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Changing Federal Strategies for Supporting Educational Research, Development, and Statistics - September 1998
The federal government has been collecting, analyzing and disseminating educational statistics for more than 130 years. Over time the focus has shifted from data gathering to emphasis on research and development in order to find more effective ways of educating children at the state and local levels. In the 20th century, however, work on educational research and development usually has not been held in high esteem by most academics and policymakers.
Policymakers have often downplayed the value of supporting long-term research and development compared with providing immediate and direct assistance to local schools. When the sciences and other social sciences were called upon to increase their contributions during World War II, the Office of Education actually scaled back its support of educational research and development. On the other hand, as it became increasingly evident in the mid-1960s that we lacked adequate knowledge about how to improve the schooling of at-risk children, the Johnson Administration and the Congress called for more investments in long-term educational research and development.
The need for federal involvement in educational research, development, and statistics is even greater today. Analysts and policy makers are slowly and reluctantly acknowledging that many of the basic federal compensatory education programs established in the 1960s are not as effective as we had hoped. Large-scale, popular federal educational initiatives such as Title I and Head Start probably do offer some assistance for many disadvantaged students, but the early gains do not last; and the short-term successes which often make them appealing to the public and to legislators are not enough to help those in need. Many of these federal initiatives are really only general funding mechanisms rather than specific programs capable of helping children who live in more impoverished homes and neighborhoods to close the academic gap with their more fortunate counterparts. Nor do we possess sufficiently detailed and reliable statistical information about our schools to help educators formulate better policy alternatives. As a result, there is a growing awareness of the need for better educational research, development, and statistics before we can really improve education and schooling for everyone.
If there has been widespread agreement on the need for federal involvement in educational research, there has been less of a consensus on where that effort should be located within the bureaucracy. Mid-nineteenth-century educational reformers wanted a separate cabinet-level department of education to signal the importance of a federal role in schooling. Congress did establish a separate Bureau of Education, but deliberately restricted its responsibilities in practice to gathering, analyzing, and distributing data on schooling. In the process the Congress seemingly emphasized the importance and bureaucratic autonomy of the federal government's statistical and research activities.
As the Bureau of Education acquired new responsibilities in the early 20th century, the statistical and research activities gradually received less internal attention and support. Indeed, calls for enhancing federal involvement in education often justified themselves by citing the importance of gathering educational data; but once the broader federal involvement was attained, the statistical activities in practice were usually downplayed.
As the Office of Education grew rapidly in the 1960s, there was a growing fear that the statistical and research functions of the agency were being neglected and mismanaged. As a result, a separate National Institute of Education was created to provide more visibility and coherence for educational research in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, strong congressional hostility to NIE in general and to one of its early directors in particular prevented the agency from fully capitalizing on the benefits of its new independent status.
When the U.S. Department of Education was created at the end of the 1970s, NIE was placed into a new Office of Educational Research and Improvement and lost much of its previous autonomy and visibility. The OERI reorganization in 1985 further diminished the role of researchers and scholars within the agency as the remnants of NIE became even further submerged within the larger organization. Starting in FY 1989 the transfer of many new, but less research-oriented programs to OERI meant that the overall budget and focus of the agency shifted still further away from the original NIE concentration on research and development. Despite major increases in OERI funding and staffing during the Bush Administration, Diane Ravitch was correct to lament the lack of first-rate researchers in the agency. And the loss of 25 percent of the OERI staff in the past 4 years has only exacerbated the situation.
Given OERI's limited research and development capabilities and disappointing achievements, perhaps it is time to reconsider the organizational location of the agency. Should OERI and its rapidly increasing number of programs be maintained as they currently exist? Congress has strongly recommended that U.S. Department of Education should consolidate even more of its research and evaluation functions into OERI. Is this a good idea and if it were to be done, will the appropriate staff positions and funds be transferred as well? Should OERI concentrate its attention on research, development, and statistics by shedding some of its recently acquired, but less research-related program activities? Or should the more research-oriented components of OERI be merged with some other federal agency such as the National Science Foundation and the more statistically-oriented parts incorporated into another unit such as the Bureau of the Census? Naturally, there is no easy or ideal answer to this difficult but fundamental question. Yet by asking it, we may encourage policymakers in Congress and administrators in the Department to clarifying OERI's future mission and direction.
