![[Table of Contents]](/icons/up.gif){kind=icon}
Changing Federal Strategies for Supporting Educational Research, Development, and Statistics - September 1998
May 14, 1998
Dr. Kenji Hakuta
Chair
National Educational Research
Policy and Priorities Board
80 F Street NW, Suite 100
Washington, DC 20208-7564
Dear Kenji:
We appreciate the Policy Board’s invitation to respond to Maris Vinovskis’ "Changing Federal Strategies for Supporting Educational Research, Development, and Statistics." Professor Vinovskis introduces many issues that are important not only for the OERI Policy Board but for all concerned with federal education R&D policy. We would expect members of the Policy Board to find the historical section of the paper especially informative, as this information is not often discussed.
The Government and Professional Liaison Committee (GPL) is a standing committee of the American Educational Research Association. Its members and staff have been concerned with the authorization, monitoring, and support of the federal research programs throughout the period discussed in the paper. Through the GPL Committee, AERA provided guidance for the creation of the National Institute of Education (NIE), for the reorganization of the research and statistics programs within the newly created Department of Education in 1981, and for the several authorizations of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), including the most recent one which created the Policy Board and the present institute structure. The GPL Committee has had an opportunity to discuss the draft document on several occasions and these views represent matters of consensus.
Staffing
There are three problems related to professional staff in OERI: (1) there are too few of them; (2) there are too few of them with strong research credentials and/or extensive experience in research grant management; (3) efforts at staff development have been sporadic and, on occasion, misdirected.
Numbers. Early in the Clinton administration, a high official proclaimed that there were so many staff at OERI that many did not have enough to do. Unfortunately, the reality is that OERI led the way for the downsizing of the Department of Education, and currently in both the research and development programs and in statistics is understaffed. Professor Vinovskis usefully has provided the hard numbers regarding staff reductions and the resulting research-management load on the remaining staff.
Experience. OERI, through its "successful" downsizing effort has provided almost an entire bureaucracy of senior staff to private consulting and professional association work in the Washington area. The "early out" process encouraged by the Clinton administration was effective in reducing the number of management personnel, but in the case of OERI, it has the dysfunctional aspect of an equally dramatic reduction in experience and expertise. Vinovskis laments the absence of "excepted service" positions; others recommend use of "rotators" as employed in the National Science Foundation. Some hope to add expertise through the addition of "fellows" or "visiting scholars," an effort AERA has supported by working with NCES to provide a very small program. While such steps are important, it must be observed that it was not possible to recruit senior scholars from outside the agency to fill the critical positions of institute directors, despite a Herculean effort by Sharon Robinson, who was then the assistant secretary. Recruitment is a serious problem for OERI.
Professional Development. In our view, only two of the past 8 assistant secretaries of acting assistant secretaries of OERI have considered the professional development needs of the agency. Others saw the OERI staff as either instruments or obstacles toward a particular end, or simply did not have time in office to think about such long-term problems. Among the indignities heaped on professional staff have been restricted travel to carry out their responsibilities, occasional public humiliation, and general lack of encouragement to become partners with the research and development community. Obviously, there are individuals who have managed to maintain active professional relationships even within a hostile environment, but organizations cannot be built on occasional professional successes. We believe that the Policy Board can do much by raising questions about staffing and professional development within the agency as an agenda item at its regular meetings, and including such information in its reports to Congress and the public.
Structure and Management
OERI is made less effective because: (1) there is presently no mandated structure for providing leadership among the institutes; (2) the ORAD tail often wags the OERI dog, and the directives from Congress to ORAD preclude coherent R&D agenda for OERI; (3) relationships among the Policy Board, Department, Assistant Secretary, NCES, ORD, and the Education Policy Evaluation Program (EPE) need to be clarified.
OERI. Eliminating the coordination role of the old "Director of Research" position appears to have been an oversight in development of the current legislation. Unless the assistant secretary for OERI provides strong leadership, it is clear that it is difficult for the individual institutes to coordinate their activities under the present structure, and it is not self-evident that this is an appropriate role for the assistant secretary to handle personally. This is a problem that should be fixed through authorization, most usefully in the context of other organization and management concerns. The Policy Board might address this problem in the reauthorization by recommending the appointment of a senior scholar to coordinate and motivate the institute directors. Such an individual would be appointed by and report to the assistant secretary.
Institutes, national research centers, regional laboratories, and field-initiated studies make up the bulk of the OERI research and development portfolio. Questions have been raised continuously about the relative mix of dollars appropriate to support each area. Some, including many AERA members, would have all research funds dedicated to field-initiated research, similar to the approach taken in NSF and NIH. It is good to remember, however, that the idea of national research centers was the solution to a previous problem—a fragmented research program built primarily around field-initiated studies. The institutes were intended to provide a productive mix of center, field-initiative, and agency sponsored research—a comprehensive portfolio—and might yet do so with adequate appropriations.
