ABSTRACT
Introduction: Diagnoses of Disease It appears that the research enterprise in education suffers from a mysterious disease or, more than likely, from several mysterious diseases that might or might not be interrelated. Disparaging remarks about its health have come often enough from those outside the research community-from members of federal and state legislatures, from senior civil servants, and from education administrators and practitioners. As historian Carl Kaestle (1993:26) noted, education research has had an “awful reputation,” one that developed over many apparently sickly years during which it failed (or appeared to have failed) to live up to the expectation that it would contribute to advances or improvements in educational practice. Almost 40 years ago, Ralph Tyler (1965), referring even further back into the past, when a number of bureaus of education research had been formed, commented that
[m]ost of those active in founding these bureaus believed that educational research would quickly provide valid answers to educational problems and that teaching and administration would soon be professions based on research findings as engineering is based on the natural sciences and mathematics. This belief proved untenable.
