Abstract
This paper is motivated by a shared concern over the apparent lack of inclusion of socially critical research in educational policy intended to address inequitable outcomes from schooling. We recognise that while this is partly (perhaps mainly) a political problem, an effective response by socially critical scholars must also take into account the mechanics of research/policy relationships. We need to understand who else is operating in the contest for ideas, how and why they use research, and how their practices promote and reinforce some types of knowledge and some messages while others are excluded. One example is the work of think tanks. To gain insight into these issues, we construct and consider ‘activity profiles’ of two think tanks operating to influence policy around socio-economic inequalities and education. These suggest some points of interest for researchers working in that same area: points about the differences between different think tanks and about their strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis the policy process, compared with those of academics. In response, we argue that researchers need to develop a pedagogical not just a critical disposition, and propose a number of potential strategies they could adopt. In order to have an impact, academics must find ways of communicating beyond their scholar peers, in forms that are accessible and digestible, while maintaining the hall marks of robust, peer-reviewed and deeply evidence-based knowledge.
Introduction
This paper is motivated by our concern with the lack of influence of socially critical academic research on educational policymaking intended to redress inequalities in schooling. In a global context in which the impact of academic research is increasingly coming under scrutiny, our aim is to explore some ways in which researchers themselves might address this situation.
Lest readers think that we have entirely suspended our critical faculties, let us be clear that we understand that the principal reason for the marginalisation of socially critical research is ideological. As Gerrard (2015: 856) points out, there is no getting away from the fact that ‘even when couched within (often well intentioned) notions of best practice, policy is politics and politics is ideological’. Apple (2006), Ball (2007, 2008), Ball and Junemann (2012), Ball and Exley (2010), Gunter, Hall and Mills (2014), Lubienski et al. (2011), Lingard (2016), among many others, have given us deep insights into the ways in which ideology, politics and power have shaped knowledge production and policymaking processes in education: for example, the proliferation of multiple private and philanthropic interests and networks, think tanks and consultants; and global policy borrowing, exchange visits and regulation by measurement and international rankings. So, it is not the case that socially critical research is not influential just because researchers have not worked hard enough at their ‘impact strategies’. However, at the same time we argue that it is not enough for academics to illuminate and critique these processes of knowledge production and use. We are also actors within them, trying to fulfil our role as independent, publicly funded and rigorous knowledge producers, and to bring this knowledge to bear on policy decisions. We cannot simply continue with traditional modes of academic dissemination, which Lubienski et al. (2014) have described as ‘throw it over the wall’ and see what gets picked up, and complain that our lack of influence is someone else’s fault. We have a responsibility to develop our own professional work to make us more effective operators within the knowledge-exchange environments that surround contemporary policymaking. This requires us to draw on socially critical understandings of policymaking and more functional ones, such as research on the ways in which web publishing and social media have changed the nature and ownership of research knowledge and bypassed traditional routes of knowledge exchange. Put another way, we need to use research to develop our own pedagogical dispositions and strategies towards policymaking. Who is it that we are trying to inform and influence? What do they already know? In what form and when do they look for information? What kind of knowledge is admissible? Who else is influencing them and how? And what should we therefore do in response? Answering these questions should bring us to varied and perhaps multifaceted strategies including engagement, challenge and opposition.
This paper is effectively a case study of the ways in which strategies for researchers can emerge from an examination of processes of knowledge exchange in a particular policy area. We focus on one policy issue – inequalities in schooling – and one particular set of actors – think tanks. The work of think tanks as policy intermediaries has attracted attention from critical academic researchers (see, for example, Hart and Vromen, 2008; Lingard, 2016; McDonald, 2013; Verger et al., 2016; Weiner, 2011) and we are able to draw on this literature. However, this is not another critical study of think tanks. Our objective is to draw out the implications of the work of think tanks for the work of academic researchers. We therefore proceed as follows. We start with a short introduction to what we see as the problem – a research/policy gap in relation to poverty, socio-economic inequalities and education, which we suggest is common in both our countries (England and Australia). We then look at two think tanks – one in Australia and one in England – that are working in this policy area, but are different in their political orientation, interests, expertise and modus operandi. We construct an activity profile for each organisation from their reports, websites and other outputs, and analyse these, drawing on the existing literature on think tanks. We use this analysis to suggest implications for the strategies of academics working in the same field who are committed to more socially just outcomes from schooling.
