And instead of wasting any more energy debating whether she should be addressed as “Dr.,” let’s focus on what we can do to make teaching easier for teachers like her-and learning easier for students.Overview: Sometimes life deals you a very hard hand. She should be applauded for returning to teaching English at Northern Virginia Community College even after she becomes first lady. Rather than being derided for claiming an honorific she spent 15 years earning, Jill Biden should be celebrated for her dedication to some of our neediest students. Both of these assumptions are contradicted by scientific evidence. Relying on their training, teachers are likely to believe that teachers should avoid explicit instruction as much as possible, and that there’s no point in ensuring students learn facts when they can just Google them. In addition to devoting more attention to writing, she calls for a “study skills program” that might focus on things like test-taking and “finding the main idea.” But one reason so many college students arrive unprepared is the assumption in K-12 schools that these kinds of “skills” are what education should prioritize over specific knowledge. One of the recurring themes in Biden’s dissertation is that students arrive in college unprepared for college-level work.

If it were, it could make K-12 teachers’ jobs a lot easier-and Biden’s job as a community college English instructor easier as well. There’s surely a place for the kind of research reflected in Biden’s dissertation-case studies rather than large-scale experiments-but it’s distressing that education research, and teacher training in general, isn’t more grounded in science. Research professors at schools of education may be familiar with those findings, but the instructors who train teachers are generally unaware of them-and certainly aren’t incorporating them into their research. In recent decades, there have been significant advances in the science of learning, but prospective teachers don’t become acquainted with them during their training. It doesn’t help that schools of education are largely cut off from-and often scorned by-the rest of academia. Professors of education have been heard to dismiss the mountain of evidence in support of teaching phonics as “your science, not my science,” as though science were a belief system. Research in education has generally differed from that in other academic areas, partly because many professors of education have valued ideology as much as evidence-or sometimes more.

To Have It All by Jill Wexler