Research Evidence and School Board Deliberations

References to Research

The first factor to consider in analyzing the use of research evidence is the way in which board members and other meeting participants referenced research during their deliberations. In our analysis, we discerned two patterns of use: general and specific references. General references constituted 1 to 2 sentence references to “research,” “studies,” or a “literature.” Sometimes, these general references included an identifying marker, such as a “University of Texas” study. The structure of these references typically began with a mention of “research”—positioned as author and source—and a description of a general finding. Specific references effectively appeared as abstracts of single or multiple studies. These references provided some information about the researcher, the population studied, the research design, and conclusions. Specific references included instances of published research, district-initiated research, widely examined case studies, and investigations undertaken by individuals participating in the meetings. These specific references appeared alternately as single references during a meeting and as sustained references mentioned by more than one participant over the course of a meeting.

A typical example of a general reference to research surfaced in a report on nutrition and school meals presented to the school board of the working-class community of Beloit. One of the two presenters noted that “research has shown that hunger can actually explain 27% of the differences in aggressive behavior among children.” No additional information was given about this research, nor did anyone refer to the research again. Similarly, in advocating increased time for advance placement courses, a school principal in Beloit maintained that “from some of the literature, you’ll see too that it says two periods are really best for teaching situations, but I haven’t seen where it says anything works for all situations.” The principal did not expound on this reference and no one else remarked on it.

As these examples suggest, the most distinguishing feature of general references to research is their vagueness: few, if any, identifying markers provide information about the authorship, design, populations, settings, or conclusions of the “studies” obliquely referenced. What board members, other participants, and audience members may glean from these references is that research has substantiated some claim. In this way, general references do not function as reports on scholarly literatures. Indeed, in these references, the particulars of a study or line of research seem comparatively unimportant. Rather, research functions significantly in its status as research. Research bolsters the credibility and authority of the person who cites it. Referencing research suggests that the person has reflected on an issue, sought out additional information, and developed relevant competencies. Moreover, referencing research serves as a marker of nonpartisanship. The person referencing research places his or her position above the partisan fray—while others debate about district policy in terms of particular interests, the person attuned to research putatively invokes an objective good.

Yet, in these references, research often serves a persuasive function (see Coburn, Toure, & Yamashita, 2009; Feldman & March, 1988; Majone, 1989). That is, with rare exception, general references to “research” appear in support of an advocate’s claim—whether the issue is improving the nutritional value of school meals, increasing the time devoted to advanced placement courses, or some other topic. Participants typically did not reference research in the context of indecision, with the hope that research evidence may help them and other participants form an opinion. Furthermore, participants often made research speak with one voice. An example of this is when a staff member in the upper-middle-class district of Elmbrook argued for the benefits of mixed-ability groupings of students in the high school science curriculum. The staff member held that “research shows us when you have a mixed group, you will have greater learning going on.” In this statement, research appears anthropomorphized as a single actor who investigates an issue and arrives at a conclusion, rather than a collection of individuals and groups working across time and space and arriving at multiple—and sometimes conflicting—conclusions. Cast in the singular, research may bolster the authority of the person who cites it, but this reductive move also stalls further investigation when other participants reassert multiple voices of researchers, as when a community member noted later in the meeting that the research on mixed-ability groups was not unanimous. In these moments, meeting participants often seem uncertain about how to reconcile contradictory claims.

In some cases, general references to research may reflect an advocate’s unsuccessful effort to recall an item encountered in a newspaper, learned through interpersonal conversations with coworkers or neighbors, or some other source. In other cases, general references may be the product of a gap between what an advocate knows and what this person shares with others at a meeting. In this sense, a general reference may stem from an advocate’s understanding of audience expectations, or an effort to underscore basic information. General references also may signal a lack of basic research literacy; that is, an advocate may not fully appreciate the significance of particular studies or the technical procedures of some research. Furthermore, deliberations across the three districts, even as Elmbrook conducted highly structured meetings, tended to develop in unexpected directions. Spontaneous discussion may frustrate efforts to recall the specifics of research. Importantly, the cultural authority ascribed to the voice of the researcher—which may conflict with the more tentative, qualified voice of the author of a scholarly report—may motivate participants to make claims about what “the research says.” In any case, these explanations do not dilute the significance of what gets said during the meetings and how these general references constitute an important pattern of research use.

