, that don’t spend enough time, you know, finding, asking them what matters to them.

And I think that it is very easy to, you know, do academic work in silos and not be in conversation. I’ve seen examples, you know, throughout my career, not as much, I have to say, at my current university, but I have seen examples of professors who I’m not sure have been in a classroom outside of their own child’s parent-teacher conference in decades.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Well, again, this response from the American Education Research Association says that education researchers enter the field to improve the lives of students and educators and educators, and to tackle real world challenges in schools and universities and they do it for the good of every student and the country.

And maybe that’s what leads me to my next question, professor Marshall. Because even though you’re not saying it overtly, what I read from your article in The Hill is that okay, I hear you, you say that equity-based research isn’t, shouldn’t be ended or done less of, but nevertheless, there’s an opportunity cost, right?

Because there, there’s a lot of money in education research, but it isn’t infinite. And for every additional study that goes towards “resistance” as you found, practically speaking, what that means is that money didn’t go to researching, say, how to increase literacy rates that are plummeting in the United States. I mean, is that, it’s kind of as simple as that.

MARSHALL: No, I think there’s, yeah, I think that’s a fair take. I think in terms of my perspective.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so then, I mean, but this is why it matters because we have to talk a little bit about the fact that the world of education right now. Education research specifically is under attack by the Trump administration.

I mean, the administration dismantled the Institute of Education Sciences and canceled $900 million of educational research funding. And the federal government historically has been the largest funder of education research. And so, you know what members of the Trump administration are saying is that too many studies on safe spaces, too many studies on narrow forms of identity are in fact doing what we talked about. They’re reducing the practicability of studies or of research that can do things like, you know, help teachers handle a new world of AI.

I mean, isn’t this what it gets to is that the overweighting of certain issues is part of what’s led to this, almost a billion dollars of funding being canceled for education research?

MARSHALL: Well, a couple thoughts on that. One thing that’s recently given me hope was there’s a recent call for comment on how to reconstruct the IES and how to reconstruct some of these organizations. And, you know, we weighed in. I think it’s my hope that we will have some of these mechanisms restored, perhaps, hopefully a little more efficiently.

I had the former IES director Mark Schneider actually was kind enough to join one of my classes last year. And he shared a number of instances and I’ve also since read some of his commentary, where there were huge inefficiencies in the way that the Department of Ed and IES were doing things. They were using software that was out of date that ended up costing a lot of money and also wasn’t as efficient as could be. The National Center for Education Statistics, I think also is extremely important. I hope that we see a robust NCES restored.

But the way they were doing things, it was, I mean, I think he described it to us, is it would take years. I think the most recent data that the NCES has released is from the 21-22 school year. Now this is 2025, it’s about to be 2026. That is not up to date enough. I mean, we should expect more up to date data.

He said part of the problem was, is that there were statisticians that were working there that were, you know, they were double and triple and quadruple checking everything to the point, and that was what was taking a lot of the time, that they might’ve made the data slightly more accurate, but only to about the sixth decimal place. So if, for example, 13.1% of students had IEPs or were receiving special needs instruction, after they’d spent another couple of years double and triple checking all of these things and making sure we were accurate to the sixth decimal place, 13.1% of students were still, you know, that number didn’t change.

And a lot of these figures, in other words, it sounds like from what he had shared, of course this was last fall, this was before any of this. And also in pieces I’ve read him that he’s written since it sounds like there were a number of instances like that that could be improved. It is my hope that I’ll say that, that some of these functions are restored in a more robust fashion, but restored in ways that maybe are better serving us. Because I’ll be honest, if the most recent data that we can get from the federal government is from 21-22, that’s not as helpful as you’d like to think.

CHAKRABARTI: Right. Well, let me just take a second and go back to, again, to what, teachers themselves told us again about what they’re seeing in the classroom and what kind of research would actually help them improve the learning and school experience for all of their students.

This is Leslie Cassinari,  a former teacher from Lebanon, Connecticut, and she has struggled over decades of teaching with managing students’ stress — you talked about this earlier, David — to the point where she took things into her own hands.

LESLIE CASSINARI: I taught over 30 years in the classroom. I’m a music teacher, general music, and it got so, so bad that I began to research and create a de-stress warmup for my students. It was a five minute warmup. And I feel like that sort of research is really, really important, that more people should be doing research into how to de-stress the students so that they can learn better.

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s another one. This is Melissa Hostetter who teaches middle school in Springfield, Illinois, and Melissa says she still struggles to find adequate research regarding the effects of reading on upper secondary education.

MELISSA HOSTETTER: I would like to know what the research says about the impact of. Reading remediation for middle and high school students. We have a major issue where many of our middle and high school students are reading far below grade level. I would like to know what the research says about an impact specifically on behavior, motivation, graduation rates, and life outcomes.

CHAKRABARTI: So David, I’m gonna turn back to what you wrote in The Hill. You wrote that this disconnect, again, between what the majority of what researchers are presenting at the AERA’s annual conference and what teachers say they need, you say it has consequences. Not only do teachers tell you that the research feels irrelevant to their daily practice, but when policymakers “see that the research community is not engaged with the problems educators say matter most, it fuels calls to cut funding for research altogether.”

And we were just talking about this, that, you know, in the federal government “some argue that if research isn’t producing clear benefits for schools, perhaps these dollars should be redirected elsewhere.”