The paper is exploratory in nature and in scale. Nevertheless, it contributes to international understandings of new landscapes of knowledge production and use, as well to current debates about the role of academics in policy environments in which the value of their accumulated knowledge and expertise is increasingly being questioned.
Socio-economic inequalities in education: a research/policy gap
The problem of the gap between research and policymaking, which this special issue addresses, is abundantly evident in the field of research in which the authors work – that of socio-economic inequalities and poverty and their relationships to education.
In England, Australia, the US and many other advanced industrial nations that have high levels of economic and social inequality and high levels of relative poverty, inequalities in educational experiences and outcomes are also marked and persistent (Raffo et al., 2009). Politicians across the political spectrum identify inequality in education as a problem – whether because it represents a waste of human capital and a drag on growth, because ‘educational failure’ causes other social problems and costs on welfare states, because it hinders individual opportunities and social mobility or because it is seen as socially unjust.
While policies obviously vary between countries and political parties, and, over time, there appears to be a recognisable cross-national consensus that the policy solutions to these problems lie in a suite of policies increasingly regulated by numbers (Ozga and Lingard, 2007), and by parental choice, standardised testing and privatisation (Sahlberg, 2015). Some regimes place more emphasis on compensating for perceived deficits in students’ home environments and relationships (for example, through longer school hours or mentoring programmes) and some on compensating for material disadvantage and more limited opportunity (for example, through funding for books, computers, food, clothing and enrichment opportunities). Some have emphasised standardisation and accountability, ‘naming and shaming’ as a way of improving school quality. Others have promoted market solutions, diversity of schooling and school autonomy.
Arguably, research of many kinds is being ignored in different parts of this policy agenda. The current debate on the expansion of academically selective schooling (grammar schools) in England is a good example, with the government insisting that such schools promote social mobility in the absence of any evidence to this effect and plenty to the contrary. However, we want to draw particular attention to the persistent marginalisation of two kinds of research in particular. One is the body of evidence that shows the close connection between socio-economic inequalities and inequalities in educational attainment, when this is used to argue that the solution cannot be found entirely in school system reforms or compensatory programmes but in the more equitable distribution of resources in society generally (Anyon, 2005; Berliner, 2013) and multi-agency support – not just a focus on school improvement and cognitive outcomes (Thomson, 2002). This tends to be dismissed as ‘excuse-making’ for poor professional practice and a distraction from the job of raising academic standards. The other is the body of evidence that suggests that current policy solutions may be having adverse effects: that narrow curriculum and performative pressures consolidate failure in disadvantaged students (Gutiérrez et al., 2009; Reay, 2006); that residualised school systems constrained by a focus on standards, high accountability and insufficient resources exacerbate inequalities by proliferating a ‘pedagogy of poverty’ (Haberman, 1991, 2010) and a ‘diet of low-expectations curriculum’ in residualised settings (Comber and Woods, 2016: 205). While much policy effort goes into funding quantitative research on ‘interventions’ that ‘work’ within the dominant policy paradigm and getting teachers to ‘implement’ them, research on teachers’ broader professional practice and pedagogic relationships is much less well supported, cited or acted on. This research tends to suggest solutions rather contrary to those typically promoted: for example, that strength-based approaches drawing upon young people’s lifeworlds work better than blame-based approaches that perceive them in deficit terms (Comber and Kamler, 2004); and that teachers given room to develop as professionals (Connell, 1994) can deploy ‘productive pedagogies’ which engage disadvantaged students and enable them to achieve (Hayes et al., 2005).
This gap between research and policy is, we argue, important. The consequences of getting this type of education policy wrong are severe since schooling remains a vitally important resource for young people with limited access to other economic and cultural resources likely to support their success in and beyond it. So, it matters that critical academic research becomes more visible and influential in this policy area than it currently is.