While specific references to research also serve persuasive functions and bolster the credibility of advocates, they provide enough information to illuminate the policy issues debated by a school board. In the nutrition report to the Beloit school board noted above, the presenters also shared specific research references, as in this example:

A 2002 study in which nutrition researchers found that children who reported low nutrient intakes have lower GPAs and higher rates of absenteeism and tardiness than children who reported higher levels of nutrient and energy intake. And this is specifically considering breakfast as that nutrient intake to start one’s day. And then the same study also cited that—that’s okay—um, students who increase their nutrient after the start of a free school breakfast program, much like the one in Beloit, were more likely to improve their nutrient intake status and academic and psychosocial functioning.

In this reference to research evidence, the presenter provided the school board and community members with compelling reasons for improving the nutritional content of district-provided meals, especially since 70% of the students in the district qualified for free and reduced lunch. With specific references, the length of the reference is less important than the information conveyed. In Beloit, one board member offered the following argument for spending sufficient resources on education: “The UW–Whitewater researchers found that parents who live in communities with high property values with comparatively low tax rates often send their children to districts that spend more on students and presumably tax more as well.” In this reference, in the space of a sentence, we learn something about the researchers, the population studied, the research design, and the conclusions of the study. Specific references thus provide inferential support for “bridging”—to recall Toulmin’s metaphor—premises and conclusions.

Advocate

While references to research exhibit patterns that shape the use of this type of evidence in school board deliberations, the background and interests of the advocate referencing the research also influence its circulation and function in the school board meetings. In particular, an advocate’s affinity for a particular line of research, his or her educational training, and his or her presentational style contribute to the frequency with which research evidence is cited as well as its influence on a board’s decision-making process.

References to research evidence circulate more widely when an advocate has an interest in and favorable assessment of a particular research source. Although a given topic may yield diverse research findings, advocates often cite only one study or one line of research in support of their arguments. For example, Beloit Superintendent Milton Thompson refers to “Stevenson” repeatedly, declaring that he is “brainwashed” by the DuFour model and studies conducted at the high-achieving Adlai Stevenson High School in Illinois. On a variety of district issues including interventions, testing, grading, and credits for graduation, Thompson invokes Stevenson as a model for making changes in Beloit as the city works to transform its struggling schools. Other administrators in the district, including the high school principal and the assistant superintendent for educational services similarly refer to Stevenson as research evidence in their reports to the board. No one in the Beloit meetings has questioned the model’s relevance, cementing its place in the conversations and decision-making practices in Beloit.

Across the districts in our study, advocates whose background taught them to use research as part of a decision-making process—whether at an advanced or introductory level—referenced research comparatively more often. Two of the most frequent citers of research, Thompson and Superintendent Pat Herdrich, who directs the middle-class district of West Bend, have advanced degrees in education. Herdrich earned her PhD in administrative leadership from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a minor in curriculum and instruction, and she wrote a dissertation on strategic planning. Thompson has a master’s degree in educational leadership from Cardinal Stritch University. Although meeting participants in Elmbrook cited research less frequently, the district’s director of assessment, Melanie Stewart, was a primary citer of research. Stewart holds a PhD in curriculum and instruction from the University of Akron. Their advanced degrees assure that these administrators have learned to evaluate, interpret, and appreciate the value of research. Alternately, two Beloit College undergraduates delivered the nutrition report to the school board, citing numerous peer-reviewed studies and conducting their own review of the program. To be sure, board members in all three districts possessed college degrees, which the undergraduates had not yet achieved. However, whereas board members tended to draw on experiences they had obtained after graduation, the undergraduates’ present situation placed them in an environment where their professors regularly impressed on them the value of reviewing and citing research. With 16 separate references to research, the nutrition report accounted for nearly all of the 19 references to research relating to wellness issues. Access to and comfort with research cultivated in the educational environments of these advocates helps to explain why they cited research more frequently than other participants in the school board meetings.

