IT SOUNDS GOOD, SO WHY DOESN'T IT WORK? Joanne Jacobs exposes the dirty little secret behind education fads.

"Education is often degraded by the use of pseudoscience or weak science or anecdote in lieu of better methods," writes Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, research director for the U.S. Education Department, in a Chronicle of Higher Education story.

Academics in the American Education Research Association typically do "qualitative" and "ethnographic" research, notes the Chronicle. Like anthropologists, they describe what goes on in a classroom or at a school, but don't provide any data that makes it possible to figure out whether one approach works better than another.

"Fewer than 10 percent of AERA members are knowledgeable about randomized trials," Robert F. Boruch, a Penn education and statistics professor, tells the Chronicle. "And even fewer have actually worked on a randomized trial."

As a result, education professors have been frozen out of major new studies, often in favor of private research firms like Mathematica, which is evaluating software that claims to boost reading and math skills, and MDRC, which has specialized in job training and welfare reform. Labor economists, statisticians and psychologists have the skills to do controlled studies. For the most part, the education professors do not.

Of course, some are converting to rigorous research. It's where the money is. And plenty of academics really do want to know what works.

Perhaps if we knew what we were going to assess, we might get beyond the assessment of the obvious I so frequently grouse about on these pages. And perhaps the students that enroll at community colleges (hat tip: Milt's File) might actually be ready for community college. And perhaps more of our graduates would have the technical and scientific skills that would enable them to earn a middle-class living.