Still behind

Given the increasingly shrill partisan tone in Washington, it's hard to remember that President Bush was once able to marshal the support of such stalwart Democrats as Sen. Ted Kennedy to pass a major education reform bill: the No Child Left Behind Act. Educators and policy makers remain divided over what impact the law, with its emphasis on standardized testing, has had on student achievement.

Education writers and advocates have taken note of how little time the president devoted to education, once of his signature issues, during his most recent State of the Union address--his first to a Democratic-controlled Congress. Nonetheless, education reform remains one of the nation's most contentious and seemingly intractable issues. One of the big impediments to fixing America's schools has been that for years no one really knew what instructional strategies worked best. Teaching methods were based more on anecdote and intuition than empirical evidence.

Enter Carnegie Mellon. Along with the University of Pittsburgh, we have created the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC) to bring scientific vigor to education research. The core of the center is a novel research facility called LearnLab, where education researchers create, run and analyze experiments on how people learn. Several schools in the Pittsburgh area and throughout the country participate as "research schools" and serve much as research hospitals do for medical research.

The PSLC is funded by the National Science Foundation. The LearnLab already has produced some exciting results that we hope to be sharing with you over the coming months. Stay tuned.


 

Jonathan Potts