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Working in partnership with documentary filmmakers, educational researchers can offer compelling counter-narratives to the dubious ideas that have guided recent school reforms.

 

As education policy researchers with a disciplinary grounding in sociology, our research team navigates between two worlds. We study policy trends and high-level decision making about topics such as student assessment, school accountability, curriculum, and school discipline. But we also study people’s everyday experiences in the educational system, looking at issues such as school culture and climate, student access to learning opportunities, and parents’ efficacy in the school choice process (see Wells, Holme, & Scott, 2018; Wells et al., in press).

Given the dual focus of our work, we can’t help but see that education policy often stands at odds with what the research says about teaching, learning, and life in schools. Over many years, for example, federal and state officials have made massive investments in rigid test-based accountability systems as the only valid measure of student achievement, even though a mountain of evidence shows that these systems undermine efforts to provide engaging instruction. Over and over, we’ve seen policy makers design and implement school reform models that contradict the professional knowledge of our field. And at the same time, even as they ignore the research literature, they freely lend their ears to publishers, political advocacy groups, and other special interests who urge them to adopt teacher-proof curricula, create fast-track teacher-preparation programs, and disregard the empirical knowledge base about child development in favor of shiny new “data-driven” approaches to classroom management.

When one member of our team — Amy Stuart Wells — was elected as the 2018-19 president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), we saw an opportunity to highlight this troubling disconnect between policy and research and, more important, to encourage AERA’s members to experiment with new ways of communicating their findings to various audiences. If researchers can become more effective storytellers, we reasoned, then they might begin to have a greater influence on policy and decision making. Particularly in a so-called “post-truth era,” when “fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it” (Arendt, 1951, p. 350), the voices of well-trained education professionals must be heard.

Recognizing that AERA’s nearly 25,000 members represent a wide range of disciplines and research methods, Wells and her program co-chairs, Jennifer Jellison Holme and Janelle Scott, sought to describe this agenda in broad and inclusive terms, allowing for the many effective ways in which research findings might be communicated. Hence the title of AERA’s 2019 annual meeting: Leveraging education research in a ‘post-truth’ era: Multimodal narratives to democratize evidence.

If researchers communicate their findings in multiple formats — traditional academic journal articles and books as well as personal narratives, films, speeches, newspaper commentaries, and more — then perhaps they can better inform policy makers and the public.

In short, this AERA annual meeting theme called on education researchers to demonstrate the value of their work by sharing it in many forms that could reach audiences from Capitol Hill to local school boards, from classroom teachers to PTAs. The central argument was that if researchers communicate their findings in multiple formats — traditional academic journal articles and books as well as personal narratives, films, speeches, newspaper commentaries, and more — then perhaps they can better inform policy makers and the public. In the face of political tweetstorms, facts alone are not likely to change many minds. Evidence must be framed in more compelling ways and through various channels, including appeals to emotions and personal beliefs.

Film as storytelling

As part of our own effort to tell new stories about education research, we decided to produce a short documentary film (designed both to be shared with AERA members and to reach broader audiences beyond the Ivory Tower). For a few reasons, we thought film would be an especially powerful medium through which to share our findings and help policy makers understand the concerns of educators, parents, and students about recent trends in school reform. First, films can be distributed much more broadly than refereed journal articles or academic talks. Second, they’re accessible to people who prefer learning through visual media over reading pages and pages of text (Vasudevan, 2014). Third, they allow for stories about educational research to be told not just by researchers but also by students and educators, who can speak to the concrete ways policies that are not supported by research harm them. We hoped this combination of research and storytelling would allow our film to resonate with viewers’ personal experiences, values, and beliefs, thereby evoking an emotional response and encouraging them to take action in support of evidence-driven school improvement (Carter, 2019; Goffman, 1974; Lakoff, 2004). As David Whiteman (2009) illustrates in his analysis of the role of documentary films in policy making, “The production and distribution of social-issue documentaries can have a wide range of significant impacts on community organizations, educational institutions, citizens and policy makers” (p. 457).

