This winter, I wrote about my concern that not enough education researchers do the kind of difficult, timely work that we so sorely need. One reason for this is that bad journalism鈥攚hich is more common than I鈥檇 like鈥攃an dilute the rewards for careful, time-consuming scholarship while rewarding researchers for slapdash studies that advance self-serving agendas.
When I write things like this, readers sometimes (quite reasonably) ask, 鈥淐an you give me an example of what you mean?鈥� Well, the other week, I ran across an especially jarring example. It was such a microcosm of getting this wrong that it鈥檚 worth discussing as an object lesson.
The story in question, 鈥�,鈥� landed in my inbox as the lead story in the Feb. 27 issue of The 74.
After five paragraphs about a school nurse in Ohio, the story got around to the in question. It turns out that, four years ago, researchers at the University of Missouri studied 21 school nurses in Minnesota, concluding that students with a lot of part-day absences 鈥渟eek out school nurses as a source of comfort and support.鈥� Therefore, the researchers argue that nurses can help intervene before 鈥渁bsences become chronic.鈥� It鈥檚 not a ridiculous assertion. And, in an era of rising chronic absenteeism, everyone is looking for promising solutions.
But it鈥檚 not obviously clear that this should be regarded as one of those solutions. How much do nurses actually help? What exactly do these nurses do that matters? How often do part-day absences lead to full-day absences, anyway? Unfortunately, the article is in the pay-walled Journal of School Nursing, so I wasn鈥檛 able to assess the details. But both The 74鈥檚 account and the study鈥檚 abstract make clear that the researchers are in no position to answer such questions鈥攂ecause they didn鈥檛 devote the requisite time, energy, or thought to them. And that is a problem.
It turns out that the study is based on 鈥渟ix online focus groups鈥� conducted during the summer of 2020 that involved 鈥渘early two dozen school nurses.鈥� The nurses all worked in Minnesota, presumably because the study was 鈥渃onducted in collaboration with the Minnesota Youth Sex Trading Project, which is associated with the University of Minnesota School of Nursing.鈥� (The study is 鈥渘ew鈥� in the sense that the article drawn from these early-pandemic focus groups was finally published this winter.)
The 74鈥檚 story approvingly quotes lead researcher Knoo Lee, a registered nurse, asserting, 鈥淲e discovered something that we haven鈥檛 seen before, where school nurses ... have the potential to play a key role in terms of really helping out with chronic absenteeism.鈥� Meanwhile, you鈥檇 look in vain for cautions about the validity, reliability, or generalizability of conclusions drawn from Lee鈥檚 half-dozen Zoom calls.
In fact, by the end of The 74鈥檚 account, I could only conclude that the 鈥渟tudy鈥� was mostly an excuse for Lee and his colleagues to garb a pretty predictable agenda in the guise of scholarship. Lee et al. reported that their handful of virtual focus groups revealed that 鈥渘urses are often left out of policy-making decisions and conversations,鈥� that teachers need 鈥済reater support and resources to respond to ... mental health concerns, homelessness, lack of transportation, and food insecurity,鈥� and that school systems need to hire more certified nurses and provide them with more supplies.
Look, it鈥檚 fine for nursing school professors to argue that schools should hire more nurses and give them more say and support. I鈥檇 expect nothing less. The problem is when these self-assured, self-interested directives are offered as 鈥渞esearch,鈥� with no more than token attention paid to collecting data, examining evidence, or testing assumptions.
Reporting on a handful of 4-year-old Zoom chats as a path-breaking new 鈥渟tudy鈥� gives the clear impression that the takeaways are 鈥渇indings鈥� and not just nursing school conventional wisdom. When credulous media outlets validate this kind of exercise by treating it as authoritative, it can make painstaking interviewing, extensive data collection, disciplined analysis, and careful parsing of conclusions look like a sucker鈥檚 game.
It鈥檚 hard to do justice to just how earnestly the reporter treated Lee鈥檚 supposed takeaways. And the consequences of this kind of journalism extend beyond the promotion of one silly study. For all those in education who lack the time or training to distinguish serious scholarship from its lazy imitators, this kind of reporting only blurs those lines. In doing so, it corrodes the credibility of both researchers and reporters. And that鈥檚 not good for anybody.
