I think I am starting to understand your point better – that this is not new – unfortunately in education it seems that the really good ideas that would require major change are often ignored and we choose band-aid solutions instead of really working at making a difference. People want proof that something will make a difference, but are rarely willing to invest the time and effort it takes to get evidence. It seems to me that educators usually don’t change until it is so apparent that they are actually behind the change. Most of the time this happens because we administrators don’t take the time to understand the change-makers in the classroom. Once we start supporting the teachers that are doing great things, and stop wavering on our ideals for those that don’t embrace change, educational reform might happen. We still aren’t doing things that Dewey unveiled to us nearly 100 years ago. What my point from the beginning was that schools need to invest time and money into investigating how to make these changes happen – to be proactive – rather than responsive.

I was pointing out that the process already exists within the framework of educational research design (action research is one example). Unfortunately, I don’t know your background well enough to predict what you know. One of the things that I am learning through my experiences in the edublogsphere, is that sometimes we think that we are reinventing the wheel, when educational theory abounds in these areas. If we want to raise the level of discussion from high school banter into educational reform, we need to keep existing theories in mind, in order to make breakthroughs into higher levels of discourse and new theories. But – what do I know, I’m just a teacher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_and_development

Then yes it is a form of Action Research that I feel also qualifes for R&D

If the goal in education is to help our students learn (better) and money we are spending isn’t going towards that goal (education’s profit)- how does that not qualify as R&D? Especially if you are using it to gather information to see if a resource might be able to help increase learning in the future?

Maybe I just don’t understand what you are qualifying as R&D…but I am interested in learning.

see Amazon

Anyhow, for what it’s worth, this was my initial reaction to the paper (before I even knew what I was supposed to do with it.