Before we could begin the film production process, however, we needed to identify the specific themes the film should emphasize. Which topics would best illustrate the disconnect between educational policy making and research? And which topics would enable us to provide a compelling counter-narrative to prevailing reform strategies and the more typical portrayal of schools and educators in feature films, in which one or two superhero teachers solve all the problems of the educational system through true grit alone (see Beverback, 2010; Delamarter, 2019; Wells & Serman, 1998)? Even some documentary films, such as Waiting for Superman or The Lottery, suggest that if public school educators are sufficiently hopeful and perseverant, they can solve any and all kinds of thorny societal problems that fall into their laps.

Education policy often stands at odds with what the research says about teaching, learning, and life in schools.

We decided to focus on four overlapping areas of policy and practice — assessment and accountability, curriculum and pedagogy, student discipline, and segregation. We chose these issues because, according to our own and others’ research, they have combined to produce an intensely segregated and unequal school system (in some ways comparable, we would argue, to the schools of the Jim Crow era). For instance, accountability systems that rely strictly on standardized test scores (which are strongly correlated with race and class) to measure student learning produce data that parents often consult when deciding where to live, which results in higher levels of segregation (Wells, Fox, et al., 2018). At the same time, intense pressure to boost test scores has narrowed the K-12 curriculum and led many schools to implement harsh disciplinary policies in part to push out students with low test scores. In turn, these trends influence the public perception of school quality and create a demand for school choice, which leads to an even more divided and unequal educational system.

Our decision to focus on these four issues also was informed by the fact that researchers have analyzed and studied them extensively, and the preponderance of the evidence supports very different policies and practices from those that currently exist. In short, by focusing on these topics, we knew we could tell a powerful story about the contradictions between what researchers have learned and what policy makers have chosen to do.

Themes and production

By the time we were ready to ask our partners at Firelight Media — a documentary film production company — to begin filming, we had compiled extensive archives of research findings related to each of our four themes, including annotated bibliographies, articles, book chapters, links to websites and research reports, lists of relevant experts, and lists of schools and districts that have pursued promising practices in these areas.

We wanted to give the filmmakers the artistic freedom they needed to create a compelling story, told through powerful visual imagery and verbal testimonials by the researchers, educators, and students they interviewed. But we also directed them to dig into the archives, use that material to help them frame their narrative, and highlight four main points:

  1. When it comes to accountability and assessment policies and practices, the evidence is clear that U.S. public schools place far too much weight on one or two standardized tests to decide the fate of students, educators, and schools. While standardized testing can be one of many measures used to assess students, researchers have found these measures to have cultural and contextual biases that enable some students to perform better than others based simply on their prior life experiences and not their innate ability. Furthermore, the high-stakes nature of existing accountability systems have created perverse effects on school systems, leading many teachers to teach to the test, giving many students severe anxiety, and causing many parents to become frustrated with the limited amount of time teachers can devote to other aspects of child development and learning.
  2. The research on curriculum and pedagogy underscores that the way we measure student learning and hold schools accountable has had a profound effect on how educators shape instruction. According to a preponderance of the evidence, a narrow emphasis on test preparation — particularly preparation for standardized multiple-choice exams — is harmful to students’ ability to develop and express their own thoughts and opinions. Meanwhile, we know that inclusive and interest-based approaches (such as culturally relevant instruction, ethnic studies, and collaborative learning) tend to be highly engaging for all students, and especially for students of color.
  3. Ample evidence suggests also that when educators are rewarded and punished on the basis of student test scores, they often come to favor harsh disciplinary practices, either as a means of pressuring students to raise their scores or creating justification to suspend or expel those whose scores do not improve. Furthermore, evidence shows that harsh disciplinary measures (such as zero tolerance policies and the use of metal detectors) tend to be ineffective and often harmful, not only inhibiting students’ learning but also perpetuating racial disparities in suspension and expulsion rates.
  4. These three major trends in policy and practice — test-based school accountability, the narrowing of the curriculum, and the turn to strict disciplinary policies — have combined to intensify racial segregation across schools and classrooms. Those families that have the means or wherewithal to relocate to new school districts, pay for private schooling, or take advantage of school choice options tend to do so, separating themselves from those they’ve left behind.