Frequency, however, does not ensure that other meeting participants will be responsive to research evidence. Instead, an important factor is the advocate’s presentational style. Thompson exhibited a facilitating style in his interactions with various constituents. As a tall man with a low, loud voice, Thompson assumed a commanding presence in the room during board meetings, but he consciously worked at generating a cooperative environment. When discussing his approach to making policy changes, he explained to the school board that he believes in meeting with the different stakeholders and incorporating their ideas to improve the policy proposal:

I believe that if we do it, if we allow for the discussions to happen—and I really listen to what’s going on and reformulate the ideas taking what I’m hearing. . . . Maybe I’m strange, but I really, I enjoy the discussion because it’s changing the idea like John said. It’s like a living idea, you know, where what I bring back to the board will contain elements of the original idea, but it’s going to be tweaked and reshaped.

At other meetings, he reiterated his commitment to this “conversation process” and explained (to laughter): “nobody’s afraid of me over at the high school.” Assuming this facilitating role, Thompson strived to create an environment in which people could state their views without risk of retribution or embarrassment.

This attention to his audience came through not only in Thompson’s leadership style but also in his argumentative style. In making his arguments in support of a proposal, he engaged a variety of evidence types. Pairing research evidence with examples and testimony, he constructed his appeals in ways that respected the possibility that different types of evidence would resonate with different audience members. One topic on which Thompson spoke frequently and repeatedly was a policy proposal to change the grading guidelines for the school district. The policy had the potential to be very controversial: it could create more work for teachers, induce students to “game the system,” and confuse parents. Anticipating these and other objections, Thompson outlined his proposed changes by describing the problem and explaining how his solution would meet that need. Speaking passionately, he incorporated several types of evidence to support his claims. While describing the problem of grade variance across teachers, he used testimony several times by citing conversations that he had with teachers in which they expressed their frustration with the problem and the district’s previous inaction. In addition to the teacher’s testimony, Thompson relied heavily on examples and his experience as a teacher to illustrate how his grading policy proposal would work in practice. After claiming that consistent grading practices were essential to improving instruction, he turned to an example to articulate the same point differently:

In other words, as a history teacher, if I thought that I was being clear on communicating a certain concept, but in the discussion that I’m having with students it’s obvious that they’re not getting it, then the next day I need to change something about my instruction so that they’re understanding is clear, instead of figuring, “Well I taught it. Their fault if they didn’t get it.”

By explaining his claims using multiple evidence types, Thompson ensured that his arguments might be more broadly accepted because his discursive strategies allowed him to relate to different audience members.

In contrast, West Bend Superintendent Pat Herdrich, who relied more exclusively on research and data as her two primary evidence types, assumed a more technocratic presentational style, and she often struggled to connect with community members as well as some of the board members. Consonant with her technocratic style, Herdrich packed her presentations to the board with data about the district. Relying more on evidence types that required systematic collection and analysis than on examples or testimony, she seemed to subscribe to the idea that more formal evidence types would carry the argument she advocated. However, her detailing of facts and figures could make her arguments much less accessible to a lay audience. In one instance, in response to what she termed a common question about the number of students who open enroll, Herdrich explained the budget process at a public hearing like this:

We based the budget on the qualified economic offer that was set by state law as a 3.8% increase in total package of salary and benefits for staff. State law has changed. Now they actually require us to go into binding arbitration, but that is one of the fundamental promises to set, um, the budget parameters for this year. The net general fund spending is an increase of 3.7% based on those parameters that were set. The state aid equalization cut was 2.4 million dollars.

With more than 300 community members present, Herdrich offered a very technical, data-driven answer, assuming that the parents and taxpayers present would understand terms like “qualified economic offer,” “binding arbitration,” “state aid equalization.” Although her descriptions of the process were precise, her presentational style did little to explicate the budgeting challenges and needs of the district to those present.

Recognizing the district’s previous failures to explain adequately and clearly the fiscal nuances of the West Bend district to the community, board members specifically advised Herdrich to adapt her style and explain budget needs in terms that the average person could better understand. At a board work session, board member Kris Beaver explained to Herdrich,

when you show this to people that says “other objects,” they don’t get that. . . . We need to make that very, very plain to people because, that’s what frankly, that’s what we get beat up on out in the public.

