Grass is Greener?

This week's Newsweek cover story looks at apparently-conflicting research findings on the health impacts of different dietary choices and how confusing they can be for the public. For example, after years of warnings about the dangers of high-fat diets for both heart health and waistlines, many Americans were understandably surprised--and a few ecstatic--to hear about a recent Women's Health Initiative study that was widely reported as showing low-fat diets don't improve health outcomes, relative to higher-fat diets. But, in fact, the researchers' conclusions were much more nuanced. And, as the Newsweek article admirably admitted, media coverage--including Newsweek's own reporting at times--often further muddies the issues, rather than clarifying them for the public. It's a fairly interesting article (particularly, I would imagine, for dieters) that makes a pretty decent effort to help readers cut through some of the confusion around recent studies.

What I found interesting about this article, however, was how much of the discussion could just as well be applied to debates about education policy. Swap out, say, the great charter research wars of 2004-05 for low-fat diets or hormone therapy, and you could write pretty much an identical story. Maybe the ideology is a bit more fiery in the education debate. (Although, if you've ever tried to prepare a meal to accommodate an ardent Atkins dieter and a Dean Ornish convert, you may disagree with this.) But a lot of the issues are the same.

And, many of the same media pathologies the Newsweek authors note produce public confusion over health findings--such as a tendency to boil complex issues down to simplistic headlines--also have a negative impact on education policy debates. One of Education Sector's--and, by extension, the Quick and the ED's--goals is to address some of these issues and help enrich the education policy conversation. (Programming Note: On March 24, Education Sector is co-hosting, with the National Academy of Sciences and the National Education Knowledge Industry Association, a forum to try to help untangle what the research evidence says about high school reform strategies and implications for policy and practice.)

Folks in the education policy community tend to be a bit envious of medical research. But, as this article illustrates, health care research is hardly as perfect as those seeking to remake education research in its image might imagine. It's easy to find a ridiculous-sounding education "research" article, or one with just plain lousy methodology, but there are also crummy studies in health. For example, Newsweek mentions a 2001 study, funded by the American Cocoa Institute, that found health benefits from chocolate--but was based on only 23 participants (to my great sorrow). The WHI's own low-fat study methodology raises some eyebrows: It relies on the (all-female) participants' self-reports of their own food consumption: something about which my gender is not known to be particularly candid. That's not to say education research can't learn from health research--in fact, we have to--but we need to be clear-eyed about what we're comparing ourselves to.