In the end, this collaboration of researchers and filmmakers led to the production of a short (23-minute) film, Children Left Behind: Time to Reimagine Education, that highlights the mismatch between research and policy in the areas described above.

Having premiered the film at AERA’s 2019 annual meeting, we now hope to expand it into a full-length documentary that we can show in communities across the country, using it to provoke conversations with educators, parents, and students about the kinds of bottom-up reforms and advocacy needed to recenter the policies and practices in education around the professional and research-based knowledge of our field.

Finally, it’s important to point out that the film doesn’t just expose troubling gaps between education policy and research. It also provides hopeful examples of states, districts, and schools that are trying to make the educational system more responsive to the needs of families and communities. In fact, at a presentation at AERA, Firelight Media producer Lisa Binns was asked how working with a team of researchers changed her filmmaking process. If not for our participation, she replied, the film would have been more negative in tone. It was only through our partnership that she learned about and came to understand the significance of projects such as the Massachusetts Consortium of Innovative Assessment or the ethnic studies program at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. These portraits of possibility, along with the film’s attention to restorative justice as an alternative to traditional disciplinary practices, offer compelling counter-narratives to educational policy and practice as usual. The real promise of storytelling about education research, we think, is that it can provide not only thoughtful critique but also illustrate hopeful new directions for our field.

We encourage you to view the film:

Children Left Behind: Time to Reimagine Education

 

References

Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Harvest Books.

Beyerbach, B. (2010) The social foundations classroom: Themes in sixty years of teachers in film. Educational Studies, 37 (3), 267-285.

Carter, L.H. (2019). Persuasion: Convincing others when facts don’t seem to matter. New York, NY: TarcherPerigee.

Delamarter, T. (2019/2020). Helping preservice teachers separate fact from fiction. Phi Delta Kappan, 101 (4), 21-25.

Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Vasudevan, L. (2014). Multimodal cosmopolitanism: Cultivating belonging in everyday moments with youth. Curriculum Inquiry, 44 (1), 45-67.

Wells, A.S., Fox, L., Cordova-Cobo, D., & Ready, D. (2018). Addressing the patterns of resegregation in urban and suburban contexts: How to stabilize integrated schools and communities amid metro migrations. In J. Spader (Ed.), A shared future: Fostering communities of inclusion in an era of inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Wells, A.S., Holme, J.J., & Scott, J.T. (2018). Leveraging education research in a ‘post-truth’ era: Multimodal narratives to democratize evidence: Theme for the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Washington, DC: AERA. www.aera.net/Events-Meetings/Annual-Meeting/2019-Annual-Meeting-Theme

Wells, A.S., Cordova-Cobo, D., Keener, A., & Cabral, L. (in press). The more things change, the more they stay the same: The resegregation of public schools via charter school reform. The Peabody Journal of Education: Special Issue on the 65th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Wells, A.S. & Serman, T. (1998). Education against all odds: What films teach us about schools. In G.I. Maeroff (Ed.), Imaging education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Whiteman, D. (2009). Documentary film as policy analysis: The impact of Yes, in My Backyard, on activists, agendas and policy. Mass Communication and Society, 12 (40), 457-477.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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Abbey Keener

ABBEY KEENER is a Ph.D. student in sociology and education and researcher at The Public Good, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City.

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Amy Stuart Wells

AMY STUART WELLS is a professor of sociology and education and director of the Reimaging Education Summer Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY.

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Diana Cordova-Cobo

DIANA CORDOVA-COBO is a Ph.D. student in sociology and education and researcher at The Public Good, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City.

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Leana Cabral

LEANA CABRAL is a Ph.D. student in sociology and education and researcher at The Public Good, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City.

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Siettah Parks

SIETTAH PARKS is a doctoral student in sociology and education and researcher at the Public Good, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY.