Educational researchers want to engage in, or with, research that matters--research that helps education institutions improve the academic and life outcomes of students. This essay is about whether education research matters for students. The author defines "death-bed impact" as the direct line between education research and student outcomes. The distinction between the impact that is really cared about versus the various ways that research impact is measured (for instance, many academics and researchers conceive of impact as the number of citations or the impact factor of the journal in which they publish) is an important distinction in this essay. The author describes the results of a survey of Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) members assessing the degree of their consensus on particular empirical findings, their assessment of how politics and research influence policy, and how the research and dissemination process might change so as to increase the likelihood that empirical evidence will influence decision making. Dan Goldhaber offers his thoughts, which are often unburdened by empirical evidence, about how education research and dissemination have changed recently, the role social media has played in these changes, and what he thinks it will take for research to matter more.