We believe it would be a mistake to call for a major overhaul of OERI. While we share the disappointment of most in the discrepancy between the federal program as envisioned by the Congress and as implemented so far, it is important to recall that progress has been made with regard to development of structures and procedures in a relatively short time. We favor keeping the institute structure (and the Policy Board) and keeping a mix of national research centers, laboratories, and field-initiated studies as core research activities. The existing legislative formula for funding these entities within the institutes would work, if only an adequate amount of money were provided. We understand concerns raised about the constraints and inflexibility of the present structure and the frustration this causes OERI staff. However, curtailing the political viable core research programs is the equivalent of trimming the tree beginning with the roots. The OERI Policy Board could address this problem by helping Congress and the administration understand more clearly the sources of the organizational problems encountered by the agency.
One characteristic of the success of NIH has been its ability to grow by addition of new institutes. The equation has been that new diseases or new treatments resulted in new institutes. This has not happened within OERI and there is presently no one responsible for proposing modification of the institute missions. For example, no one in the agency called for an institute on reading to match this new national commitment. Likewise, education technology should be the basis for an institute within OERI. In both instances resources have been provided without consideration of a structure necessary to work through these problems on a sustained basis. Of course, the administration’s OERI proposal for FY1999 totally ignores the capacity-building needs of the institutes.
ORAD. Professor Vinovskis implies that funds should be transferred from the school improvement portfolio to the R&D portfolio. However, it is not currently within the power of OERI or the Policy Board, or even the Secretary, to make such transfers, as Congress has stipulated the missions of most of the school improvement programs. The recent discussion with ORAD staff and Policy Board members during the January meeting of the Board was instructive on this point: ORAD has not requested any of the programs now existing within their portfolio; few, if any, of their programs are reasonably considered R&D programs. However, the difficulty cannot be resolved by fiat. What is needed is an assessment of the positive and negative consequences of the programs housed in ORAD and a recommended plan of action in one of two directions: (1) separate the research programs from the school improvement programs by moving one or the other to another agency or department; (2) accept the status quo and seek to maximize the benefits provided (e.g., congressional support, generally positive media attention, dedicated staff). This issue might well be central to the Policy Board’s discussion of reauthorization.
NCES. As is noted in the document, NCES represents a success story of sorts in having moved from a problematic agency to one that is gaining the respect and support of both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. Such progress certainly offers hope for OERI, but obscures the problem of coordination between NCES and OERI. There are excellent reasons for a statistics agency to have considerable autonomy in analysis and reporting of information. However, there are also excellent reasons to have coordination and collaboration among the research and statistics agendas within the U. S. Department of Education. Currently, such collaboration as exists is the result of the efforts of individuals within each agency, rather than from leadership of OERI.
Peer Review
Concern for peer review procedures appear throughout the authorizing legislation for OERI—much like marbled fat in a side of beef. We are encouraged that the Policy Board has supported an outside review of peer review procedures within OERI, and we look forward to working with the study panel on this important matter.
Peer review is a cardinal principle of research associations. While there are often difficulties associated with grant awards, OERI has had a more unfortunate history than most federal research agencies, and it is therefore more important for OERI to develop and implement exemplary procedures. One special difficulty for educators is to satisfy the often conflicting demands for relevance and for quality research. Frequently, the result is to establish a review panel of educators and parents to assess relevance and researchers to judge the quality of the proposed research. Such hybrid panels are not peer review panels.
As an applied field, it is essential that the relevance of education research be stated in terms of the problems of teachers, administrators, students, and policy makers. However, the drive to have professional educators engaged in every aspect of the research enterprise is misguided on two counts. First, while there clearly was a time when researchers resided in an ivory tower, that time is long past. Leading researchers in AERA work with educators to solve problems identified by educators. Second, one simply cannot evaluate methodological approaches to research on the basis of "general" expertise in the field of education.
We urge the Policy Board to consider a new distribution of responsibility in thinking of its research agenda and research award process. The research agenda of problems to be addressed should involve in a serious way the entire education public; the decision of how to accomplish research objectives that have been identified by this broad, representative education public should be made by peer reviewers. We recommend that the Policy Board work to separate decisions of research relevance to educators and policy makers from decisions of research appropriateness and quality.
