A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Changing Federal Strategies for Supporting Educational Research, Development, and Statistics - September 1998

IV. Creation and Evolution of the National Institute of Education

Compared with the previous 90 years, and in spite of a significant amount of belt-tightening toward the end, the decade of the 1960s saw a major improvement in the funding and organization of federal research and development. Not only had funding risen rapidly, but the creation of R&D centers, the regional educational laboratories, and ERIC provided important new institutional mechanisms for fostering more systematic and long-term research. And the creation of NCES in the general reorganization in 1965 consolidated educational data collection and analysis activities. While not all of these changes had turned out in practice exactly as had been hoped for in theory, all of these developments collectively signaled a new role for the federal government in educational research and development.

Yet educators and researchers working in the late 1960s and early 1970s were not at all satisfied with these numerous and tangible improvements. Why? Mainly because the need for additional and better educational research and development rose even more. When the major federal compensatory educational initiatives like Title I and Head Start were created in the mid-1960s, both policymakers and educators were quite confident that the programs would play a major role in helping to eliminate the so-called "cycle of poverty" that appeared to trap disadvantaged Americans.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Yet several of the preliminary analyses of these new programs raised serious questions about their effectiveness. Scattered state evaluations of Title I indicated that the program had little impact on helping at-risk children.⁽⁴⁹⁾ The ability of Head Start to help the cognitive development of disadvantaged children was challenged by the controversial, but highly influential Westinghouse evaluation.⁽⁵⁰⁾ And, distinguished scholars such as James Coleman in the mid-1960s argued that "[s]chools bring little influence to bear on a child's achievement that is independent of his background and general social context."⁽⁵¹⁾

Troubling questions were raised in many different quarters about the ability of the recently restructured Bureau of Research to initiate and oversee the type of high quality educational research and development necessary to improve federal compensatory educational programs. For example, following the election of President Richard Nixon, a subcommittee of the White House Urban Affairs Council was created. The Subcommittee endorsed the need for more research, but had little confidence that the just renamed Bureau of Research should be entrusted with that assignment:

• No one in the working group was pleased with the performance of USOE's Bureau of Research, recently renamed the National Center for Educational Research and Development (NCERD). In one stormy review session, Moynihan, Nathan, and Morgan had pressed Gallagher [Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning, Research, and Evaluation in USOE] to cite a single instance of research conducted under its auspices that had produced useful or significant results, and they had been wholly unsatisfied with the stumbling response. The Budget Bureau faulted NCERD for planning badly, wasting money, and exercising weak direction of its projects. The education specialists on Butler's staff concurred, as did DuBridge's aides and the President's Science Advisory Committee. Federal educational research funds were scant, were heavily committed to the support of a network of regional laboratories and university research centers, and were largely in the hands of traditional educational researchers, a group whose disciplinary breadth and intellectual distinction did not impress those members of the working group who knew something of social science and of scholarship.⁽⁵²⁾

Instead, the group recommended establishing NIE?an institution which Nixon had mentioned in passing during his campaign.⁽⁵³⁾

Ignoring the numerous difficulties involved in doing high quality research and translating it into practice, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the key architects of NIE, anticipated imminent breakthroughs in the field of educational research and development under the new plan:

• The shame of this [decreasing research funds] is that it is occurring at just the moment when educational research is going through a quantum change in methodological sophistication. And it is also very much widening the range of disciplines which are involved.... The history of science records many moments when persons working in a particular field have been seized with the sense that they were on the verge of [a] major breakthrough in their understanding of a subject they were investigating.

