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Collaborative Research
As noted in section I, the 1994 Act sets the tone for collaboration in all of OERI's work, including that of the Board in its relationships with the Office and the Assistant Secretary. OERI should conduct all its work in ways that bring diverse perspectives constructively together. This includes the perspectives of researchers, educators, policymakers, the public; representatives of the nation's diverse populations and cultures; federal agencies participating in the conduct of education research, as well as states, foundations, and the private sector. To the extent appropriate for each function, this range of perspectives should be represented in all of OERI's activities, from developing agendas, to selection of awardees, oversight, evaluation, and refinement.
OERI has an important place in research in education throughout the Department and across the government. This is defined by Congress in broad terms in the 1994 legislation. For example, the law sets forth a coordination role for the Assistant Secretary and OERI:
With the advice and assistance of the Board, the Assistant Secretary shall work cooperatively with the Secretary and the other Assistant Secretaries of the Department of Education to establish and maintain an ongoing program of activities designed to improve the coordination of education research, development, and dissemination and activities within such Department and within the Federal Government.
The law goes on to specify the goals of minimizing duplication, maximizing the value of federal investment, and enabling entities in education research to interact effectively as partners.
But OERI is limited in its abilities to achieve this role. It provides, for example, only a small part of the total support for education research and development. A study prepared for the Board estimated U.S. spending for research in education in the range of $900 million to $1 billion through the U.S. Department of Education and among foundations. A larger net that includes investments in education studies and data collection in other federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Science Foundation, as well as state and local governments and universities might add another billion. With a $2 billion level of annual expenditures for education research activities, the nation would be investing less than 0.5 percent of the total enterprise in educational knowledge-building. However, the OERI share represents only about one-fifth of that of the Department and about one-twentieth of the $2 billion estimated national education research investment.
Aside from the level of investment is the question of OERI's span of activities in education research. To be blunt, OERI is only one among several agencies involved in significant support and or conduct of education research. Within the Department, research related to individuals with disabilities and education of children with disabilities is considerably larger. The Department of Health and Human Services conducts research on learning, family structure, integrated service delivery, and funds dissemination activities related to education. The Department of Labor funds research on dropouts and illiteracy, and funds dissemination activities related to education. The National Endowment for the Humanities funds research and dissemination on students' knowledge of history and the humanities. The National Science Foundation has worked on the teaching of math and science, NIH in learning disabilities and reading, and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in cognitive and neural science and technology.
These simple facts have impressed upon the Board that the almost unbounded role envisioned for OERI in the 1994 legislation creates unachievable ends. OERI is not a monopoly, not the most significant element, not the leading federal influence in several prominent substantive areas. The reality is that OERI must carefully balance its own initiatives and its collaboration with other federal agencies, foundations, and states and localities.
In the coordination of Department research and in exercise of its authorities for government-wide collaboration, OERI and the Department, nevertheless, have vital strengths that all the government agencies can respect, in that they:
OERI's strengths can often be used particularly well in combination with complementary attributes of other agencies. The Board makes the following recommendations simply to reinforce the letter and spirit of the 1994 OERI law:
Recommendation 14: Collaboration across federal agencies — The Assistant Secretary should extend efforts to join with other federal agencies, and perhaps foundations, to collaborate on common agendas.
Recommendation 15: Coordination of research within the Department of Education — The Secretary should encourage, and the Assistant Secretary should provide, special attention to performing a visible and constructive role in collaboration and coordination of education research within the Department of Education.
The Board does not view these as mere bureaucratic exercises. Every effort should be made to create constructive tasks for which it is to the advantage of all collaborators to join with the Assistant Secretary. Some examples of what the Board members expect might include (1) large areas of research that a single agency would not have the resources to undertake alone, (2) syntheses across important topics such as development or learning in which the research supported from several perspectives would be tapped, or (3) evaluation of potential future activities so that overlapping agency interests can be avoided or exploited in purposeful ways.
One additional aspect of collaboration needs to be strengthened. The Board has been troubled to find that the relationship between the OERI-supported research and development centers and the regional labs is often distant rather than collegial and mutually reinforcing. There are concerns that in a period of woefully inadequate resources, the nation is reaping less than it could gain from its investment in the two enterprises. In caricature, the centers are sometimes seen as the thinkers and the regional laboratories as interactors with practitioners. But this is out of touch with the realities of how practice will improve and how comprehensive reform is being implemented effectively.
