Theory and Practice at the Ed School

The isolation of the Graduate School of Education from the public school systems around it is slowly being forgotten. The group of Ed School researchers which needs help from classroom teachers or school administrators is no longer met so automatically with suspicion in Boston, acrimony in Cambridge or complacency in the suburbs.

One reason for the change is the large amount of federal money now available for programs that schools of education and school systems have to plan jointly. One reason for its success is the diplomacy of a few men at the Ed School and in Cambridge, Boston, Brookline and Newton.

The Ed School's Center for Records and Development now has $1.1 million worth of research projects in these and other communities. More significantly, a few elementary and secondary school teachers are coming to the Ed School this summer to learn how to conduct research themselves.

But most Ed School researchers haven't decided how much they want to work with classroom teachers, or get involved in their schools. At present, broadly speaking, there are two factions: those who feel a responsibility to work within local school systems, and those who see more value in a separate educational laboratory run by researchers alone.

Those who want researchers to work separately on their own programs argue that the Ed School is in danger of becoming a "service agency," simply supplying its graduate students to local teachers, its research ideas to local schools. But this argument is becoming obsolete. Most of the Ed School's new programs in local schools are ingenious combinations of "service" and research; the Harvard-Boston program this summer, for example, will involve 20 Harvard researchers working with 30 Boston teachers to plan a "model" curriculum for Roxbury schools.

This group also claims that only in a "great school," an ideal lab run by educators for educators, can radical educational reforms be drafted.

Many schools in Boston and the other communities would profit from such drastic reform. More important though, they need educators willing to help school administrators see the need for reform and help school-teachers see the significance of research.

This role can be filled by the researchers themselves. And though some day they may be able to make good use of an ideal lab, they will profit from a better knowledge of the problems faced day to day in an urban classroom. For them, as well as for the local schools, the Ed School should increase its support of proposals to share research rather than exporting it.