Herdrich responded that she understood, but other board members continued to protest that her explanations would only be accessible to a businessperson and that “we’re trying to get it in common language” and “under some simpler form.” Although others recognized the need for Herdrich to rethink her presentational style, she continued to employ technical language and formal evidence extensively. Serving a fiscally conservative community, West Bend officials continue to struggle to explain their fiscal concerns to a public hostile to tax increases.

Audience

Audiences play a key role in the circulation and function of research evidence by interpreting and ascribing meaning to the arguments and evidence they encounter. The same research reference may mean something different to an audience of local homeowners versus an audience of district teachers. In these cases, audiences appear as physical entities who may make judgments about board deliberations and district policies. Yet audiences enter into the deliberative process in another way—in the perceptions of board members and district staff. In this sense, advocates in district meetings anticipate audience responses, which, in turn, informs their deliberations.

With respect to audience composition, Goodnight identifies “authorities” as a crucial factor in distinguishing among technical and public spheres of argument. As noted above, a technical sphere of argument invokes a body of experts relying on commonly recognized procedures, whereas a public sphere exhibits greater fluidity in its operation. In other words, a technical sphere invokes a comparatively homogeneous audience while a public sphere implicates a heterogeneous audience. Since its members share background knowledge, a more homogeneous audience permits advocates to use more specialized forms of evidence—both research- and non-research-based. With respect to the former, a more homogeneous audience reduces an advocate’s need to make extended references to specialized research more accessible. In Elmbrook, for instance, a research team conducting a self-study of enrollment trends reported its findings to a district committee. The research team based its projections on birth rates, student transfers, and competition with private schools. Forecasting enrollment trends, team members outlined multiple scenarios based on different assumptions about their three analytic factors. Their report produced a detailed and dense discussion that relied almost exclusively on research and data. Had the research team adopted this approach before a more heterogeneous audience comprised of board members, district staff, and community members, they likely would have encountered the same resistance directed toward Herdrich’s technocratic style.

As audience diversity increases, so, too, do the potential meanings ascribed to the arguments and evidence circulating in school board deliberations. Diverse audiences also generate additional challenges for school board members and district staff, who must negotiate potential conflicts between policy issues and value differences among audience members. In our study, both West Bend and Beloit held a series of meetings about proposals to increase tax levies, yet each district faced a decidedly different community response. The proposal in West Bend generated considerable controversy, eventually contributing to the election of two new board members who ran on fiscally conservative platforms. In contrast, discussions of increasing the tax levy in Beloit generated little negative response. An important difference between the two districts was that proposals to increase the tax levy received widespread community attention in West Bend and comparatively little attention in Beloit. One explanation for this difference may have been the amount of the initially proposed increases: the West Bend school board, perhaps misjudging the self-perceived financial well-being of its largely middle-class constituency, originally proposed a 12% increase, while the Beloit board, expressing concern about the high unemployment and foreclosure rate experienced by its largely working-class community, considered an increase of less than 6%. Local media also played a role in drawing community attention to the West Bend proposal. Milwaukee drive-time radio and a number of local blogs focused attention on the West Bend tax levy. In fact, West Bend has a history of bloggers who have been highly critical of the district and some have written personal attacks directed toward the superintendent. Spurred by local media, more than 500 community members turned out to the annual meeting where the board initially proposed the 12% increase, and many of these audience members expressed vocal opposition—including booing and jeering—to the board’s proposal.

For these reasons, the Beloit board was able to consider increasing the district tax levy in the comparatively homogeneous technical sphere, while the West Bend had to address a diverse—and angry—audience. The Beloit school board and staff possessed a shared knowledge base about the district’s resources and needs, developed through extensive consideration of financial issues, that could not be assumed by advocates in West Bend, since attendees at the annual meeting and other discussions of the tax levy may have only learned about the issue through a brief report in the news media or conversations among neighbors. In this way, advocates in West Bend faced a more difficult challenge, having to translate comparatively esoteric details as they engaged an audience that most likely did not appreciate the complexity of the financial situation or undertake sustained conversations about district finances.