The lack of adequate federal support for research, development, and statistics has been repeatedly criticized by educators and researchers. Given the unusually broad and ambitious agenda expected of NIE/OERI, this is a legitimate complaint. Much more money has been available for research and development in medicine and science than in education. Even compared with the other behavioral and social sciences, funding for educational research and development has trailed badly.
Most educators and policymakers do not have a high regard for educational research and development. Many of them think that we already know what needs to be done to improve schooling. If anything, they feel that we should simply expand the dissemination of the results from our "treasure chest" of earlier work. Others are more supportive of the need for additional research and development, but have a low opinion of the quality and relevance of much of the previous work. This lack of enthusiasm for research and development is compounded by the fact that even many sympathetic educators and policy makers have considerable difficulty in citing examples of past successes despite three decades of effort in this area.
The problem of limited funding is exacerbated by a lack of focus and commitment to long-term research and development. Members of Congress and educators attacked first NIE and now OERI for a lack of relevance in the educational research and development being produced; they forced the agency to devote such a large percentage of its scarce resources to dissemination that too little was left for serious research and development. Yet the increasing attention to dissemination in the late 1970s and early 1980s was not sufficient to protect NIE/OERI from the unusually severe reductions in the agency's funding during the Reagan years. As a result the function of OERI often has defaulted to distributing information about plausible, but poorly researched and largely untested ideas and practices.
While monies available for research, development, and statistics have been limited, Congress has also hampered the ability of NIE or OERI to spend it efficiently and effectively. Rather than allowing the agency to decide how to distribute its resources to achieve the general goals set forth by the legislators, a few members of Congress allied with some of the largest beneficiaries of those federal contracts, have since the mid-1970s increasingly mandated how federal educational research and development funds must be spent. While Congress certainly has the responsibility to set the general policy goals for federal research and development activities, some of their efforts to micromanage NIE/OERI have been counterproductive for the nation as a whole - especially since Congress has not been able to undertake the type or quality of oversight of these activities commensurate with its more specific legislative intrusions. Particularly problematic is the all too frequent practice of inserting into congressional report language, at the last moment, major policy directives which have not been given adequate consideration through the regular authorization and appropriations process.
As Congress and OERI prepare for reauthorization, the distribution of monies allocated for research, development, statistics, dissemination, and other activities should be reviewed. How much money is needed to achieve the projected needs and priorities of the office for the next 5 or 10 years? Do we have the optimal division of expenditures in OERI given those future objectives? And within each of these subcategories of expenditures, are we investing in the best mechanisms for achieving our objectives? For instance, how much of our dissemination monies should be spent on ERIC compared with alternative ways of reaching educators and policymakers? What proportion of the expenditure of NIE/OERI monies have been congressionally mandated, and what have been the advantages and disadvantages of that approach? Has the earmarking of funds for labs and centers by Congress during the past two decades been the best way of distributing and using those monies? Should such designations continue in the future, or are there more flexible and more effective ways of achieving the same overall congressional goals?
A persistent complaint about educational research and development is that it is fragmented and oriented too much toward short-term projects. Educators and policymakers usually want answers to a larger number of research questions than can be addressed, given such limited funding. Rapid changes in leadership at NIE and OERI have also contributed to the episodic and impermanent nature of much of the work of the agency. While numerous long-term research and development plans have been drawn up, few have survived more than 1 or 2 years and even those have not provided adequate guidance and direction. Since their inception 20 years ago NIE and OERI have simply never been able to create a useful short list of research and development priorities and then to stick to it for any length of time. And the most recent OERI research priorities do not provide the detailed and focused direction that is essential for guiding future work in this field.