The workings of think tanks on issues of poverty and educational inequalities
To explore some of the ways by which this might come to pass, we look at the work of think tanks in this field. To be clear, we do not claim that think tanks are always heard in policy, nor that they are solely responsible for current policy directions or for the neglect of relevant academic research. Existing studies certainly provide evidence of their influence (Cooper, 2014; Medvetz, 2012), although it is also the case, as Pautz (2014) points out, that a direct causal relationship between think tank activity and specific policy decisions is hard to establish. Proof of influence is not our central concern here. Rather, we identify think tanks as one important type of ‘intermediary organisation’ in what Lubienski et al. (2011: 3) describe as ‘a new political economy of knowledge production and use in education’. They are potential collaborators and/or competitors for academic researchers in the contest of ideas around how to achieve more equitable outcomes from schooling. We could also have looked at the work of other policy intermediaries or at policymakers themselves. Think tanks are offered as one case study to illustrate how looking closely at the work of other actors leads to reflection on our own professional work and potential future strategies.
In preparing this paper, we looked at the work of a number of education-specific and generic policy think tanks in both England and Australia, including the Centre for Social Justice, the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Sutton Trust in England, and the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Grattan Institute in Australia. All of these have engaged in some activity around issues of poverty and educational inequalities. Some of them have already been the subject of in-depth critical case studies (for example, Lingard, 2016; Mendes, 2003; Pautz, 2013; Savage 2016).
Here we present two ‘activity profiles’, which we have constructed from the websites and written outputs (reports, blogs and articles) of the Education Policy Institute (EPI) in England and the CIS in Australia. While much of the existing literature has focused on a particular kind of think tank (right wing, advocacy), these two organisations have been chosen to illustrate the range of different work that think tanks are doing in this ‘policy space’, and the different opportunities and challenges presented for critical academic researchers. The profiles provide a brief coverage of the following areas, which existing literature suggest should be relevant for understanding the work of these policy intermediaries: their political/ideological stance; their policy interests in general and in relation to education; their organisational structure and staff expertise; the nature of their research activities (for example, conducting or commissioning research) and their predominant research methods; their relationship to the academy; and, in the case of the CIS, the means by which it attempts to influence educational practices. We also look at selected activities and outputs in relation to educational inequalities to understand how these organisational factors come into operation to shape what is said (and not said) to what end in this specific field.
The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS)
The CIS is a long-established organisation whose agenda is broader than education. It was formed in 1976 for the purpose of influencing ‘the climate of opinion’ towards its libertarian agenda (Norton, 2006), which, as it is clearly stated on its website, is ‘to encourage/provoke debate that promotes liberty, the rule of law, free enterprise and an efficient democratic government’ (https://www.cis.org.au/about/). Its board of directors is currently made up principally of senior personnel in investment banks, financial and legal services, property investment, management consultancy and other private-sector business concerns. Initially concerned with economic issues, it moved away from these in the mid-1980s when strong synergies emerged between it and the economic policies of the Hawke/Keating Labour government (1983–1996), which were reflected in the increasing influence of neo-liberalism on government policies and a break from the social-welfare agenda of the previous Whitlam Labour government (1972–1975) (Kelly, 2016).
CIS staff comprise ‘research scholars’ (about 18 at the time of writing this paper) and ‘adjunct fellows’. Other individuals are also listed as contributors, but its papers are mainly prepared ‘in-house’. There are also ‘academic advisers’ made up of mostly retired professors, across the range of fields in which CIS operates. These advisers are predominantly male and reflect narrow cultural diversity. The think tank’s work on education has been spearheaded by Jennifer Buckingham. For more than 15 years, Buckingham has written on a range of topics including school choice, school funding, literacy, international assessments (including PISA), NAPLAN and My School, religious schools, boys’ education, teacher training and employment, class size and educational disadvantage. She is the author of CIS reports, a regular newspaper columnist and media commentator. She recently completed a doctorate on literacy and social disadvantage, and is now publishing in the academic literature.
The CIS has long maintained the position that there is no relationship between increased funding and improved student outcomes – a stance that Lingard (2016) takes strong issue with in his case study of the organisation. The CIS has consistently campaigned against education programmes designed to redistribute funding based on need. In recent years, the Review of funding for schooling: Final report (Gonski et al., 2011) renewed calls for equity-based funding. The major recommendation of the report – that schools be funded according to the needs of their students and what is required to educate each one of them to a high standard – is yet to gain the support of major political parties in Australia. The Disadvantaged Schools Program was created by the Whitlam Labour government in 1975 to provide additional funds to schools with young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, but this was dismantled by the Howard Conservative government in 1996, and the CIS has mounted a sustained attack on the Gonski proposals (CIS, 2016).
