Abstract
An increased role for the federal government and philanthropic organizations in education over the last decade, along with a growing demand for evidence by public and private policymakers, has invigorated an already vibrant sector of intermediary organizations that seek to package and promote research on educational policies and programs for policymakers, typically around a specific policy agenda. Educational reforms that promise to incentivize school improvement—charter schools, vouchers, teacher compensation incentives, and student pay-for-performance, for example—are of particular interest to intermediary organizations. This chapter examines how national and local intermediary organizations function to shape evidence on the benefits and drawbacks of incentivist educational reforms through funding, production, and dissemination in New Orleans, Denver, and New York City and at the national level. We find evidence of national-local coalitions through which a variety of evidences—academic, journalistic, anecdotal, think tank, and advocacy oriented—are produced and disseminated. We are also witnessing the ways in which intermediary organizations, through their coalitions, are providing a political function to a host of policy actors and the public writ large.
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Notes
- 1.
The Campbell Collection is an attempt to follow educational research use in policymaking and is an exception to this overall trend.
- 2.
A few respondents requested to not be recorded, and in that case, we took copious notes of the interviews.
- 3.
Consumers can include policymakers as well as the public, since many advocacy groups seek to sway public opinion. However, in this chapter we are focusing only on the former.
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Scott, J., Lubienski, C., DeBray, E., Jabbar, H. (2014). The Intermediary Function in Evidence Production, Promotion, and Utilization: The Case of Educational Incentives. In: Finnigan, K., Daly, A. (eds) Using Research Evidence in Education. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04690-7_6
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