Although they operated with a shared understanding of the district’s needs, advocates in Beloit did not assume that the community would support the school district at all costs. The board and staff recognized that the Beloit city council made budget adjustments in response to the extreme financial circumstances experienced in the fall of 2009 and used this information to think about possible actions for budget cutting in the school district. One action that they considered and successfully pursued was renegotiating the teachers’ contract, an action that underscored the school board’s recognition of the community’s economic concerns.

School board perceptions of the community as audience—importantly, whether the board perceives the audience as cooperative or adversarial—may influence the use of research evidence. While Beloit did not experience community controversy over the tax levy, it has experienced negative community responses over past district policies, which long-tenured board members have shared with other meeting participants. For example, during a conversation about changes to the sex education curriculum, some board members reminded the group of the potential for conflict around changing the Human Growth and Development curriculum. One board member commented,

The Human Growth and Development controversy, the last time it happened, before most of us were on the school board, most of us weren’t participants in it. Some of us were. I was a horrified bystander. I was not a participant. I don’t have an ax to grind. But it tore this community apart. Scars still exist. I know people that to this day, aren’t speaking to each other because of things that were said and that happened at that time. I don’t want to see that happen again. I think that if we just do the HG&D Curriculum, that it’s a onetime shot in the high school health class.

As the group began discussion of changes to the HGD curriculum, some board members exhibited caution, having lived through this highly controversial previous experience. This may explain, too, efforts to seek out key constituents on the potentially controversial proposal, initiated by Superintendent Thompson, to change the district’s grading policy. The Beloit board and teachers’ union engaged in a long conversation about the grading policy and recognized common areas of concern. In fact, at one point, a teacher representing the teachers’ union said, “We appreciate the discussion, quite honestly.” Thompson recognized the concerns raised by both board members and teacher union representatives, often commenting that they were asking great questions. In these ways, neither Thompson nor the board presented the policy as a fait accompli.

In contrast, the West Bend school board and administration tended to perceive the community as potentially hostile, adopting a defensive posture in advocating their policy proposals. Anticipating a need to defend itself against community criticism, both the board and superintendent adopted an image of community members as uninformed. Rather than seeing the community concerns as legitimate and community members as potential collaborators, advocates in West Bend appeared to lack full understanding of and respect for community members. At a public hearing preceding the annual meeting, Herdrich listed a number of data points to justify the levy increase: the district spent the lowest per pupil in the region and among the lowest in the state; the district’s property tax mill rate was the second lowest among comparable systems; the district per-pupil administrative spending was the fourth lowest in the state, and the district had the seventh lowest number of administrators per pupil; the district spent the 14th lowest in staff wages and benefits in the comparable set of districts; and more. During the annual meeting, Herdrich cited a study completed by the University of Wisconsin detailing the economic benefits of the school district to the local community. However, in both cases, as citizens in attendance asked questions, Herdrich and board president Joe Carlson did not engage these questions substantively, sticking to their main themes that the district is frugal and it could take only a limited number of actions to redress finances because of state statues or contract limitations.

Neither Herdrich, Carlson, nor any other board member publicly recognized as legitimate the concerns of community members opposed to the tax levy until nearly a month later at a meeting to finalize a levy increase of 10.9%. Although Carlson did note a lot of passion around the issue, no one in the district leadership expressed public understanding of a connection between the tax levy and the difficult financial times people in the community might be facing as the country experienced an enormous financial crisis. Finally, at an October, 2009, meeting, Carlson admitted that

We understand where you are in the community. I’ve got friends who are laid off, I have parents who are on fixed income, I have lots of similar situations in our family, you know, and I think as school board members all of us can tell those same stories. So we understand the pain the community is going through.

The boards’ delayed recognition of economic hardship in West Bend may have contributed to its loss of legitimacy among some audience members. Delay may have cast the board and administrators as ignorant of the potential impact of the tax levy on household finances, which may have raised doubts about the board’s ability to allocate authoritatively valued goods such as community finances (Easton, 1965, p. 96). Perhaps if this recognition had been publicly expressed earlier, it may have diffused some of the negative responses of community members, creating a more collaborative, trusting environment that would have made the audience more receptive to considering the research and data presented by board members and administrators.