A consequence of the winding back of equity programmes was that social justice in schooling has been reconceptualised as the achievement of literacy (Comber et al., 1998). The CIS has buttressed this policy shift by enthusiastically supporting the teaching of reading by explicit instruction, and most recently it has extended its role in promoting the teaching of reading through explicit instruction in phonemic awareness by brokering an alliance of philanthropic organisations and individuals to establish the Five from Five website (http://www.fivefromfive.org.au/), which hosts resources and publications for teachers, principal, parents and policymakers. The involvement of the CIS in actively supporting the adoption of a particular approach to the teaching of literacy is a departure from its long-term focus on policy advocacy around a set of core principles, and a move that repositions its interests closer to practice.
The Five from Five website illustrates some of the ways in which think tank knowledge-production activities can work to shape understandings of ‘what counts’ or ‘what works’. The website lists a number of CIS publications – two are peer-reviewed academic papers (Buckingham et al., 2013, 2014). Both papers draw upon a literature review conducted by Buckingham while completing her doctorate. An analysis of this review of the literature shows that it has a particularly narrow definition of literacy programmes. For example, the literature included in the review is limited to quantitative studies conducted since 2000. This choice of methodology excludes the kind of research conducted by key literacy scholars, especially those in the field of poverty and education who are well known for their longitudinal studies of classroom practice. Their exclusion is further assured since Buckingham et al. (2013, 2014) draw primarily upon research conducted in psychology, cognitive sciences and educational researchers working in the field of special education and learning difficulties.
Consequently, the review is limited to research aimed at predicting the relationship between factors presumed to impact on the literacy learning of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. While this choice is legitimate for the purpose of identifying such factors, knowing what these factors are only hints at an answer to the problem; and the mechanisms by which they might operate need to be examined by research conducted by other means (for example, ethnographic studies in the field of sociology of education).
Gutiérrez et al. (2009) point to some of the consequences of such an approach. They describe the kinds of practices promoted on the Five from Five website as ubiquitous, and limited versions of literacy. They claim that such approaches, which are often made available to children of families who live in poverty or who are marginalised in other ways, are underpinned by deficit and normative stereotypes of these children and their families that perpetuate hierarchical differences. To understand literacy learning, these and other literacy scholars would argue, we need to give account of the social organisation of schooling and its effects, which demands that researchers capture the socially mediated nature of literacy and literacy learning in situ, and understand the sociocultural history of the development of literacy. Such a view requires detailed, in-depth accounts of the actual practices of people in different cultural settings. In other words, how literacy gets done in schooling, and its effects.
In other words, Buckingham et al. (2013, 2014), in the interests of promoting literacy, exclude the research that we would argue is most relevant to the purpose of supporting teachers, principals, parents and policymakers who wish to improve it.
The Education Policy Institute (EPI)
In the UK, the EPI is a much more recent player, formed only in 2016. Evolving from the Liberal Democrat think tank CentreForum (itself a development of the Centre for Reform which was established in 1998 and became CentreForum in 2003), it appears to occupy a centre-left position in British politics. Its Executive Chairman is David Laws, Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Yeovil from 2001 until 2015 and former Minister of State for Schools in the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition, while its Chair of Trustees is Sir Paul Marshall. Marshall is co-founder and Chairman of one of Europe’s largest hedge fund groups, and is also Chairman of Ark, a leading academy chain working in disadvantaged areas, and author of several publications on educational inequality. The EPI’s small board of trustees consists of individuals from academia, public service, the private sector and the media, most of whom have experience in education, and it also has an advisory board of leading education figures, including currently active academic researchers. The EPI currently has a small team of 13 staff.
The EPI concentrates solely on education and it emphasises equity. One of the four elements of its mission is to ‘Promote high quality educational outcomes for all, meeting World Class standards, regardless of social backgrounds’ (http://epi.org.uk/about/). It also positions itself very strongly as offering research, evidence and analytic rigour: ‘an independent, impartial and evidence-based research institute’ (in contrast to the CIS, which emphasises its ideological objectives), and operates with an in-house team of quantitative researchers. Publications so far have concentrated on very current policy issues, such as school funding, academies and analysis of GCSE results, and have been focused around new analysis. Of particular interest to us is a report published in late July 2016, titled Divergent pathways: The disadvantage gap, accountability and the pupil premium, which examines how that gap grows across the early years, primary and secondary phases and the extent to which different types of schools are closing the gap, leading to recommendations around the continuation use of redistributive funding (Hutchinson and Dunford, 2016).
