Critical Issues: Writing for Rosie: How a Journalist Uses (and Doesn't Use) Research

Abstract

Jay Mathews WASHINGTON POST Editors' Introduction. There were several reasons that we invited Jay Mathews, a seasoned education reporter for the Washington Post, to write the following piece for JLR'S Critical Issues section. First, we believed JLR should address in some fashion the National Reading Panel report released, after several delays, in April of this year. However, we resisted our first inclination to use the pages of the Journal as a forum for researchers to discuss the pros and cons of a report that has been controversial from its inception. We resisted that inclination because, in our view, opinions about the report were in many if not most cases largely formed when researchers considered the context of the panel's origins, who was or was not appointed to serve on the panel, and the panel's stated goals and methods in orienting itself to the research literature. In addition, there have been regular opportunities at national forums and conferences to air opinions about the panel's composition, work, and preliminary findings. We imagined that, for researchers at least, the actual release of the report might be somewhat anticlimactic. So, we were looking for another angle to pursue in relation to the release of the report.