Think Tank Agile Class. A remix by Greg McVerry of Academy Building University Leiden. flickr photo shared by atelier PRO under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC) license and ”Kuroikoma” flickr photoshared by pasukaru76</a> under a a Public Domain Dedication Creative Commons ( CC0 ) license

Who are we speaking to? And is anybody listening?

A recent post shared on the Literacy Research Association website.

When I speak to school leaders they know nothing of our research but can cite the talking points from every well funded white paper. Policy organizations on the left and right of the edreform issues crank these out. No impact rating but the highest impact on actual lives of students.

Then when we submit publications we may have to wait 1–2 years for acceptance and publication while the “Foundations” can crank out many different reports that will have a much larger impact than anything we can publish in a journal with the highest impact rating.

In many ways an impact rating is just a numerical representation of how much we talk amongst ourselves while the public and policy makers ignore high quality research.

How can we:

• serve as a counterweight to the shiny glossy white papers and “research” published by Foundations?
• speed up and open up our publication systems so we can get research into the hands of policy makers?
• address any moral or ethical obligation when we are asked to contribute to these white papers?
• maintain the highest standards of publishing while also addressing the first three bullet points?

Some of the resources shared by members:

• International Literacy Association: Literacy Research Panel
• Writing About Reading for the Public. This was an invited article by Tim Rasinski, who was then editor of The Reading Teacher (lead article, September 1997).
• Another is Let’s Mend Fences With Our Newspapers, appearing in Reading Today (April/May 1997).
• A third, Ivory Towers Are Often Tempting Targets, received the Distinguished Achievement Award for Editorial Writing from the American Press Association of America. It appeared in The Cincinnati Post (July 18, 1995).
• Perish the Thought appeared in The Baltimore Sun (April 3, 1985).
• A Few Words About Sentences, address, appears in the 29th Yearbook of the College Reading Association (2008, now ALER).
• National Educational Policy Center at the University of Colorado (huge h/t here from me as well)

Some closing thoughts:

• Maybe we should be thinking about ways of replicating rather than defeating.
• Research centers need autonomy. Shared goverance is not the same as federated governance.
• If we want a say in educational policy our research must be meaningful and community based.
• Our current system of peer review publishing is simply too slow. What can we learn from movements like #OpenScience?