Randomized Design and the Myth of Certain Knowledge: Guinea Pig Narratives and Cultural Critique

Abstract

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) has explicitly promoted randomized research designs and implicitly promoted clinical trials as the only legitimate educational science. In doing so, the law seeks to remodel educational research in a medical mode. This article draws on the narrative of a human subject participating in a medical randomized experiment to raise questions about the extent to which such designs secure the goals NCLB claims they will: validity, rigor, replicability. In contrasting the narrative of science in NCLB and the narrative of science as told by human subjects, the author draws on de Certeau as well as Bowker and Star to make sense of the difference in structure of the narratives and to highlight the extent to which randomized designs are mythologized in the law and current debates over methodology.