Educational Psychology as a Policy Science: Thoughts on the Distinction Between a Discipline and a Profession

Abstract

Some of you know that I entered the policy arena about a decade ago. After happily and productively working as an educational psychologist in the area of research on teaching, well out of the public eye, I became fed up with the incomplete, distorted and political uses of data that I saw around me. This unhappiness started for me with the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). That influential report described a school system that I didn’t recognize. It had been written by people I knew and liked so I originally kept quiet, thinking that although they may have gone too far, all that attention would be good for education. I believed that the report might help us to get more money for research and that it could lead to policies that would help schools that were not succeeding. But the two years following publication of that inaccurate and data-less screed witnessed the publication of, literally, hundreds of criticisms of the public schools. Eventually it dawned on me that many of the critics were not out to help the schools get better at all. They appeared to me to be out to destroy public education. Whether accurate or not, this realization brought my values to the foreground of my professional life. I discovered that I had a deep, almost visceral commitment to public education. I came to believe that the institution I cherished personally, and believed to be indispensable to our nation, was under attack. I thought I needed to talk about this and so I changed the direction of my career.