Comment Educational Research:The Hardest Science of All

ence, possibly doing great harm to scholarship in education. An other-wise exemplary National Research Council report to help clarify the nature of educational science fails to emphasize the complexity of sci-entific work in education due to the power of contexts, the ubiquity of interactions, and the problem of decade by findings interactions. Discussion of these issues leads to the conclusion that educational science is unusually hard to do and that the government may not be serious about wanting evidence-based practices in education. Scientific Culture and Educational Research ” (this issue), as well as the National Research Council (NRC) report from which it draws, are important documents in the history of educational research. I commend the authors and panelists who shaped these reports, and I support their recommendations. But it is not clear to me that science means the same thing to all of us who pay it homage, nor do I think that the distinctions between educational science and other sciences have been well made in either report. There are implications associated with both thes