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Changing Federal Strategies for Supporting Educational Research, Development, and Statistics - September 1998
April 29, 1998
Ms. Eve M. Bither
Executive Director
National Educational Research
Policy and Priorities Board
80 F Street NW, Suite 100
Washington, DC 20208-7564
Dear Eve:
Thank you for inviting the national education research centers to offer their perspective about federal strategies for support of education research and improvement. As you know, the Organization of Research Centers (ORC) was organized in 1986 in order to promote communication and cooperation among the centers. ORC is affiliated with the American Educational Research Association. While it is fully appropriate for any center to take its own position on federal research policy issues, I am writing to you as chair of ORC and my comments have been reviewed and approved by all ORC members.
We understand that the members of the OERI Policy Board have received a draft document on the subject of federal strategies for support of education research and development authored by Professor Maris Vinovskis. He offers a wide-ranging essay which includes opinions on many topics well beyond the ORC purview. It is unclear if, in selecting the term "Changing" for his title, Professor Vinovskis sees to describe changes that have occurred in federal strategies for supporting educational research, or if he is an advocate for specific changes which should occur. For the most part, the draft document offers descriptive statements implying strongly that change is required, but little direction about specific changes to be sought in a reauthorization
When one gathers together the various comments about national research centers scattered throughout the draft document, one might conclude that: (1) support for centers and labs has had devastating consequences for the quality and quantity of knowledge produced within OERI; (2) too much of the money awarded research centers goes to overhead, administration, and dissemination; (3) the idea of one-time renewal grants for national research centers is "controversial"; (4) centers are too small; (research conducted within the national centers is too fragmented and oriented too much to short-term projects; (6) much of the research and development conducted in education is judged second-rate. If there are positive statements about the contribution of national research centers—other than those attributed to others—we fail to note them. In developing our response we have held up for examination the central observations about national research centers, provided our perspective about each, and offered some suggestions for the OERI Policy Board to consider with regard to authorization.
Investment in Centers and Labs
The OERI Policy Board has been consistently concerned about the size and shape of the OERI research and development portfolio. It is clearly the case that relatively little of the OERI total budget supports core R&D activities, and that most of these funds presently are devoted to centers and labs. However, Professor Vinovskis is incorrect when he states:
When the Government Accounting Office (GAO) examined the extent and nature of the budget cuts for NIE, they documented the devastation brought about by the combination of overall budget cuts and the congressional protection of labs and centers.
The GAO report illustrates that there were budget cuts and that centers and labs were cut less than others because of congressional mandates, but nowhere in the report do they state or infer that congressional protection of the centers and labs restricted the total production of information. Board members might wish to review for themselves the citation (p.21 of the GAO report) provided in support of this statement. Another perspective on the congressional mandates (e.g., such as the minimum size of a research center or the percentage of an institute budget that must be allocated to centers) is that these protections are all that kept the federal education R&D program alive during difficult times, such as the Reagan administration, as chronicled by Professor Vinovskis. The GAO report states:
Although all information-gathering activities were affected by budget constraints, congressionally mandated activities received smaller reductions and thereby consumed an increasing share of available resources. Activities that were not required by law were vulnerable to changes in priorities, funding, and policies. . .
Education research support requires a base in the political system. This simple observation explains why for years there was virtually no money for field-initiated research while the labs and centers were able to survive, albeit with reduced funding. The goal of the OERI Policy Board should be to help establish a broader political base for all education R&D programs in its portfolio, perhaps by building on the platform offered by the centers and labs.
Most importantly, while a historical view can be helpful in gaining perspective, it must be recalled that the GAO report was prepared to offer advice for the very authorization under which centers are now operating. If the institutes achieved the appropriation authorized at the present time, national research centers would represent only one-third of their portfolio. The problem is not that the center budgets are too large—they in fact represent less money now than in FY94—but that the institute budgets have not begun to achieve funding to their authorization levels. We believe the OERI Policy Board should support the present authorization language regarding centers and should press for changes to gain a more satisfactory appropriation for OERI’s R&D programs. ORC members will continue to help in this effort.
(There is another large issue facing the OERI Policy Board—the proportion of funds in ORAD relative to funds in the institutes. ORC members will be willing to help think through these issues with the Board or with OERI staff, but this topic is beyond the scope of our present statement).
Proportion of Funds Devoted to Research
We are aware of no basis, other than his own observations which were made prior to the award of all but one of the current centers, for Professor Vinovskis’s comment that the amount of center funds spent on research is "surprisingly modest," with a large amount going to overhead, administrative costs, and dissemination. The three elements represent very different phenomena and must be understood as such to understand center operations. "Overhead" typically represents the "indirect research costs" which are assessed by the universities in accordance with a rate established in negotiation with the federal government. Neither the center directors nor OERI have any control over this rate. "Administration" or governance is proportionately higher in smaller centers. Certain governance tasks must be performed in any accountable and effective organization; in large centers the relative share of funds devoted to administration is less than in small centers. Regarding dissemination, most centers have been encouraged—through RFP’s and agency admonitions—to disseminate aggressively, and all research supporters would agree that dissemination is key to maintaining a useful and visible enterprise.
We recommend that the OERI Policy Board seek to achieve funding at the upper end of the scale of current centers, discouraging the creation of smaller centers in favor of other research vehicles such as Broad Agency Awards or special projects. Such a funding strategy will do much to assure that relatively more of the award is devoted to direct research activities. In addition, we commend the Board for its ongoing efforts to deal constructively and creatively with dissemination issues within OERI. We urge caution with regard to generalizations about how to achieve effective dissemination within a complex agency. For some centers, dissemination is a central component of their R&D strategy, while for others it is less central; but for OERI overall, dissemination is critical. We recommend that the Board adopt a backward mapping approach to thinking about dissemination: who is to receive what research information should be the first question, followed by implementation and structural questions.
