Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy (2012) / Chapter Skim
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5 The Next Generation of Researchers and Practitioners
5 The Next Generation of Researchers and Practitioners
Pages 65-76
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From page 65... ...
Citing metaphors favored in that more naïve time, the director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, Beardsly Ruml, who funneled millions of dollars to research universities and the SSRC in the 1920s, lamented that "All who work toward the general end of social welfare are embarrassed 1 This early plea for interdisciplinary research did not use the term, which did not appear (as interdiscipline inquiries) until SSRC's Sixth Annual Report, 1929-1930 (noted by Sills, 1986)
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From page 66... ...
Social science researchers responded not only to the SSRC, but also to the program priorities announced by other philanthropic foundations, to the Russell Sage Foundation in more than a century of social science funding and to the larger foundations -- Ford, Carnegie, Hewlett, and MacArthur, among others -- in the second half of the 20th century. The label field development, for example, was attached to area studies, a Cold War era success story.
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From page 67... ...
. This effort shaped the ongoing debates about the respective merits of the state and the market with respect to a long list of social policies -- including whether poverty was better reduced by social welfare government programs or market forces, and whether school reform was better advanced through vouchers and school choice than leaving many educational practices under the influence of teacher unions.
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From page 68... ...
.4 The Spencer Foundation's Evidence for the Classroom Project, part of its broader Data Use and Educational Improvement Initiative, sponsors research on the assumptions behind data-based educational reforms "by investigating whether, when, and how student performance data informs instruction in K-8 classrooms." The goal is "to learn more about how K-8 teachers use student performance data for instructional decisions and how organizational and individual factors affect that use." Included in this initiative is research on how organizations learn and improve (Spencer Foundation, 2012)
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From page 69... ...
In more recent decades, dissertation grants provided by the MacArthur Foundation added depth to international security education, successfully reorienting the field from a 1960s focus on a limited array of issues, primarily arms control, to a broader consideration of how international economics, global immigration, climate change, and other "nonsecurity" issues were, in fact, deeply implicated in how the nation should approach its security challenges in the 21st century. The predoctoral research training program in the neurosciences, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
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From page 70... ...
This time-tested strategy fits with a central point of this report: attracting a fresh generation of researchers to studies of the use of science in policy should not be difficult in this period of heightened political (and, we expect, funder) attention to whether the substantial public investment in science -- social sciences included -- results in science that is used.
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From page 71... ...
Perhaps mentoring and on-the-job learning worked in an earlier period, when policy challenges slowly made their way to the public agenda and arrived as fairly straightforward questions of whether X leads to Y That world, if it ever really existed, is clearly not today's policy world.
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From page 72... ...
The academic social sciences adequately attend to the education of advanced students whose vocation is the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. The political world adequately supplies on-the-job training for those whose vocation is winning through bargaining and compromising, media campaigns, mobilization of support, and using science evidence selectively and tactically.
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From page 73... ...
The Flexner Report, commissioned in 1908, stands out in this list; it is widely credited with initiating reforms that professionalized medical and health training appropriate for 20th century challenges, and from which the nation continues to benefit. An analogous effort directed to policy education could determine if schools and programs are suitably aligned with the challenges that have emerged over the past half-century: decolonization; democratization; globalization; mass communication and the emergence of the Internet; economic and technological development; the international diffusion of science and technology; the rise of knowledge elites; and the growing influence of the private sector in information production and knowledge management, in addition to the host of specific competencies associated with evidence-based policy, performance metrics, cost-benefit analysis, and evaluation research.
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From page 74... ...
Without such understanding, students may overestimate the persuasive power of scientific reasoning, and overlook the substantial barriers of institutional and cultural resistance to new research knowledge, unfamiliar policy framings, or solutions that challenge deeply held moral or ethical beliefs. Internships and case studies can help students learn about these and other complexities of the policy-making process.
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From page 75... ...
The processes and institutions through which policy makers gain access to relevant knowledge, such as expert advisory committees, receive little notice. There certainly is no attention to whether variation in cognitive biases of policy makers or variation in cultures of decision making tell them what to expect when science enters the policy argument.
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From page 76... ...
One outcome might be differentiation, with some programs providing ever more rigorous training in methods and theories that strengthen research about "what works" and other programs emphasizing rigorous training in methods and theories that strengthen understanding of the conditions needed to put that research to policy use. Such a division of labor would result in a broad array of perspectives and skills available to think tanks, legislative staffs, policy units in executive branches, and other settings in the policy enterprise-from local government to international agencies, in both the public and the private sector.
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