Recommendation 16: Linking ongoing research and practice-related efforts — The Assistant Secretary should develop constructive means through which OERI, the research and development centers, and the regional laboratories can function closely together to maximize their collective impact.
Both the centers and the labs need to be thoroughly grounded in practice realities, while playing complementary and collaborative roles. The centers may emphasize their comparative advantage in broad analysis and conceptual frameworks, while the labs may emphasize integration with practitioner settings. But that is not enough. Both of these sets of institutions, and OERI, should expect a more overarching synthesis of research and the practice of education. OERI should create appropriate mechanisms through which that can be achieved. This might begin as simply as describing functions and tasks of centers and labs, as viewed by the Assistant Secretary, or a description of lab and center work mapped onto OERI/Board priorities.
The Board also wants to associate itself with conclusions from the National Directions conference about significant roles for the Board and OERI that emphasize the utility of recommendations 14 and 15. Those conclusions were that the Board and OERI are particularly suited to:
Synthesis
Finally, the Board has selected one of these conference conclusions for special attention as a recommendation.
Recommendation 17: Synthesis activities — OERI should support synthesis activities across all-important fields of educational research, summing up progress continually and drawing implications for policy and practice.
On balance, the government has devoted more of its attention to making awards of funds for additional research and development than to making the most of what is already known. Synthesis activities can provide a basis for identifying implications of research findings for practice, promising research that might lead toward improved education practice, or potential new research. Some of this work may be especially appropriate for leadership, and even direct conduct, by government staff because of the unique perspectives offered across the Department and throughout the breadth of the government.
OERI Staff
These descriptions of roles for OERI raise an urgent question about the expectations held for OERI staff upon whom these responsibilities will fall. To fulfill its charge as a government research and research support agency, OERI needs staff who can participate as peers in the scholarly community and work with users to facilitate the practical application of knowledge. In other federal research agencies, staff perform significant leadership roles that advance the enterprise, and at the same time attract and retain highly trained and capable individuals. Among the variety of staff responsibilities that may be found across government research and research support agencies are conduct of research, synthesis of research, collaborative efforts with external stakeholders, planning and design of cutting-edge research, organization of and participation in peer reviews, review of proposals for social utility or agency relevance, and evaluation of ongoing research.
Recommendation 18: OERI staff — The Assistant Secretary needs to determine the types of responsibilities most appropriate to accomplish the research functions of OERI, both to advance its work, and also to attract, retain, and continuously nurture staff with the requisite training, knowledge, and capabilities.
Several strategies will be necessary to build staff capacity in OERI. First, additional staff with demonstrated research accomplishments and potential must be attracted. Second, intensive professional development opportunities are needed for existing staff, including support for graduate study, details to other scientifically oriented research agencies, and newly energized employee development in the workplace, as, for example through mentoring, in-house seminars, and group projects. Third, staff with generalist skills may need to be reassigned to other areas in OERI or in the Department where their experience can be better used.
The National Directions conference participants also concluded that hand-in-hand with a sense of focus and collaboration in research must come emphasis on more rigorous methods and designs, with particular attention to: (a) rethinking, reimagining the possibilities of experimental field trials given new technical tools, the complexity of the puzzles that must be unraveled, and the persuasive power of randomized trials with policymakers and the public; (b) design processes or "engineering" that systematically apply insights of research to the development of discrete education programs; and (c) creating a universe of reliable syntheses of all important areas of educational research.
Following these conclusions from the National Directions conference, OERI would fit between the research community, the political community, and the world of practice. It would not only undertake research and related work for which it is especially suited, it would assist all agencies, associations, institutions, and individuals involved in educational research and improvement to add more value to their own work and to the joint endeavor of learning. The goal can be clearly stated: in the future, all education must be based on ideas that are subject to validation or invalidation by well-designed, well-executed research, and translated into success by well-qualified professionals.
The National Academy of Education included in its advice to the Board a strand on the design of research in education. The Academy's advice began with observations on the usual connotation of "research" and "practice" in education research. Historically, the relation between research and practice in education has been troubled. The field of education does not have a strong, well-established professional community that takes as its charge the design and development of practice-relevant theory, products, and procedures based on established scientific principles and data. There are important examples of such design and development work, but it does not occupy a sufficiently stable and extensive community of researchers and developers. The field does not include a sufficiently established institutional home, form of professional identity, or set of incentive structures that can be called on to support sustained attention to a continuing, integrated set of activities aimed at solving pressing educational problems and developing sound educational theory.
