Spent the week at the American Educational Research Assn. meeting in Chicago (16,000 attendees, sessions at most of the downtown hotels, big receptions, and a program that weighs more than 2 pounds. Many of the hundreds of research papers presented at the annual meeting offer detailed examinations of very specific situations, many are political rants that sound the same year after year, some repeat the obvious, and others examine issues, such as testing, NCLB, school choice, literacy and so on in often helpful ways. This year there were many sessions with an international perspective. Every year I attend AERA I learn a lot and meet some very smart people doing interesting research on important issues.

One of the most memorable sessions this year was a lecture by Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the dean of the University of Michigan School of Education and a former elementary school teacher. Ball is a big star in the education research firmament and for good reason—she’s smart, talks about complex ideas in very clear ways, and can be counted on for a fresh, non-ideological perspective that she’s subjected to her own rigorous thinking process. (Her main area of research involves mathematics teaching and what teachers need to know.)

Anyway, she gave the DeWitt Wallace lecture this year, and she analyzed the often sharp criticism of education schools and the research they do going back almost a century. She tried out various responses to those criticisms to justify the need for Ed schools. One argument would be that schools of education are needed to train teachers. But she said that argument, on its own, is insufficient, especially in a research university. So she made the case that education schools can justify their existence most persuasively if at least some of the research done by education professors focuses on the heart of the educational enterprise.

Imagine a triangle with teachers, students, and curriculum at the points. That triangle is made up of arrows representing influences going back and forth. The triangle is situated inside a circle representing the classroom and the classroom is inside of another circle that representing the outside environment. She argued that truly “educational” education research focuses at least partly on what happens inside that triangle, which is where instruction takes place. I know I’m badly simplifying her argument, and she was careful to say that she wasn’t trying to say only certain types of research were worth doing. Important research can be done to “inform” educators and policy makers by those in other disciplines or fields—psychology, political science, history, policy studies, economics, anthropology and so on. Research on what happens inside or near that triangle, however, requires that the researcher know something about the process of education and the interactions of teachers and students and the curriculum.

What does any of this mean for journalists who cover education? Well, I think there’s a connection. Journalism that focuses on what goes on inside classrooms requires that journalists know something about education. There’s much journalism about schools that is important and compelling but that is not precisely about education. Covering the school board, for example, is important but it’s more about government—politics, budgets, labor negotiations and the like. So, journalists on the politics beat, City Hall, even GA’s (General Assignment for my non-journalist readers) can handle the job. Education writers, however, need to also be able to communicate clearly about the heart of the matter—teaching and learning.

Another insight from Ball’s talk that journalists should consider is that what goes on inside classrooms is a complicated interaction between and among students, and with their teacher, while wrestling with important content. And all of those interactions are influenced by what happens outside of class and outside the school. That’s a big idea journalists should keep in mind, as it will help them avoid writing simplistic stories that conclude education can be “fixed” by a silver-bullet idea, policy, textbook, teaching method, test or heroic principal or teacher. The final insight is that education journalists should seek out the kind of research Ball describes, because it will help them gain the knowledge they need to explain these complicated interactions to their readers, listeners, viewers and Interne