August 2024

Tell us a little bit about your year on Capitol Hill, the issues that you covered, your responsibilities.

I’ve spent the year working in Senator Tim Kaine’s office, who serves on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, and is a leader on education, childcare, and labor policy in the Senate. I worked on a broad range of education and labor issues, with a particular focus on teacher policy, childcare, workforce education, and student well-being, and met with inspiring constituents and organizations from statistical associations to Amazon factory workers and families with young children struggling to find childcare.  

What was the most valuable lesson that you learned from the experience? 

Legislative bodies are at the center of a big dynamic complicated American representative democracy, and legislative majorities (and super majorities), which can be issue specific and CAN cross traditional divisions, are very important to high-level change.  The work of building common ground on issues is hard but essential to addressing problems, and the division of leadership labor within (and outside) Congress by issue focus is a necessity, given the infinite complexity and diversity of issues a society of our scale faces. 

What should education researchers know about the factors that go into education and science policy decisions?

Communication and constituencies matter a lot. It doesn’t just matter that a policy will promote general notions of equity, justice, or efficiency, but it matters in a democracy that you can connect it to a group of (organized) people who will be impacted. Who will benefit from change? Who benefits from the status quo or who will be harmed by a shift in one direction or another? 

Based on your experience, what advice would you give to fellow education researchers about how to connect their work to policy and effectively share research and data with policy makers? 

I think there is an important role for the sort of collective or avant-garde understandings that form through researchers’ inter-group discourse, seeking rigorous proofs and exploring theories, and a lot of good ideas and understandings are born out of unintentional alchemy. But I do think more of us would benefit from listening more to people who are trying to solve problems, including policymakers, about what questions they need answers to.

How might this experience shape your future research and career decisions?

I now think about projects as divided into longer term and more immediate or actionable, and I try to work across that spectrum. But I also feel more now that what can be immediately beneficial or impactful is less predictable than we might think. Sometimes, it is the things you don’t see as particularly important that turn into something substantial. I think even more critically about using language in framing an issue to avoid alienating people. And I think about what doors to opportunity can be closed when we omit perspectives from our thinking, our framing, and our coalitions/communities.   

How can other education researchers benefit from opportunities such as the AERA Congressional Fellowship to engage in policy?

I think many education researchers would benefit from viewing themselves more as public servants connected to a broader democratic society that relies on us to contribute what we can to make policy work. Opportunities like the AERA Congressional Fellowship help our institutions benefit from what ed researchers have to give. But, beyond that opportunity to serve and be inspired by the folks working very hard to make government better, I believe these kinds of opportunities give ed researchers a chance to see the complexity of the relatively opaque process of policymaking, which does indeed rely a great deal on research.

Walker Swain is an associate professor in the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia. He previously worked as a middle school science teacher in Louisville, Ky., and received his doctorate in leadership and policy studies from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development. He is a co-founder of the Just Education Policy Institute for developing scholars and has published research in Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Journal, Economics of Education Review, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and Sociology of Education.