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Impact and Your Death Bed: Playing the Long Game

dgoldhab@uw.edu WHAT DO WE MEAN BY IMPACT? I attended my first Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) conference (then American Education Finance Association) in 1995 in Savannah, Georgia. The world of education research has changed a great deal since then, but I suspect what has not changed for most people in the “education research community” (a term meant to include education researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and other wonks) is the underlying reason we are all here. In short, we want to engage in, or with, research that matters, research that helps education institutions improve the academic and life outcomes of students. At its heart, this essay is about whether education research matters for students.1 Thus, it’s useful to begin with a definition: for this essay, I will define death-bed impact as the direct line between education research and student outcomes. Yes, it’s a bit macabre, but the distinction between the impact that you really care about versus the various ways that research impact is measured (for instance, many academics and researchers conceive of impact as the number of citations or the impact factor of the journal in which they publish) is important for what follows. So, what are the steps necessary for education research to have a death-bed impact?2 To begin, there should be some societal agreement as to the outcomes we value. This is an obvious, but not trivial, matter. We never know for sure what students get out of their schooling, and many of the outcomes that schools affect aren’t observed until much later in a student’s life. The weight we place on different measures of student outcomes, or how schools contribute to the development of students (such as test scores, educational attainment, or assessments of social– emotional learning), differs from person to person. Indeed, some might argue that other schooling contributions, like preparing