Worst of all, education lacks a well-established tradition of mutual accountability between education research and practice. There are examples of collaborations in which researchers and professional educators join in shared accountability for educational improvement and advancing research, but these are exceptional. In most cases, researchers are expected to study important educational questions, but their work is judged almost entirely by its quality as research; the relevance of the work to the details of education practice is secondary, despite frequent attempts to document some kind of "impact." On the other side, knowing research, seeking it out, and acting in accordance with its results (even when these results challenge some traditional and favored ways of doing things) are exceptional rather than normative behaviors for working educators. Furthermore, regarding contributions to the research literature, professional educators are generally viewed, by themselves as well as by researchers, as the objects of study, rather than as participants in constructing knowledge and understanding general principles.
This situation is not new. The history of OERI and its predecessors (the National Institute of Education, and the U.S. Office of Education within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) is in part a tale of trying to establish, nurture, and sustain a more productive relationship between research—the source of a reliable knowledge base for education improvement—and educational practice. The conceptual basis for much of this work, the Research-Development-Dissemination-Evaluation (RDDE) model, however, embodies a set of assumptions about the way in which research and practice should interact that the National Academy of Education, as well as members of the Board, question.
In the past, researchers typically have taken responsibility for producing new knowledge that relates to some aspect of learning, pedagogy, or schooling and for disseminating that knowledge through the traditional academic venues of scholarly journals and meetings. Others, often education practitioners, have assumed the responsibility for designing educational products and programs, sometimes based on research data but more typically based on experience and intuition, in response to specific problems. Pressures to be pragmatic and move on to the next problem often mean that practitioners devote little time to analyzing how their programs work or how they may be useful in other settings.
There is a second dimension of the lack of connection between what we know and what we do with what we know. No matter how research is conducted, through surveys or ethnographic methods or "design experiments," we need to develop better strategies to ensure that research findings will have a wider impact in schools and communities with significant numbers of low-income students. For the most part, we have treated the intersection of research and practice as one in which researchers transmit the products of research to practitioners. This situation is ironic, for we know that the transmission model does not work for the education of children. So why, then, do we think it should work for interactions with teachers?
The RDDE approach to research and practice has proven to be unproductive and myopic. When researchers take little or no responsibility for making things work and practitioners eschew development of explanatory systems for how and why things work or do not work, neither research nor practice benefits. Without a sense of mutual obligation to one another, researchers and practitioners continue in their own worlds, talking past rather than to one another.
Problem Solving
The Academy's analysis concluded with concrete ideas for a new design for "problem-solving" research in education, and the Board's recommendations are built from that advice.
Recommendation 19: Collaborative problem-solving research and development — OERI should begin development of a new design for research that would focus explicitly on solving specific current problems of practice and, at the same time, be accountable for developing and testing general principles of education that can "travel" to locations beyond those in which the research is done. The central idea is to develop a system of support for projects in which professional researchers and professional educators share in the accountability for achieving success in improving educational practices and outcomes. These projects may also include program developers, curriculum specialists, or policy specialists. Initially, this effort might be launched through a "working group" to assist in designing the details about specific parts of the priority research agenda for which this model would be best suited, the role of OERI and outside contractors or grantees, coordination across multiple sites, expectations as to scale and length of commitment and the like.
Board members believe that this proposal will provide powerful new means through research and development to grapple with some of the most persistent and deeply ingrained problems of our day, and especially the ones contained within the Board's priority for high achievement for all students. All the participants in collaborative problem-solving research and development would share in a commitment to and accountability for multiple outcomes of this approach. These will include: (1) tangible improvement of participating education systems, responsive to the circumstances of those systems and demonstrated by documentable criteria; (2) development of materials, personnel, and other resources to support transport of the aims, operational concepts, and methods that are developed in the project to other sites; and (3) contributions to the research literature that document the results of these efforts and allow for alternative explanations of them, so that the results of these projects will advance society's understanding of educational practices and purposes.