• I don't know if anyone has tried to keep score, but one's impression is that this hunch is repeatedly validated, and there is just such a feeling in the world of education research at this time.⁽⁵⁴⁾

Almost no one at the hearings on NIE challenged the activist role for educational research or questioned the desirability of providing educational opportunities for everyone. And many of the witnesses assumed that educational research and development would be modeled after the work done at the National Science Foundation (NSF) or at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But Hendrik Gideonse, former Director of Program Planning and Evaluation in the National Center for Educational Research and Development, challenged this view of research. He argued that educational research by its very nature was fundamentally different from that funded by NSF or NIH because it was inherently political?an observation which seemed to be validated in the 1980s as critics of NIE attacked it for being too biased and political rather than scientific and objective.⁽⁵⁵⁾

Several congressional critics such as William Scherle (Republican-Iowa) unsuccessfully sought to defeat the proposal to establish NIE because they felt that the proposed agency was an unnecessary duplication:

• This provision simply opens the Federal Treasury to the same educational researchers without any assurance that the quality of education would be improved.

  The Office of Education in the last 10 years has spent approximately $1 billion in education research. Most of this was contracted out to various educational research organizations. Under this bill all that would happen would be that a new organization, the National Institute of Education, would be created to do the same thing which is being done now....

• By defeating this amendment, the House will have an opportunity to reject the concept that the way to solve problems is to recast an old agency with a new name and increase its size and scope with the same people who run the old program, with additional waste of time and effort.⁽⁵⁶⁾

President Nixon and 92nd Congress finally succeeded in creating the National Institute of Education in June 1972.⁽⁵⁷⁾ But funding for NIE was in jeopardy from the very beginning as several influential members of Congress remained hostile to the new agency. As a result, while the proponents of NIE recommended a doubling or tripling of the old research and development budget, Congress actually slashed NIE's budget by more than one-third.⁽⁵⁸⁾

One of the major shifts in federal strategies on research and development in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the decline in enthusiasm for the role of the R&D centers and the regional educational laboratories. Most witnesses at the hearings on the creation of NIE did not expect them to be designated as the primary sites for educational research and development. For example, James Gallagher, Director of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina, testified that:

• There was a time where the major argument for educational laboratories was that we needed these major institutions to carry out big projects. And we did. I think the time is pretty well past for just institutional support. I think what needs to be done is to put the laboratories and R&D centers under a program support basis. If they can develop in those laboratories or R&D centers major programs that are worthy of support, let's support them. But let's not support them merely as institutions.⁽⁵⁹⁾

In the late 1960s Charles Frye of the Office of Education proposed a "program purchase policy" for the centers and laboratories which would have allowed these institutions to compete for federal research and development funds without guaranteeing them continued funding. NIE tried to implement this concept as the agency did not regard the centers and laboratories as the key institutions for doing educational research and development in the future but ran into difficulties.⁽⁶⁰⁾

NIE's efforts to end guaranteed funding of the centers and laboratories precipitated a bitter and costly battle between the agency and their funding recipients. The Council on Educational Development and Research (CEDaR) had been established in December 1970 to coordinate the activities of the centers and laboratories as well as to represent their interests, but had not become an active and effective congressional lobbying group until a few years later. Faced with the likelihood of losing guaranteed funding, CEDaR worked with the centers and laboratories to persuade the House and Senate appropriations committees to earmark $30 million for the centers and laboratories in FY 1976. CEDaR became an influential and active participant in congressional debates over the future of educational research and development. While the specific tactics ensuring the funding the centers and laboratories varied over time, CEDaR and its congressional allies managed in essence to make those institutions a permanent and mandated component of federal research and development for the next two decades.⁽⁶¹⁾

Anticipating reauthorization in 1976, NIE commissioned a panel of 10 experts to conduct a 3-month study of the role of the centers and laboratories in federal research and development. The group, led by Roald Campbell, produced its influential, but highly controversial, report which rejected both "the earlier U.S. Office of Education notion of supporting independent institutions which set their own agenda, or the current NIE concept of purchasing discrete products from an undifferentiated set of institutions."⁽⁶²⁾ Instead, the Panel called for a long-term, stable relationship with a much smaller, but better funded set of national (not regional) laboratories and centers.