So Professor Marshall, okay, so now the question is if there’s a problem, what do we do about it? And here I want to quote the last paragraph of your article in The Hill. You wrote, “Educational research can transform schools for the better. And AERA could still be a leader if it chooses to listen to the profession it claims to serve. Yet if the flagship educational research organization remains unwilling to address the pressing concerns of teachers and students, we should create new institutions that will.” What would those institutions look like, professor?

MARSHALL: Well, I don’t know. I hope we’re a ways off from that. But I do think, I do think we could do some things around changing incentives. So if, if I, I will say, I’m aware that the AERA does have a researcher practitioner partnership, special interest group. And from what I’m told by folks that I trust, it’s actually a pretty good group.

Of course, that’s one special interest group within the conference. I mean, I think perhaps incentivize more of that beyond a single special interest group. I think another thing we might be able to do and is think about research funding. What if we prioritize research proposals, and again, research proposals focused on K-12 education that involve teachers and school leaders in the work, especially at the planning stage to make sure that what comes out of that matters to them?

I mean, I think one practice that I learned from my training is that when I go into a school — now, I’m a former teacher, I get excited when I go into a school to do research, but I also recognize that there’s a hundred things on that principal’s plate. I’m number 100. Because the other 99 involve kids and real kids learning, and it’s more important.

So what can I do to make sure that I matter to them? I always ask, what do you need to know? Here’s the questions I think I need to answer. Are these what you think need answering? I try to make sure at least that I’m in conversation with the people who are actually in schools. I think that we could find better ways to reward academics for translational work. As one example, a group that I’m working with right now, we’ve started turning our work into one-page, front and back research briefs, and we’re making sure we get those in the hands of policymakers. I think all these things matter.

If I were to give a, I’ll give a shout out to I’m z graduate of VCU, Virginia Commonwealth University, and there’s a couple of folks there who work at a center called MERC, Jesse Senechal, David Naff, give them a shout out. They do a fantastic job of bringing together school leaders from the surrounding school districts and they ask them, what are the problems that you need solving? And then that’s what they seek out to study.

So I think there are things that we can do that can be solutions to what I’m saying, but I think that we need to be intentional about it.

CHAKRABARTI: Hmm. You know what’s interesting to me, professor Marshall, is that this issue has special resonance now, not because education is so politicized in this country, but I think it’s because, you know, things like your study provide an objective means to either, you know, affirm or question some of the statements or claims that are made by the Trump administration and its supporters.

And here’s what I mean. That we hear all the time now that, you know, “education is too woke,” right? That you know, “students are spending more time learning about how to resist than learning how to read.” Okay. That’s clearly a politically inflected statement. But on the other hand, you opened a window, your research did, onto maybe that is not necessarily a partisan issue. Maybe it’s actually a bipartisan issue. Because for all the years that there has been so much research done on, you know, things like equity and identity, which are important, if the ultimate goal is to educate kids better, that research has failed in that promise.

Because we aren’t seeing the closing of achievement gaps. We aren’t seeing all students rise. We’re actually seeing the opposite right now. So if by that concrete measure, don’t you think that, I mean, the American Education Research Association would do itself and the nation good to take that fact to heart and actually reassess what kind of education will help students the most?

MARSHALL: Well, I would like to think that’s all of our North Star. I do think at the end of the day that teachers and researchers want the same outcomes. We want better learning. And I think if these things were better aligned even a little bit more, I think it would make a big difference. Because again, the things the teachers share with me is these are their daily realities. These are the issues that matter to them.

And now let me share something with you, I had a conversation last week with a woman who runs a teacher prep program and I was having the conversation, because everything I’d seen it was, it looked exciting. It looked like they were really doing a great job. And she shared something that was kind of alarming to me.

She said, “Yes, our students are great. But the teachers that they’re paired with for their student teaching, many of them are trying to counsel them out, ‘Oh, you wanna do something different. You should try to get this degree instead of that so you can get outta the classroom faster.'”

So we have to think about if we’re not addressing the current experiences that actual teachers in classrooms are having, that’s not just impacting them, it’s not just impacting their decisions of whether to stay or maybe try to find something else to do with their life. We’re probably also impacting the pool of future teachers. And I think that that’s — that’s deeply concerning to me. That was a little alarming the conversation that I had. So it also just redoubled, I guess, my personal take that, that’s just more evidence we need to make sure that whatever we’re doing, we’re staying in conversation with the people who are working in schools day in, day out. And we’re making sure what we’re doing resonates with them.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Last question, professor Marshall, you also do point out that education research is the thing that led to, you know, an evidence base for the effectiveness of smaller classrooms, for example. So there’s a lot of good to be had here.

In the last 30 seconds we have, you know, what could the long-term consequences be if this $900 million of education research funding from the federal government which has been cut, if we continue forward without as much money in research as we used to have?

MARSHALL: Well, there’s a study from Paul Peterson at Harvard. It found that actually the study funded by IES disproportionately found their way in, in some of the most influential papers of the last 20 years. So it’s my sincere hope that we will find ways to restore some funding, uh, for education research that could be highly impactful in our schools.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, David Marshall is associate professor of educational research and evaluation at Auburn University. He’s also a former middle and high school social studies teacher in Philadelphia. Professor Marshall, thank you so very much for joining us.

MARSHALL: Thanks for having me.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.