Context

Context is potentially the trickiest of our analytic factors, since it is potentially all-inclusive, implicating considerations ranging from historical developments and societal factors to particular aspects of a deliberative situation. While we are concerned with larger trends, especially national policy developments like NCLB, our focus is on the contexts of decision making faced by the school boards in our study. These considerations include the norms and procedures that guide their deliberations, interactions between national and local levels of policy making, meeting structures, access to information, and local values.

Goodnight’s reference to “grounds” as a distinguishing feature of argument spheres broaches the norms and procedures of school board deliberations. In any technical sphere, regular participants operate according to explicitly and implicitly established rules and procedures. Medical researchers share a sense of an appropriate clinical trial; judges and attorneys agree that people charged with crimes are presumed innocent; social scientists concur that a well-selected sample may be used to study a population; and so on. In important respects, the deliberations occurring in these spheres depend on this background agreement—without consensus about what constitutes a clinical trial, for example, physicians would lose confidence in the safety of the drugs they prescribe. The difficulty for school boards is that—in addition to the diverse audiences they engage—no such agreement guides their deliberative procedures. Standards may vary from issue to issue and, even on a single issue, from participant to participant. Diverse advocates and audiences bring with them diverse standards of judgment for deliberation.

The diversity of school board deliberations stands in contrast to the uniformity implied by NCLB in terms of research evidence. As noted above, NCLB forwards a particular definition of research that invites some approaches and discourages others. NCLB also presumes that research evidence may remove, or at least neutralize, values from the policy-making process. NCLB orients both educational practitioners and board members toward an emphasis on uniform standards, accountability through benchmarks and testing, and data-driven analysis. In so doing, NCLB not only defines the nature of educational problems but also prescribes their treatment. In effect, NCLB misrecognizes the context of local educational policy making by implying that school boards and other policy bodies may function as sites of application for technically produced research. However, as hybrid spaces, school boards cannot simply transfer the norms and procedures from a technical realm to a local district; they must balance technical and public concerns. National mandates for scientifically based research, then, become meaningful in local communities in various ways.

The structure of the school board meetings themselves also shapes the contexts of decision making. The formal structure of the meeting helps determine who talks, in what capacity they talk, what topics can be addressed, and when and for how long people can talk. To be sure, the tightly structured nature of board meetings necessarily provides for a more efficient and orderly meeting. But that same structure also limits the amount of time that can be taken to speak, especially when public input is being given, and it purposefully manages how and when issues can be introduced in a meeting, which may dissuade people from making contributions (Tracy & Durfy, 2007). At the same time, many of the discussions in the meetings proceed extemporaneously, which belies the formal meeting structure, calling on advocates to rely on a general knowledge to support their arguments rather than the specifics often conveyed by research evidence.

Access to information shapes decision-making contexts as well. Unlike their federal and state counterparts, local policy makers do not have dedicated staffs to help them acquire and evaluate information that may be relevant to a policy debate. Our observations of board meetings, examination of supplementary materials, and knowledge of the districts’ organizational structure indicates that board members across all three districts rely on support staff and administrators as primary liaisons who bring relevant research to their meetings. In all three districts, staff and administrators prepare informational packets for each meeting for board members. The content of these packets is fairly consistent across the districts, comprised of reports, memos, financial documents, and messages from members of the community. When present, the research in these packets tends to consist of district-initiated studies and, less frequently, outside scholarship. In contrast, board members typically do not bring extensive prepared materials—whether consisting of research or other evidence types—to the meetings, relying instead on the commonly prepared packets. Board members and other meeting participants sometimes refer to the research reports contained in their packets. For instance, during a work session of the Elmbrook school board, President Thomas Gehl referred other members to a district self-study of potential class-scheduling changes “that is in the, uh, packet for tonight.” As indicated in the previous sections, board members, administrators, and others also cite research orally that is not contained in the prepared materials.

Using research may place extra burdens on board members, who often must balance their service with full-time employment and family pressures, since research is not as readily available as one’s experience or examples. Groups like the National Association of School Boards make available research on policy issues addressed by school districts across the United States, but we did not observe the use of these materials. It is not surprising, then, that administrators cited research nearly twice as often as board members (45 to 24 occurrences) during the meetings since they have prepared the meeting materials and their full-time responsibilities concern district policy.