Center Grant Renewal Opportunity
Having just met with Acting Assistant Secretary Ricky Takai, we do not understand why Professor Vinovskis believes the notion of one-time renewal of center awards is controversial. It is different. It will cause new thinking within the centers and the agency. But controversial? It was the considered judgment of those seeking improved federal research capacity in education to support longer award periods as are routinely provided to research centers in NSF. The primary advantage of longer award periods, of course, is to permit development of sustained research on important problems, and to facilitate development of an appropriate infrastructure. A most immediate advantage of a 10-year grant is that it would minimize both the start-up and wind-down time of a national center’s activity. The compromise Congress was willing to accept was to hold the initial award period to 5 years but to permit one-time renewals of the grant. It was not a controversial decision within the Congress. It should be noted also that ORC has fought for competitive awards and peer review throughout its history and has not sought to "save" centers that lost out in competition.
We recommend that the OERI Policy Board explicitly support either grant renewal or longer terms for centers along the lines now proposed. As long as the center is doing good work and as long as its mission continues to represent a national priority, it should receive a one-time grant renewal.
Center Size
We agree with Professor Vinovskis and other that centers funded at the lower end of the present funding range have a difficult time fulfilling the expectations for national research centers. The minimum size of centers now provided in the OERI authorization is $1.5 million. At the time of the authorization this represented a relatively substantial center and, most importantly, provided a safeguard against a return to the days of the "mini-center" of $400,000 for 3 years. We recommend that the OERI Policy Board seek to raise the center minimum to $2.5 million for any new centers in the next authorization.
The Coherence of Center Research
Professor Vinovskis observes, without documentation, that "a persistent complaint about educational research and development is that it is fragmented and oriented too much toward short term projects." The problem is real. However, recommendations to improve the situation require that one is clear about (1) who is making the complaint; (2) which part of the research community they are viewing; and (3) in what time period they are operating.
Policy makers and school-based educators are seldom worried about short-term or fragmented research. They are addicted to it and their decisions encourage it. What they want most from research are answers to the questions before them at a given historical moment. Actually, the few persons concerned about fragmentation are established researchers. Their concern is not to achieve some arbitrary standard of "centrality" or "length of project," but simply to achieve quality research. It is difficult to build a knowledge base from the small-scale, often inadequately conceptualized studies that comprise much of the research literature.
However, "fragmented and "short-term" are not pejorative terms to use with regard to the majority of field-initiated studies, doctoral dissertations, and congressionally-mandated efforts. Such studies serve many useful purposes, and they can often be folded in with other studies to increase knowledge. But a field based only on dissertations and field-initiated studies would lack coherence and would be fragmented. Indeed, it was in response to the fragmented character of field-initiated studies that led to the formation of centers and laboratories in the first place.
By definition, national education research centers should be places where a coherent research agenda is underway. We believe this is the case, and note that Professor Vinovskis bases his allegation about the fragmentation of center work on his brief experiences in looking at centers prior to the creation of most current centers, with frequent references dating back to the experiences of NIE. ORC agrees that coherence should be a question always before the centers and OERI staff. We recommend that the OERI Policy Board assign one of its committees the task of reviewing the issue of coherence within institutes and centers. We believe they will be pleasantly surprised at the diligence and creativity of the national research centers in shaping their programs in ways to further coherence. We recommend also that the Board examine the relationships of FIS projects to the centers and to the institute missions. We believe that information mechanisms can be greatly improved and that center research and FIS research can be mutually supportive.
The Quality of Education Research
The charge that the quality of research undertaken by educators is second-rate is as troubling to OERI Policy Board members as to center directors. Among the reasons for this common problem is unfounded arrogance on the part of some who disdain education research, a culture of poverty in the funding and conduct of research, and the fact that there are generally no standards permitting the public to distinguish between a novice dissertation or a senior scholar’s life work. This is why ORC believes the performance standards called for in the authorization, and being developed by the Board, are so important. It is also why we believe that longer term funding to achieve coherent research agendas is a necessary condition for solid center research.
Those of us who work closely with NSF and NIH understand that there are inconsistencies in the quality of research conducted in those agencies as well. Moreover, we believe that the center research will be quality-competitive with that of, say, programs in the NSF Directorate on Education and Human Resources. But we cannot afford to permit policy makers to believe that education research is second rate; the OERI Policy Board must take a leadership role in making this case. We have several recommendations. First, the Board should support the suggestion made by Professor Vinovskis that efforts be undertaken within OERI to rely on quality assurance systems developed by grantees. Specifically, the Board might devote some time at one of its meetings to learn of the quality review procedures developed by the centers. Second, the Board should support the numerous efforts underway to develop research-based synthesis documents and to have these disseminated as OERI’s primary product, precluding having policy makers conclude that glossy documents associated with the Fund for the Improvement of Education are its only product. Third, the Board should promote the center and Field Initiated Studies (FIS) research that merit promotion, both within the administration and to the Congress.
We have necessarily offered a relatively narrow perspective about federal strategies that should be adopted to better support research and development. We recognize that the various component of OERI and the many challenges before OERI must be addressed in a comprehensive fashion. Center directors will look forward to working with the OERI Policy Board on these issues, as well as those which directly affect the centers.
Thank you again for this opportunity to share our perspective on the place on the national research centers in the federal education research system.
Sincerely,
Susan Fuhrman
Chair
Organization of Research Centers
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[Appendix C]