Fixing Education Research And Statistics (Again)
With little fanfare and scant public awareness, the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth, and Families did something remarkable some weeks back: By a unanimous, bipartisan vote, it adopted HR 4875, the proposed Scientifically Based Education Research, Statistics, Evaluation, and Information Act of 2000. ( "House Plan Would Create Research 'Academy,'" Aug. 2, 2000.) If this measure survives the rest of the legislative gantlet in anything like its present form, it will work a long- overdue transformation in Washington's handling of education research, statistics, program evaluation, and assessment. For even pointing the way toward such a major reform, subcommittee Chairman Michael N. Castle, R-Del., and his colleagues deserve plaudits.
One sign that they're heading in a good direction: The American Educational Research Association is beside itself with anxiety that these changes might actually come to pass. Another sign: The mandarins of program evaluation at the U.S. Department of Education are apoplectic. (A lot of other education groups have signaled their support for the bill, however, which gives rise to the suspicion that it still may not go far enough!)
We've known for ages that Washington's education research effort is sorely troubled. Ever since the National Institute of Education was created some 28 years ago, this domain of federal activity—now housed in the U.S. Department of Education's office of educational research and improvement—has been beset by woes of every sort: shoddy work on trivial topics; research bent to conform with political imperatives and policy preferences; a skimpy budget that gets gobbled up by greedy, ineradicable "labs and centers" and other porky projects; avoidance of promising but touchy topics; studies that seldom follow the norms of "real" science (or even social science); research that is mostly inconclusive and, when conclusive, is weakly disseminated and widely ignored; terminal confusion about where research ends and "school improvement" begins; and an ever-shifting set of priorities presided over by an ever-changing cast of directors, assistant secretaries, and policy boards, most of them firmly under the thumb of...
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