Despite these intentions, we argue that there is a danger that EPI will also perpetuate the exclusion of the socially critical, qualitative and practice-based research that could point to different solutions to the problems it identifies. An argument could be made that this is intentional, as the think tank’s leadership has strong associations with and clear interests in existing policy regimes. However, unintentional exclusions may also be made as a result of the limited knowledge of the small staff team. Notably, all of EPI’s research team have quantitative expertise, including a Chief Economist, a quantitative analyst and Director and Associate Director of Education Data and Statistics. The senior staff have recent and extensive Department for Education experience, including a former head of the School Funding Reform Unit and head of economics, evaluation and appraisal at the Education Standards Directorate, and statisticians working on school funding, academies, child poverty, analysis of school outcomes, among other topics. No one on the staff team claims any expertise as an education practitioner, nor in research in educational settings, nor in any of common academic disciplines informing educational research apart from economics.
These limitations are evident in the otherwise excellent ‘Divergent pathways’ report, which attempts to tease out explanations for the patterns seen in a short section relating to how schools can and are spending the pupil premium. 1 To produce this, EPI ‘teamed up’ with Sir John Dunford, who is a former secondary headteacher and former General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, and was the government’s National Pupil Premium Champion from 2013 to 2015. Sir John’s section of the report distils some of the issues identified by practitioners as ‘barriers to learning’ for disadvantaged pupils, and the findings of government-funded and Ofsted reviews of how the pupil premium is being spent, as well as four case studies of schools which have won awards for their pupil premium work. This is a useful contribution in itself, but makes no reference to any of the existing literature on these topics. For example, a number of the case studies refer to family learning, but there is no attempt to understand whether this is a key element of their success, how they have been able to engage families, what challenges have arisen in different kinds of areas, if and how family learning is connected to children’s learning, and so on. More problematically, no attempt is made to interrogate the broader professional practices and processes that underpin these specific strategies. Would it be the case, for example, that all these schools are adopting strength-based rather than deficit-based approaches to children and families? If so, what are the common elements of a strength-based approach? What professional development practices have schools adopted to achieve these changes? These specific and general questions have all been tackled in existing research, but there is no reference at all in the report to any academic research on any aspect of school practice apart from use of the pupil premium. Without this depth of analysis on the actual things that might be making a difference to children’s progress, Sir John is unable to go beyond generic prescriptions, such as schools being clear about what they are trying to achieve.
More broadly, the result of this particular combination of knowledge, skills, interests and connections is that the report’s recommendations, on the whole, are very much within the current policy paradigm, in that they propose maintaining the pupil premium and also various changes to expectations about schools’ monitoring of progress gaps. Policy recommendations focus on the technologies of funding and incentives, rather than on the issues beyond school that might affect progress gaps, and substantive issues of school practice such as curriculum and pedagogy and the ways in which they might be enabled through the school system. A section urging that schools need to use evidence better limits its understanding of ‘evidence’ to that arising from the randomised controlled trials and experiments being conducted under the auspices of the Education Endowment Foundation to support schools’ use of the pupil premium.
Discussion and implications for education researchers
Clearly these are selected profiles that necessarily describe only some of the work undertaken by these organisations. Nevertheless, the examples, when taken alongside the existing literature on think tanks, begin to suggest some points of interest about the work of these particular policy intermediaries that should be of use to critical education researchers. We make three broad observations.
First, the think tank world contains organisations that are very different in their political affiliations, goals, scope and range of activities. As Lingard (2016) points out, not all think tanks have been established and funded by elites, nor are they all right wing. This contrast is demonstrated in our activity profiles, as is Welner’s (2011) observation that (in the US) think tanks of the right and left tend to do different things. Right-wing think tanks have tended to invest in marketing a coherent set of ideas; in other words, they aim to shift the broad ideological basis of policy rather than ‘tweaking’ existing policies. The CIS seems to correspond to this pattern, and we note, in particular, its focus on shifting public opinion in order to drive policy change. Progressive think tanks, Welner observes, have concentrated more on the policy specifics, as is the case with EPI to date, although this does not mean they should be regarded as non-ideological.