Politics and Policy Making
It is important for Policy Board members to note that education research—and research in NIH and NSF and DOD—is fraught with politics from the initial creation of the agencies, through their annual appropriation, through congressional oversight, and even through determination of what research is to be conducted, how, by whom. We share the concerns raised by many about the negative consequences to OERI of perceived politicization through congressional interference, but this is only one political issue that should be of concern to the Policy Board.
Some recent examples of congressional influence on research agendas of other agencies might be helpful. One example was the failure of NIH to include women in studies of heart disease, a policy which changed only when there were a number of women in Congress. As a second example, the entire behavioral science directorate of NSF was threatened with elimination through the appropriation process just two years ago. Finally, while the leadership of the NSF wished to stay in the District of Columbia, the entire agency was moved to Virginia, home of the chair of the Senate appropriations panel responsible at the time for NSF. Every dimension of federal research programs is subject to political forces outside its control, and the problem is better viewed as one of managing the harmful aspects of such forces rather than eliminating them.
There are at least two dimensions of politics that must be of concern to the Policy Board as it exercises leadership on behalf of OERI and the nation’s education research capability: (1) relations with Congress; (2) relations with the Department. It is unfortunately the case that there are very few supporters of OERI in Congress and very many detractors. Candid visits with Hill staff suggest an "anywhere but there" attitude toward placing important research initiatives in OERI. These negative views stem from two sources: (1) the agency is often viewed as "merely" a support engine for the political agenda of the administration; (2) few know anything about OERI.
Professor Vinovskis mentions the adverse effect of OERI’s leadership on the testing issue, which has antagonized Republicans already skeptical of OERI. It is important to recall that the Bush administration’s reform agenda—America 2000—became the actual agenda of OERI, to the dismay of Democrats. Clearly the Policy Board has responsibility through its development of standards and a research priorities plan to serve as a buffer between the agency and the political agenda of both the Congress and the administration, Democratic or Republican. In addition, much repair work needs to be undertaken if OERI is to be regarded as a competent agency on the Hill. It suffers because it is in the Department of Education—recall the Department’s many fiascos with direct loans—but also because it has not demonstrated to skeptics that it has a coherent plan to conduct quality research. The OERI Policy Board, through its efforts to create and sustain a coherent research agenda, through its dedication to peer-based performance review, and through its outreach measures, can do much to improve this image.
The Policy Board needs to recognize that its mandate has not been honored by the Clinton administration. It has been expected to follow in the wake of the administration’s myriad reform initiatives, rather than to set direction for the research and development aspect of OERI. Last year the staff of OERI was required to provide support for the administration’s testing agenda. This year there will be a new administration agenda, and once again the Policy Board will be expected to acquiesce, and once again OERI will be expected to reorganize its priorities in support of the new agenda. The administration did not request increased funding for OERI’s research and development programs in FY 1999. It will not be possible for the Policy Board to set priorities for the R&D program until it changes its relationship with the administration.
Financial Resources
The amount of money available for research and development is a major barrier to the conduct of good research. The National Academy of Science report on OERI recommended great increases in research funding for all aspects of the portfolio, and neither the institutes, laboratories, or field-initiated research studies are within shouting distance of the recommended amounts. More recently the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) recommended hugely increased funding for education R&D. Most recently, in February, testifying before the Senate Education Task Force chaired by Senator Frist, Chris Whittle declared that we deprive schools of the greatest engine of change in American history, research and development. Whittle suggests that 3 percent of school expenditures should be invested in research.
While critics challenge OERI to respond quickly and effectively to emerging issues, there is very little money available for agency-initiated activities. It is not possible for any institute to achieve its full legislative mandate, or even a substantial portion of it, with the low level of funding that has been available since the authorization. The agency continues to try to respond to many diverse and constantly changing demands, but every aspect of the research activity—conceptual clarity, methodological soundness, evaluative monitoring, and reporting of results, suffers for want of resources.
We know you are aware of the problem, but still feel obligated to call attention to the duress and dysfunctions created through paltry funding of the institutes, especially as the present authorization levels have not been achieved. An important role you can serve in the reauthorization is to help make a strong case that much more could and should be accomplished through adequately funded education R&D.
We hope that the OERI Policy Board will be a major voice in the reauthorization of OERI. This will require not only that the Policy Board has a comprehensive plan addressing pervasive issues, but that it find a way to make its message heard within and without the Department. We hope the discussion of these will be helpful to the Policy Board in thinking through its reauthorization position and strategy.
We appreciate your leadership, and the strenuous effort the Policy Board has undertaken to provide a much stronger capacity for federal education research. It is important work and we hope you will call on us if we can be of additional help.
Sincerely,
William A. Firestone
Chair
Gerald E. Sroufe
Director
Government and Professional Liaison Committee
American Educational Research Association
-###-
[Appendix B]