Comment by Thomas K. Glennan Jr.
[The Federal Role in Educational Research and Development]
Maris A. Vinovskis has provided a comprehensive analysis of the problems that the U.S. Department of Education (and previously, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) has faced in creating an effective research and development (R&D) program. Basing his analysis on his deep knowledge of the history of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) and its predecessor, the National Institute of Education (NIE), he sets forth seven problems that have inhibited the conduct and sponsorship of educational R&D in the department:
1. The lack of sufficient autonomy, independence, and prominence of the organizational locations of the departmental R&D enterprise.
2. The limited numbers and low quality of staff, particularly in recent years.
3. Limited resources to support R&D.
4. The fragmented, episodic, and short-term nature of the individual R&D efforts.
5. Low quality in the research and development itself.
6. Turnover in top agency leadership and uneven quality in the middle-level management leaders.
7. Overly strong emphasis of politics (as opposed to science merit) in the development of the agency's agenda. [End Page 386]
As the first director of NIE, I had intimate familiarity with many of the problems Vinovskis cites in the early years of federal support for education R&D. I know little of the activities of the 1980s and early 1990s. Recently I have been working on issues of research quality with the current OERI leadership. On the basis of this incomplete experience, I find little quarrel with the facts he presents and the picture that he paints. However, the fairly even-handed painting of his picture may provide a potpourri of suggested reforms when a narrower and more focused effort is required.
In my view, much of the situation that OERI faces today can be traced to the pattern of funding for educational research since the early 1970s when NIE was created. NIE was established in response to many of the same concerns that Vinovskis outlines; for example, poor-quality and fragmented research, inadequate funding, too many politically motivated projects, a lack of organizational independence, and inadequate staff talent. NIE was provided independence, the opportunity to hire new staff, and, by today's standards, fairly substantial funding. NIE's first-year budget was nearly $500 million in today's dollars, and the Nixon administration asked for a substantial increase for its second year. 73
In fiscal 1973 NIE's proposed budget contained nearly the only request for increased funding in the entire federal educational budget, a fact that did not endear it to the legions of lobbyists for various education causes. NIE (and its intended mission) began life with the unenviable role of being the Nixon administration's excuse for not spending more on education. Moreover, the mere establishment of a new agency did not increase Congress's dim view of the quality of educational research. The leadership of NIE clearly failed to build the needed support in Congress and with important elements of the education community. The result was not only a failure to obtain the hoped-for increases in funding but also a 50 percent cut in the appropriations for research from nearly $500 million in fiscal 1973 to just over $200 million in fiscal 1974 (1999 dollars).
It is hard to overstate the negative consequences the cut had for the agency. It had been successful in attracting capable new staff, but many were quickly thrown into scaling back existing programs rather than building the new ones that NIE had been intended to create. While little doubt exists that, from a scientific perspective, many of the programs that NIE tried to eliminate had little value, the need to make the cuts further exacerbated the divisive political wrangling that has so frequently [End Page 387] characterized the NIE and OERI reauthorizations and appropriations over the years.
From fiscal 1974 through 1980, NIE continued with funding at a little less than $200 million a year (1999 dollars). Some important planning was done and research supported. However, beginning with the Reagan administration, funding steadily fell, reaching levels as low as $65 million (1999 dollars) around 1990. 74 Since that time, educational research funding in OERI has begun to rise and in fiscal 1999 stands at about $160 million, still only a small fraction of what was contemplated at NIE's founding. 75
From my perspective then, the key problems of federal education research stem from its low funding and dysfunctional political battles over dividing up that limited funding. The key to future success of federal support for educational R&D is obtaining more funds and resisting the temptation to spread them among many potential claimants. The best hope for more funds is to clearly demonstrate the value of educational R&D and the capacity of OERI to manage that R&D. While I do not doubt that many or all of the changes that Vinovskis proposes are desirable, I think that the time they require and the political energy that is likely to be needed to achieve many of them will detract from this important task.
To demonstrate the usefulness of effective and focused education R&D, I would avoid devoting limited managerial resources to immediate restructuring of the existing research programs. Instead, I would focus on the effective use of the limited increases in funding now being provided by Congress in this time of high national concern about education and economic prosperity. I would emphasize a small number of problem areas of unquestioned national importance such as literacy and numeracy, and I would frame the research program in a way that sets that program on a (perhaps ten-year) course to making major contributions to solving those problems.
In the near term, OERI probably lacks the ability to recruit first-rate intellectual leadership to its regular staff. But this does not seem to be the most important near-term goal. What seems far more important is to engage some of the best minds in the field in the planning, conduct, and assessment of the performance of the programs. Perhaps leading members of the research and practice community can be brought together in study [End Page 388] groups, panels, or networks to perform these functions. In doing this, OERI should draw upon the managerial experience of more credible research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which rely heavily on members of the research community to plan research and evaluate proposals and progress.
While the full value of such an effort will be known only some time in the future, let me propose some indicators by which Congress, the public, and the educational community can judge the conduct of the program:
--It attracts solid research performers and creates an active and exciting research community.
--It engages practitioners both as performers and users; the work is continually tested against the needs of users.
--It actively promotes the accumulation of understanding, providing regular reflection on what has been learned and what new work is needed.
--It discards unproductive lines of inquiry.
--The work of the program involves development--it produces programs, embodying the findings of research that can be demonstrated to be effective.
Most important, perhaps, such programs lead to a critical mass of individuals and institutions that are engaged in sustained inquiry and development.
Program elements needed to carry out such problem-centered program efforts are already in place. OERI, NSF, and the National Institute for Child and Human Development (NICHD) have joined to carry out an Interagency Educational Research Initiative in fiscal 1999 and the Clinton administration has asked for increased funding for fiscal 2000. Parts of the field-initiated studies program might be focused on these priorities, and several of the National Research Centers and Regional Laboratories have important and relevant work under way or planned. The problem is to bring direction, coherence, and cumulativeness to the effort.
However, one factor emphasized by Vinovskis cannot be ignored. Limiting OERI's focus to a few key problems, engaging the best of the nation's research community in dealing with those problems, and selling the effort to Congress is critical. Without leadership capable and willing to do this, I fear federal support for education R&D will continue to have the features Vinovskis has laid out.