The novelty of this recommendation is in the shared goals and accountability for them by all of the participants, rather than separating responsibilities of teachers, developers, and researchers. This is not recommended as a replacement of support by OERI for other basic research or applied research and development activities. Rather, Board members believe that this kind of integrated work should be added to the program of activities supported by OERI and should be closely allied with both fundamental and applied research, which the Department should continue to support vigorously.
Balanced Role
In summary, the strategic role that the Board sees for OERI cannot overemphasize the unique position the Office can occupy in the realm of research aimed at improving educational practice and policy. The territory bounded on one end by core learning processes identified in cognitive neuroscience, and bounded on the other by the engineering of educational improvement, is vast and complicated. Whereas OERI can enter into collaborative ventures with NICHD and NSF in the realm of the basic science of learning, OERI should lead in developing knowledge about learning connected to the real world of classrooms, schools, communities, and policies. Moreover, it should also take the leading role in engineering and evaluating reforms as they begin to affect children. This work is ideally situated in OERI, given its strong relationship with the fields of practice and policy, for if reforms do not ultimately reach teachers and the act of teaching, an impact on children is highly improbable.
In the Board's view, OERI would sometimes initiate an agenda and sometimes collaborate with agencies such as the NSF in science and mathematics education, NIH in reading, or ONR in learning. This dual role of initiative and collaboration would provide ways to extend the depth and purpose of those things that OERI undertakes itself, yet tap some of the strong research designs that have been followed in other organizations, while building on OERI's excellent connections with the practice community and its ability to establish appropriate contexts. The whole would be more than the sum of the parts.
The ideal education research system would assure congruence between mission and resources. It would build capacities for quality and critical mass, recognizing that any lesser goal will reduce credibility and support for the efforts. In reaching for this objective, the system would recognize the importance of both incremental development and firm long-range plans. As its capability grows, OERI will substantially increase its technical expertise and outreach, always including the skill to capture and integrate fundamental work wherever it is conducted and undertake leadership where no superior source exists.
The current situation does not resemble this ideal. Instead, the Board has found longstanding problems from insufficient aggregate resources in OERI, noted above. Too few resources have led to spreading available ones thinly over a large number of topics and problems. OERI has created and nurtured three major types of institutions over a period of three decadesresearch and development centers, regional educational laboratories, and ERIC research information centers—each with multiple sites. The resources to make these many institutions fulfill the roles for which they were created are extremely constrained. Funds for field-initiated studies and new research initiatives have often been negligible or non-existent.
Recommendation 20: Funding for research in education — Funding for education research must be increased dramatically. An interim target should be the level proposed by the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology of 0.5 percent of our nation's expenditures for elementary and secondary education—about $1.5 billion annually. This would be a feasible target to reach over a 5-year period.
There is no investment in education that the federal government might make that is of equal importance to research. Education research has demonstrated over and over again that it can provide useful answers for education practice and policy. It is the most vital strategy for lifting student learning to the levels we must achieve to maintain our democracy and its vibrant economy into the 21st century.
Recommendation 21: Aligning resources and mission — Over the next 5 years, OERI should work to make the resources and the missions better aligned. Mission must be matched with money.
If more resources are not forthcoming, the mission-resource mismatch will have corrosive and cumulative consequences. The extensive prescription of organizational features within OERI may need to be reconsidered if funds are insufficient, and in that event, it would be prudent if the Secretary had authority to modify the organizational structure.
Effective use of resources does imply a careful consideration of use of OERI staff and internal oversight of research. The Board notes that issues of quality across the agency, coordination of work internally and collaboration externally, and the substantive development of the research agenda are among issues that call for continuing supervision, mentoring, and quality review. It would be highly desirable to build into OERI the means for stabilizing a professional research function that offers some insulation from constant changes in leadership and course of direction, even appearances of politically inspired or ideological research agendas.
Recommendation 22: Research supervision — Some focal point should be created by Congress for research leadership that can span across administrations.
In addition to generally insufficient funding, the allocation of resources for OERI, particularly to and by the institutes, is heavily controlled by statutory and other distribution rules. These rules frustrate responsiveness to new needs and circumstances, fractionate limited funds, and inhibit response to new national priorities. In a well functioning system, these rules should not be necessary.
Recommendation 23: Allocation requirements — The allocation provisions in the 1994 Act for institutes and for types of support should be removed.
[Concluding Observations]