The centers and the labs established in the mid-1960s were supposed to focus on a few long-term educational research and development problems. Unfortunately, none of the labs or centers succeeded in doing this because of inadequate overall funding and support of too many short-term projects. Educators and policymakers gambled by creating too many small centers and labs in the mistaken belief that additional monies soon would be provided so that these institutions could be properly enlarged. Efforts to fund long-term, large-scale curriculum development projects were discouraged in the mid-1970s first by Congress and then by NIE. Responding to internal and external pressures, each of the labs and centers usually funded 20 to 40 small, short-term projects which all too frequently did not fit together into a coherent and sustained research and development program.
Given the poor return from the policy of funding numerous small, unrelated projects, Congress and OERI should reexamine their strategies for encouraging long-term research and development. How much has the fragmentation of research and development in NIE and OERI hindered the ability of those agencies to make a more lasting impact on educational practice? What portion of lab and center activities should focus on larger, long-term research and development goals? Why are the calls heard during reauthorizations for more integrated, long-term projects by the labs and centers met with disparate, small-scale projects being the ones actually funded? Are there ways of improving the coordination and long-term planning in other areas such as field-initiated grants?
For a long time, questions have been raised about what types of educational research and development should be funded by the federal government. There has been a major shift from historical and philosophical studies undertaken in the late 19th century to the behavioral and social science investigations of the 20th century. While most educators and policymakers welcomed this change, some individuals in the early 1980s challenged the increasingly exclusive use of the behavioral and social sciences. The debate today focuses more on the relative benefits of using quantitative or qualitative methods as well as on the benefits of doing case studies rather than large-scale systematic investigations.
Much of the research and development produced by educational scholars is often regarded by academics in the other behavioral and social science disciplines as methodologically and conceptually second-rate. The low opinion of the quality of much of educational research and development is frequently shared by policymakers who consider the work sponsored by NSF or NIH generally to be more rigorous and scientifically sound than that produced by OERI.
Despite recurrent questions about the quality of educational research and development, NIE and OERI have done little to assess the work of their grantees and contractors. The groups and panels reviewing the labs and centers in the 1970s, for example, did not investigate the quality of their work. Nor did the recent National Academy of Sciences study of OERI consider the quality of the products produced by the agency or its funding recipients. A review of the statistical work done by NCES in the mid-1980s raised serious questions about its quality - while the examination of the subsequent work produced by NCES suggests that their more recent products are more reliable and rigorous. The evaluation of the quality of the research and development work produced by the centers and the labs in the early 1990s painted a mixed, but, overall, a rather disappointing picture of the conceptual and technical soundness of much of their work. Unfortunately, the most recent study by Policy Studies Associates did not include a systematic analysis of the scientific quality of their work.
More attention needs to be paid to the types and quality of studies being supported by OERI to ensure that federal research and development monies are being well spent. Have we focused too much on contemporary problems using a behavioral and social science approach without adequate attention to historical and philosophical analyses? How should quantitative and qualitative methods be used in educational research and development? What is the proper role of case studies and for large-scale investigations? How good are the OERI-funded studies conceptually and technically? What can be done to enhance the quality of the work in educational research, development, and statistics?
Federal involvement in educational research, development, and statistics has often suffered from short-term and weak intellectual leadership. There have been some outstanding and distinguished leaders in NIE and OERI. But there have also been individuals appointed whose credentials were based more on their political experience or connections than on their distinguished educational and research achievements. Moreover, the rapid turnover of NIE directors and OERI assistant secretaries has not provided the much needed continuity or stability for the agency. During just the 4 years of the Bush Administration, there were five different assistant secretaries at the helm of OERI. And more recently OERI probably will have had five different assistant secretaries in a period of slightly more than 1 year. Particularly lacking during much of the past three decades has been the high quality intellectual leadership needed in a major federal research and development agency.
The history of NIE and OERI has also demonstrated the importance of having a well-trained, stable professional staff. The wholesale dismissal of many competent professionals during the early Reagan years significantly weakened the agency. So has the subsequent tendency to hire few distinguished and well-trained educational researchers. While not everyone in a federal research and development agency needs to be an expert in those areas, a substantial proportion of the professional staff should have those skills. And for those who are not well versed in research and development, opportunities and encouragement should be provided to receive any necessary additional training. Unfortunately, in recent years OERI has failed to attract and hire the high quality research and development experts the agency needs to achieve its internal goals as well as its congressional mandates.