Along similar lines, Pautz (2014) and Hart and Vromen (2008) have suggested that think tanks tend to be of three different types. ‘Advocacy think tanks’ have a strong ideological position which drives their interests and output, and they tend to have a short-term policy outlook. Although they may conduct research, their in-house research capabilities are usually slight, and they tend to work more by synthesising and repackaging research than by producing original analysis. ‘Academic think tanks’, by contrast, are close to academic researchers in their methods and knowledge claims. These organisations tend to have a long-term policy outlook, have academics as researchers and/or are doing in-depth research and produce substantial studies for at least part of their output. There are also ‘government think tanks or contract research institutions’, which Pautz describes as ‘technocratic in style and non-partisan’ – arguably better described as consultancies. They are likely to work within the parameters of existing policies, or of what is immediately achievable, rather than to offer research- or ideology-based shifts. These different kinds of organisations also relate to academic research in different ways. Taylor (2011) argues that think tanks ‘rely on academics’ (p.10) for advice and support and to provide their research with greater credibility, but some work mainly through commissioning external writers (often academics), while others mainly work through their own in-house research teams, tapping selected academic research to help bring credibility to the positions they intend to take.
Our examples make this picture even more complex. The CIS self-identifies as an advocacy think tank, but has, nevertheless, held some long-term policy positions in relation to education, has begun to make its own academic contributions and is also developing direct practice interventions. In this latter sense, it is acting as a ‘do-tank’, advocating ‘detailed policy models, policy choices and particular instruments. Innovations are produced and sold to government as practical and workable solutions to intractable problems’ (Exley, 2015:184). One the other hand, the EPI seems to be a hybrid between the academic think tank and contract research institution, emphasising independence and academic rigour but with close links to current policy interests and currently a short-term policy outlook. This organisation employs its own in-house analysis team, but clearly draws on leading academics through its advisory and trustee board. Similarly, the CIS has its own in-house ‘research scholars’, but it also draws upon academics through its academic advisors, adjunct fellows and scholars in residence.
Rather than thinking about think tanks in general, then, academics might be well advised to become familiar with the activities and practices of particular think tanks in order to identify opportunities for influence, challenge or collaboration.
Second, think tanks are in general much better connected to policy elites and much better resourced in terms of investment in communications and influencing than typical university departments and research centres. We don’t labour this point since it has been well documented elsewhere (see, in particular, Ball and Exley, 2010). The EPI, for example, is staffed by (recently) former government ministers and civil servants. Moreover, one in seven staff work on communications and engagement – a ratio unheard of in academia. Whether they are trying to develop major new policy directions, to ‘shore up’ and further develop particular approaches or political positions, or to propose specific policy ‘tweaks’ or additions for a party in government, they are likely to be much more effective at getting the ear of their target audience than academics, whose work is not principally geared to this purpose. The background and expertise of their personnel means that they are also much more likely to know what kinds of policies are likely to be possible in a given moment and who might be persuaded by arguments of what kinds. Thus, they can identify the policy ‘spaces’ and ‘moments’ when different ideas and messages can be injected in order to achieve a change of direction. And they invest in the development of accessible and persuasive arguments. Individual academics may or may not want to, or be capable of, mimicking these modi operandi. However, these are crucial elements in policy processes, which affect whether policies reflect academic research and do the ‘right thing’ accordingly, or whether they ignore or deny it. It is hard to see how academic researchers can complain about not being heard if we, our universities and our research associations eschew these kinds of activities. Our challenge is to do them at the same time as maintaining the independence and rigour of academic research, when the resources to support them are relatively sparse. It is a particularly difficult task when we are generally cast in the role of ‘the opposition’ responding to the policy agendas that flow from the seemingly endless stream of media releases, reports and events generated by think tanks. A key question that we face is how might we and our academic colleagues in the field of poverty and education do a better job at setting the agenda, and influencing the climate of opinion?
Third, and conversely, think tanks have major limitations in terms of the particular and partial expertise that they hold. These are not large organisations, and there are substantial gaps in the knowledge that they can mobilise in general and, in particular, around issues of poverty and education. They therefore concentrate on what they know about. For example, the CIS has a long-standing education specialist who has focused on literacy; thus, literacy has become a centrepiece of its education policy advocacy. The EPI has strong statistical and economic expertise, leading it to concentrate its policy efforts around issues like funding, attainment gaps and system incentives.
