Why include a chapter on research?  “Rather than compare the average performance of one set of schools, students, or methods against others, our approach is to examine the state of education through the lenses of (our) theories of innovation in order…to describe the process by which education research can become capable of predicting which innovations will improve our schools, which will not, and why?” 

Meredith Honig’s wrote about the deficiencies in education research in her book, New Directions in Education Policy Implementation: Confronting Complexity.  “(O)ptimistically, she says, we see that some policies get implemented and are ‘successful some of the places some of the time…The essential implementation question then becomes not simply what’s implementable and what works, but what s implementable and what works for whom,where,when and why.”

“Education research must move toward understanding what works from the perspective of individual students in different circumstances as opposed to what works best on average for groups of students or groups of schools.” 

This is a big deal.  This is as big a disruption in the field of education research as the innovations we have been discussing are to learning and schooling.