During the reauthorization process, OERI and Congress should reexamine some of the questions raised about the leadership and staffing of the agency. Why has there been such a rapid turnover in leadership in NIE and OERI and what can be done to provide more stability and continuity? How well have NIE and OERI handled the repeated interruptions in leadership and what might be done in the future to make such transitions not only less frequent, but less disruptive when they do occur? What are the essential attributes of any assistant secretary at OERI and how often have individuals with these characteristics been chosen to lead this agency? What are the most important characteristics of a professional staff at any distinguished federal research, development, and statistics operation and how well have these been reflected in the ever changing composition of employees at NIE and OERI? Given the labor-intensive nature of work conducted at NIE or OERI, what is the size of the professional staff needed and how does this match with what has been available in the past? Are the frequently repeated charges that NIE and OERI have not provided adequate intellectual leadership in educational research, development, and statistics fair and accurate? And what must be done to improve the amount and quality of that intellectual leadership in the future?
One of the most important issues that have not received much analysis is the charge that NIE and OERI have been too political. In contrast to much of the work in medicine or other sciences, school reforms and improvements are by their very nature more controversial and political. The education and socialization of children involves highly sensitive decisions not only about how students should be educated, but what they should be taught. Given the historic charge to the Bureau of Education to help improve state and local schooling as well as NIE's commitment to promote excellence and equity in education, it was not entirely surprising that a conservative reaction occurred in the early 1980s against the seemingly liberal and activist federal research and development agenda at NIE.
Many observers have properly condemned the more blatant and transparent political controversies which plagued OERI during the early 1980s. But there is an even more fundamental and subtle issue of how much and what kind of separation should exist between the immediate policy interests of any administration or Congress and the independence and integrity of NIE or OERI. While almost everyone agrees that OERI should critically investigate and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of alternative educational policies and procedures, how much of its research and development agenda should be focused on short-term policy related questions? And since NIE and OERI have always had a strong educational reform component in their mission statements, how should the leaders and staff of that agency interpret their responsibility to support any particular set of current reforms advocated by policymakers in the executive or legislative branches?especially when there is little bipartisan agreement on what educational reforms or improvements are needed?
There is also a need for an open and candid discussion of the proper role of interest groups in guiding the operations of a federal research agency. In other federal agencies such as NIH and NSF, academic and other outside lobby groups to some degree have often helped to set the general goals and to solicit the necessary funds. But most of this involvement seems to have been focused on influencing the overall orientation of those agencies or providing assistance in securing general funding increases. Much less frequently have any of these outside groups and their congressional allies attempted to mandate the details of how research monies should be spent or which specific institutions should receive federal assistance. And when outside attempts to interfere in the ongoing day-to-day operations of other federal research agencies have been made, usually there have been strong protests from those agencies, the academic community, and members of Congress committed to protecting research objectivity and integrity. Yet the troubled history of NIE's and OERI's dealings with influential outside interest groups suggests the need to explore this topic openly. While, inevitably, in any federal research and development operation there will be some politics, the extent and nature of that political involvement needs to be carefully monitored and contained lest it compromise the ability of that agency to do scientifically objective and efficient work.
Finally, while a review of the ever changing federal strategies for educational research, development, and statistics reminds us of the difficulties of making significant and lasting improvement, it also provides occasional examples of outstanding success stories. The National Academy of Science Panel in the mid-1980s was so disappointed with the statistical work of NCES that it recommended the dissolution of that entity if immediate corrective measures were not taken. Faced with that harsh reality, a few dedicated and talented individuals emerged who accepted that challenge. Working closely with the appropriate OERI staff as well as with several influential members of Congress, they managed within the space of only a few years to create an organization is now acknowledged as a distinguished and effective federal statistical agency. Given the challenges and opportunities facing OERI today, a similar effort is needed to restructure, refocus, and revitalize the one agency, which with properly disinterested, well-trained leadership and staff, could make the education of our children the nationwide success it should be.
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