Our examples suggest two potential knowledge gaps in think tanks working on issues of educational inequalities. One is knowledge of educational practice. Analysts and policy proposers in these organisations are not typically current or ex-teachers or principals, nor are they regularly working in educational settings (although the CIS’s interest in literacy practice resulted in the employment of an ‘assistant’ with a background in teaching), nor in communities experiencing high levels of poverty and disadvantage. While attempts are made by think tanks (in ways we have not been able to document in full here) to ground their policy work in practice – from involving leading practitioners on review panels and boards, inviting individuals to contribute sections to reports and running round-table events and conferences – there remains a certain distance from practice. This carries some risks: that issues of practice will simply be avoided while ‘policy’ concentrates on issues like funding and performance monitoring; that issues of practice may be misunderstood; that there becomes a narrow dependence on types of knowledge of practice that seem to be able to be acquired without leaving the desk (for example, that a certain packaged classroom intervention has an effect size of xyz); or that ‘practice’ itself is denigrated as being in some way or other irrelevant to policy – reactionary, perhaps, or ‘soft’.
Another gap is disciplinary knowledge. The dominant academic disciplines in education are psychology and sociology, with some scholars hailing from philosophy, history, geography and less commonly social statistics and economics. However, it is evident that this breadth of knowledge is unlikely to be represented in any one particular think tank, and that there are think tanks working on education in which only the latter two are well represented. Qualifications in economics, statistics and social policy equip think tank researchers to analyse the efficiency and effectiveness of public policy systems in terms of their quantifiable outcomes, including gaps between poor children and others, but they equip them much less to think critically about the public purposes of education – how education systems produce social stratification, how young people form identities and aspirations, how organisations function and are affected by their social and economic contexts, and so on. Obviously, we cannot expect whole body of disciplinary knowledge to be mobilised around every policy proposal, but there is a danger here that much of what is known about poverty and its relationship to education – through decades of investment in research and teaching – may remain entirely marginal to policy thinking done by think tanks.
Knowledge gaps in particular institutions are inevitable of course, and the same can be said for university departments and research centres, which have particular disciplinary strengths and blindnesses and particular topic interests. This observation is not made in order to point to specific gaps in particular institutions, but to highlight two issues salient to the way academic researchers may want to interact with think tanks and policymakers. One is that the education research community as a whole has something to offer both to think tanks and to education policy debate that think tanks cannot provide. This is the case both in relation to breadth and depth of disciplinary knowledge and in relation to practice. Although academia in general can be criticised for its ‘ivory-tower’ nature, this is much less applicable to academics in education. Education is a field of practice and much research is concerned with the practices, processes and relationships of teaching, learning and assessment; that is to say, activity at the classroom and institutional scales.
The other is that the knowledge claims of think tanks need to be carefully scrutinised – again, not to poke holes in particular organisations, but because it is the specific function of think tanks to shape the scope as well as the nature of policy. Think tanks help define what policymakers should be concerned with and what policy options are on the table. As Ball and Exley (2010:155) put it, they are involved and invested in policy networks in which ‘ideas gain momentum and support and are disseminated through and beyond networks by repetition, reiteration, re-articulation, quotation, cross-referencing, collaborations and co-authoring, co-publishing and associate memberships’. Thus, what they are able to talk about and what they necessarily exclude is fundamentally important. Yet, these knowledge limitations and exclusions are rarely advertised, since think tanks need to be seen as knowledgeable, expert and independent. McDonald (2013) suggests that the products of think tank research are less, not more, scrutinised or interrogated by journalists and others in the media than those of academic researchers.
These three observations lead us to suggest ways in which education academics could respond if they are interested in influencing policy. As we indicated at the start of this paper, we accept that some academics will want to maintain a distance from policymaking and adopt a position of critique. However, we argue that another important contribution is to seek to share knowledge on issues relevant to policymaking with actors beyond the academy – in other words, to develop not just a critical but a pedagogical disposition. This will demand different strategies of knowledge exchange and stakeholder engagement. In relation to think tanks, we suggest three, outlined in the following.
