Critical Issues: Writing for Rosie: How a journalist uses (and doesn't use) research

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