Despite the prescriptions of NCLB, values help constitute contexts of decision making, informing the circulation and reception of research evidence. The connection between values and research evidence was highlighted in a West Bend debate in a curriculum subcommittee about whether the district should institute a 4K program. As we have explained, West Bend experienced a great deal of conflict over the board’s effort to increase the district’s tax levy, which resulted in a changed composition of the board, as two members were defeated in the spring 2010 elections and replaced with new members who perceived themselves as operating with a mandate to protect taxpayers from increased rates and expenses. The conflict over 4K mainly took place between two board members (this particular committee has 3 members): Dave Weigand—one of the new, fiscally conservative board members—who resisted the proposal and Kris Beaver—a long-serving board member and a teacher—who favored the proposal.

A range of different reasons were offered both for and against the proposal. According to Beaver, implementing a 4K program would help younger children, who faced a more competitive global environment, to get earlier access to a structured educational environment. Beaver argued that a 4K program would help bridge existing socioeconomic deficits in this largely middle-class district by allowing lower income families who could not afford to pay for a suitable preschool program to have earlier access to a quality education environment for their kids. Beaver repeatedly valued the “educational” benefits of 4K—helping children in the community justified the program’s cost. In contrast, Weigand placed a higher value on finances, expressing concern that a 4K program would shift the burden of preschool costs, which previously had been borne by the individual family, onto the community. In particular, he worried that parents who had previously carried this cost themselves would improperly take advantage of the free “preschool” education and pocket the extra income. Furthermore, Weigand voiced concern about taking children out of the home at too early an age. Whereas Beaver foregrounded the value of community obligation, Weigand emphasized the value of individual responsibility. As Beaver discerned benefits for young children in a structured educational setting, Weigand saw harm in this same environment. Indeed, Weigand noted the key role of values underlying their policy disagreement: “Well, here’s where I have a difference of opinion with Kris . . . . It’s just a worldview difference, probably.” In terms of values historically associated with school financing, emphasis on the community drew on the associated value of equity, while focusing on the individual invoked the value of choice (Stout et al., 1995, pp. 14-15).

Amidst this value conflict, both board members appealed to research evidence. In the first meeting on the 4K proposal, Weigand launched his criticism of the potential program by pointing to ambivalent findings in the “research” he had read, which, as he understood it, showed that because students leveled off in ability around third grade, the programs were ineffective. Jumping into the debate, Beaver questioned whether Weigand had properly understood the research. He argued instead that the research actually confirmed the efficacy of 4K—maintaining that although students’ skills eventually leveled off, they did so at a higher benchmark because of the earlier intervention offered by 4K. Both Weigand and Beaver appealed to research, but their appeals led them to different assessments of the potential efficacy of a 4K program.

Their references to research themselves constituted general references. Neither Weigand nor Beaver specifically cited research—both board members relied on their memory of research they had encountered. Consequently, neither board member made clear whether the research had addressed 4K or Head Start programs, or where they had encountered this research, as in, for example, an academic venue or a news media account. For these reasons, neither Weigand nor Beaver could engage the other’s research evidence and move toward a resolution of their differing interpretations of likely success or failure. Instead, each continued to reiterate their arguments and research evidence, with Weigand regarding “leveling off” as a sign of failure and Beaver seeing it as an indication of success. Yet even if Weigand and Beaver had referenced research specifically, their value differences and, in turn, policy disagreement likely would not have dissipated. Significantly, at the end of an extended round of debate over the proposal, Ted Neitzke, the West Bend curriculum adviser who actually presented the 4K proposal, made the following telling observation: “At the end of the day, you’re both going to be able to find studies that counter the other ones.” Neitzke’s comment recalls some of the complexities noted above, including the difficulty of making “research” speak with one voice when advocates set general references against each other. Moreover, one may ask whether relevant research can speak to the questions of value that become salient in these moments of disagreement, since research on 4K programs cannot answer the question of whether they should be implemented in difficult economic times.