One is to ensure that the offerings of think tanks are subject to review in the light of disciplinary and practice knowledge, by publishing reviews and commentaries of this work on a regular basis, and thus allowing policymakers and influencers (including the general public) an informed view of the robustness of the knowledge claims made and perhaps some signposts to other sources of information. In the US, such an example already exists, organised by the National Education Policy Centre (NEPC) at the University of Colorado. The NEPC convenes a national network of education scholars across the US to write and publish reviews of think tank work. For critical scholars, such activities might be focused particularly on the advocacy think tanks on the right of the political spectrum. A means of strengthening the task of maintaining a critical oversight of the work of think tanks is through global strategic networks of academics. While think tanks tend to operate within national contexts, many of the issues they take on are of significance globally. Academics already have mechanisms for international collaboration, such as international journals and conferences. These could provide a foundation for the development of an international version of NEPC, or perhaps even an international academic ‘think tank’ with national member organisations (such as the British Educational Research Association) perhaps playing a key coordinating role.
Another option is to seek active collaborations with think tanks in recognition both of their expertise and networks as policy intermediaries and their knowledge limitations. Such collaborations could be at a distance – for example, putting policy-digestible material (such as research syntheses and briefings) into the public domain as a resource – or more engaged, such as contacting think tanks working in particular areas and offering to advise, synthesise or provide access to research and practice networks.
A third option, and one that some academics have been actively exploring, is to adopt some of the practices of think tanks: developing greater expertise in media releases, plain-language reports, events with high-profile speakers, and so on. Recognition of impact in academic research assessment exercises provides an incentive for this kind of activity. There are an increasing number of academics regularly contributing to public debate and attempting to persuade public opinion through these means, as illustrated through the establishment of The Conversation as an independent news commentary site, which was founded by a consortium of Australian universities for this purpose. However, we suggest, that there remain both opportunities untapped and, perhaps, institutional constraints on this kind of activity.
Conclusion
This paper was motivated by our shared concern over recent years for an apparent lack of inclusion of socially critical research, and arguably many other forms of academic research, in educational policy intended to address inequitable outcomes from schooling. It was written during a time when the landscape of policy influence has been undergoing a seismic shift in the form of the widespread success of popularist policies and politicians. There is a clear link between our concern with how think tanks have become adept at packaging and promoting carefully curated evidence for use by policymakers, and the delegitimisation of research expertise, which has come under an expanded explicit attack in a populist backlash against ‘experts’ and intellectual elites in general, not just socially critical scholars. Our core claim has been that to respond to these (multiplying) phenomena, we need not only to understand the broader political context and influences on knowledge production and use which make critical research particularly hard to hear, but also the mechanics of research/policy relationships. We need to understand who else is operating in the contest for ideas, particularly intermediary organisations between research and policy. We need a closer and more nuanced understanding of how and why they use research, and how their practices promote and reinforce some types of knowledge and some messages, while others are excluded. Academics will be further marginalised in the contest of ideas if they do not strengthen what we have called their pedagogical disposition towards policy and developing strategies to be heard and valued in the rapidly changing policy landscape.
Our illustrative activity profiles show that, while think tanks in this field share some common characteristics, they are not all the same type of beast. We raise the possibility that the sidelining of socially critical research, and indeed of much knowledge gained from qualitative research in classrooms, schools and neighbourhoods, can arise in at least two ways. Think tanks may deliberately ignore certain knowledge that is opposed to their ideological commitments and promote that which supports them (perhaps a characteristic of advocacy think tanks) or they may lack educational expertise and knowledge of the research corpus, or be so inculcated in the prevailing policy paradigm that broader research-informed ideas do not occur (perhaps a characteristic more likely to be associated with ‘government’ or ‘advocacy’ think tanks), although, of course, the picture will be a lot messier than this. These situations present different challenges and opportunities for academic researchers.
Our analysis offers some options and some challenges to current academic practice: the need to work collectively rather than individually; the need for capacity to respond in ‘real time’; the need to build up syntheses of research and for these to be valued, as well as original contributions to knowledge; and the need to be aware of the policy and influencing landscape and to be able to work with, and in challenge to, think tanks and other policy intermediaries, rather than concentrating exclusively on the production and dissemination of our own work. However, we have only scratched the surface of this topic. The findings drawn from the activity profiles suggest the need for a broader mapping of think tanks in this area of policy and beyond, comparisons between organisations and countries and perhaps even an understanding of the cross-national links between policy intermediaries of this kind. In the current endeavour, we aim simply to understand more of what is going on, why it matters and how we should seek to respond as socially critical academic researchers in the field.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.