In what is perhaps a sign of the growing maturity of the field of school research, scholars from around the world yesterday announced plans to form the first World Education Research Association.

The 25 groups that make up the organization represent more 60,000 researchers from six continents. The member groups come from, among other nations, Australia, the U.K., Mexico, Pakistan, Japan, Singapore, Peru, Turkey, Germany, and, of course, the United States, which has the largest and possibly the oldest education research group in the world. And, unlike some other international scholarly groups, this one will include both specialty groups, such as the Spanish Society of Pedagogy, and groups like the Nordic Education Research Association, which represent regions of the world.

Felice J. Levine, AERA's executive director, is the interim secretary general for the

group and Ingrid Gogolin, an education professor from the University of Hamburg in
Germany, will be the interim president.

There are no plans now for publishing any academic journals or holding any world congresses on education research. (If you think AERA meetings are overwhelming, can you imagine what would it be like at a convention for this group?)

What the association does plan to do, however, is spark the formation of international working groups on particular topics, collaborate on issues of common interest, and synthesize findings from around the world, among other activities. A Web site is already up and running and the group's first meeting of organizational leaders is scheduled to take place next week in Vienna.

Levine says the collaboration was the idea of Eva L. Baker, who was AERA's president in 2006-07, and its development was two years in the making. The group's headquarters will be wherever the secretary general is, which, for now, is in Washington.

Photo of Felice J. Levine courtesy of WERA.

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The cover story this week in the conservative-leaning Weekly Standard is a lengthy, and mostly withering, portrait of the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting last month in San Diego.

In the piece, which was posted online today, writer Charlotte Allen describes her "zany" experiences as she visits a reception hosted by the association's Marxist special-interest group, searches in vain for sessions not colored by progressive ideology, and tags along after William C. Ayers, the former Weather Underground member turned education researcher. You'll recall that Ayers was the focus of a controversy during last year's presidential campaign over the extent of his ties to President Barack Obama. For more on Ayers and the AERA, see my post from the AERA research fest here.

It's not a pretty picture that she paints. Allen writes:

Attending an AERA convention can give you the impression that the best thing that could happen to American education might be to shut down education schools.

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Looking for more light reading? Try this: The American Educational Research Association

With a whopping 1,045 pages and 62 chapters, the book represents a massive undertaking and one that doesn't shy away from controversy. You can find research reviews here on the reading and math wars, efforts to reduce class sizes, collective bargaining agreements with teachers, charter schools and private school vouchers, home schooling, reducing achievement gaps, the use of randomized experiments, and so on. If researchers somewhere produced credible studies on it, it's in there.

The book is only the third handbook series produced by the Washington-based association. The first two focus on teaching and complementary research methods. And the policy handbook's creation reflects the burgeoning role of that line of work within the association and in the field at large.

"We just felt the time was right to organize and pull together a disparate body of work that makes the connection between policy research and practice and represents that work to the field," said Gary Sykes, the Michigan State University scholar who co-edited the book.

You can order the book from AERA here. If you never get around to reading it, the hardcover version, at $295 a pop, can also double as a very expensive doorstop.

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As predicted, the recession seems to have resulted in thinner crowds this week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. But it's not as lonely here as you might think.

By midweek, 13,450 conference-goers had registered for the the April 13-17 event — down from 16,000 for last year's meeting in New York City. But the truth is that organizers were already expecting a drop-off because of the meeting's location in San Diego. While San Diego is a lovely city, it doesn't have the heavy concentration of colleges, universities, and think tanks clustered around gateway cities like New York and Chicago.

Still, the midweek participation numbers suggest that the fall-off in attendance is beyond what the organizers had expected due to the West Coast venue. Nevertheless, those numbers still represent more than half of the Washington-based group's 25,000 members.

Felice J. Levine, the association's executive director, said the real test may come at next year's meeting in Denver. "We think that there are enough signs that 2009-10 will be a very difficult year on campuses and at other research-related sites that we can anticipate consequences for AERA," she said.

The association will know for sure as early as July. That's when researchers have to submit their proposals for scholarly presentations at the 2010 meeting.

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If this article in Friday's issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is correct, attendance is going to be down at next month's meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

The Washington-based group typically draws between 12,000 and 16,000 researchers to its yearly conventions. And this year's meeting is scheduled to take place April 13-17 in sunny San Diego, a not unattractive destination.

But the association is anticipating a dip in attendance because of the current economic climate. Budget constraints, in fact, have prompted some state university systems to limit convention travel to professors or other faculty members who are scheduled to present papers.

As Felice J. Levine, the association's executive director points out in the Chronicle piece, that's a hardship for graduate students and other young scholars who stand to benefit the most from the chance to network and learn from the senior scholars in their fields.

Empty hotel ballrooms or not, yours truly still plans to attend. Look for my blog posts from the convention every day that week. If the Starbuck's lines are going to be shorter this year, I should have plenty of time to write.

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