The Campbell Report provoked considerable opposition from CEDaR and some members of Congress. As a result, the 94th Congress called for another review of center and laboratory operations. The congressionally-mandated panel, whose membership included more teachers and educators and fewer researchers than the Campbell group, issued a report in 1979 that was much more favorable to the centers and laboratories. The new Panel concluded that these institutions were "a vigorous set of research and development institutions doing work of quality and significance for American education."⁽⁶³⁾ It endorsed the idea of 5-year agreements with the laboratories and centers and called for a rigorous review of them in the third year; those that were deemed successful would be granted another 5-year extension while those that were unsatisfactory would have another 2 years to correct their deficiencies. The Panel also endorsed a more regional focus for the laboratories.⁽⁶⁴⁾

Based upon the Panel's Report as well as its own deliberations, NIE issued its administrative policy on "Long-Term Special Institutional Agreements with the Seventeen Existing Laboratories and Centers" in January 1979. NIE's position basically repeated and enacted most of the recommendations of the Panel.⁽⁶⁵⁾ Thus, after considerable struggle and negotiations, NIE, CEDaR, and the Congress had reached a relatively amicable understanding on the long-term prospects for the then current labs and centers. While not everyone was happy with the new arrangements, there was growing recognition and acceptance that perhaps this was the best that could be done under the existing political circumstances.

There were other major shifts in NIE strategy on federal research and development in the second half of the 1970s. Earlier emphasis had been on applied social science research, now there was an increased focus on basic research.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Moreover, responding to criticisms from members of Congress as well as educational practitioners, NIE greatly strengthened and expanded its dissemination operations. By FY 1980, dissemination expenditures had more than tripled from FY 1975 and now constituted 28 percent of NIE's funding?more than was being spent on fundamental research (24 percent), applied research (21 percent), development (17 percent), or policy studies (10 percent).⁽⁶⁷⁾

As dissemination became the single largest category of expenditures, NIE experimented with a wide variety of approaches. Often it just provided funds to help current research and development products be distributed more widely to potential users. It also tried to enhance the capacity of state education agencies (SEAs) to create new or extend existing educational dissemination activities.⁽⁶⁸⁾ NIE also established in June 1976 the Research and Development Utilization (RDU) program to help schools identify their problems, learn about educational R&D products, and use educational innovations.⁽⁶⁹⁾

If basic research and dissemination fared relatively well in the 1970s, development was dealt a serious setback. When the laboratories were established, they had been expected to systematically develop and field-test educational products and processes. Several of them worked on large-scale curriculum development efforts in the late 1960s and early 1970s and others pursued other, smaller projects. Altogether, 86 percent of NIE funding in FY 1975 was directed toward development activities.

Congressional hostility to the NSF-funded MACOS fifth grade anthropology curriculum lead to the demise of that program and helped generate distrust of national curricula.⁽⁷⁰⁾ The increasingly hostile attitude toward federal support of curriculum projects also persuaded NIE to abandon almost all of its large-scale development activities. NIE funding for development plummeted from $40.3 million in FY 1975 to $27.9 million in FY 1980 (or from 86 percent of NIE funding to 38 percent). Moreover, when applied research could be separated out analytically from the overall development budget in FY 1980, development by itself comprised only one-sixth of the agency's overall funding.⁽⁷¹⁾ Thus, the laboratories developed a more regional orientation in the late 1970s and most of them were forced to abandon any of their large-scale and more nationally-oriented curriculum development projects.

The National Center for Educational Statistics continued to expand NAEP testing in the 1970s. It also developed the 1972 National Longitudinal Study (NLS-72) to examine the transition of students from high school to college or into the labor force.⁽⁷²⁾ While the NCES budget increased from $1.9 million in FY 1970 to $13.9 million in FY 1978, it still trailed far behind those of other federal statistical agencies like the Bureau of the Census ($71.3 million), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (84.3 million), the Agricultural Statistical Reporting Service ($37.5 million), or the National Center for Health Statistics ($38.1 million).⁽⁷³⁾ Despite this expansion and improvement in statistical collections, expectations for NCES had grown and the agency was criticized for failing to meet the growing needs of the Department's Education Division.⁽⁷⁴⁾

[III. Educational Research and. . .]

[V. The Reagan Administration and the Challenge to. . . ]