Forgive me if this isn't my most coherent blog entry... More than 20 sleepless hours after my alarm rang in Baltimore, I've arrived in my hotel room in San Diego following the first day of AERA, the world's largest gathering of education researchers. There are 1,500 sessions being offered this week with 12,000 participants. The agenda is so long -- 500 pages! -- that people here call it "the phone book."

It is a testament to the excellent speakers I heard today (through a program arranged for a dozen education reporters by the Hechinger Institute) that I did not even come close to dozing through a single one of their presentations.

The first speaker, Holly Yettick of University of Colorado at Boulder, gave me some food for thought about the studies we write about on this blog... A former education reporter herself for the late Rocky Mountain News (may it rest in peace), Yettick is doing her dissertation on how the media cover education research. Through a six-month study of articles in Education Week and yearlong study of the New York Times and Washington Post, she found that advocacy-oriented think tanks are more likely to get their research into print than universities, where work is peer-reviewed. Why? The advocacy groups have aggressive marketing for their studies, even if there is less quality control. Universities produce 14 times more education research than the think tanks but only find their studies in the media three times more often.

Lorrie Shepard, dean of the education school at Boulder, presented some fascinating research about the downside of teaching to standardized tests, where students could not interpret facts they'd memorized for exams when presented in a slightly different way. For example, they could convert Roman numerals to Arabic but not the other way around. She doesn't recommend getting rid of tests but says tests need to be more thoughtful, especially the state exams used for NCLB. She says the formative assessments used in many districts to imitate the state tests have been "hijacked" by commercial test publishers.

The Hechinger group had dinner with Linda Darling-Hammond, who says that Barack Obama is more committed to education than any president since LBJ and wants to make decisions based on evidence showing what works. She predicts he'll have a difficult political road ahead reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, but says this much is certain: Obama will give the law a new name. Any suggestions?