April 9, 2007 8:26AM # Where’s the “D”? By [Andrew J. Coulson](https://www.cato.org/people/andrew-coulson) --- SHARE Alexander Russo blogs today about [the disconnect in education between research and practice](http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/thisweekineducation/2007/04/see_you_at_aera.html). Mike Lieberman has done a good job explaining this disconnect in books like *Public Education: An Autopsy*. He points to the fact that, in other fields, there is a powerful market incentive for applied research. It’s R ***and D*,** not just R, and the only justification for the former is the latter. When you don’t have a market, you don’t have that systemic incentive for applied R&D. Instead, pedagogical methods are chosen for their ideological appeal (e.g. [whole language](http://www.riggsinst.org/Testimony.aspx)), by accident (the infamous California case where Nobel laureate in physics Richard Feynman revealed that several members of his textbook adoption committee [had actually rated a blank math textbook](http://whyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2006/08/richard-feynman-on-textbook-review.html)), or by conflict of interest (because there ARE incentives in our current school systems, they just aren’t market incentives that make it desirable to find and implement the best, most efficient methods). ##### Related Tags [Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).