Once upon a time, I helped to create a new federal entity called the National Institute of Education (NIE). As the junior-most education staffer in the White House during the early Nixon administration (functioning mainly an aide to Pat Moynihan, then Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs), I helped draft Richard Nixon's 1970 message to Congress, wherein the NIE was conceived. Two years later, thanks to the midwifery of Congressman John Brademas, it was born within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare but outside the U.S. Office of Education.
I thought this was a momentous achievement, terming it (in a February 1972 article) "in formal, organizational terms," the "most important addition to the federal government's education efforts in this century." The new agency was meant to bring talent, objectivity, scientific rigor and coherence to Washington's scattered efforts to advance human understanding of education. It was supposed to build the knowledge that would cause faltering federal programs, such as Head Start and Title I, to work better. (When Nixon proposed the NIE, the Coleman Report was just four years old and Moynihan was taken with its finding that traditional assumptions about achievement gains - that they follow from more school resources and inputs - rested on sand.) [See "What the NIE Can Be," Phi Delta Kappan, February 1972, pp. 347ff. Fuller accounts of the agency's origins and Coleman connections can be found in "The National Institute of Education," The Yale Review, Winter 1975, pp. 227ff. and Education and the Presidency, Lexington Books, 1977.]
If my three-decade old euphoria sounds like press releases issued a few days ago by Secretary Paige and the House Education Committee, celebrating final passage of the "Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002" and giving birth to a new "Institute of Education Sciences," that's because the resemblance is close.
I wrote in 1972 that the new structure would bring visibility, prestige and resources to education research, coordinate and set priorities for a motley array of scattered initiatives, and tackle education problems in a systematic, scientific way.
Thirty years later, Rod Paige declared that "One of the major tenets of our education policy is that teaching and learning practices be based on sound, scientific research.... [T]he new Institute...will allow us to move forward aggressively to support the high-quality research, evaluation and statistical activities needed to improve education policy and practice."
Hope springs eternal. But it has never worked before in this domain. The 1972 edifice had termites in its foundation and they immediately started chewing. Through my fog of optimism, I also spotted seven "potential threats" to the new NIE structure. All but one of these (an obsession with technology) turned to be real menaces to the new agency's viability. Briefly stated, the other six were: falling into the hands of traditional education researchers, "complete with their second water abilities"; sinking into "the swamp of federal bureaucracy, with managers where it should have scholars, civil servants when it needs scientists"; policymakers who rapidly lose patience with the new agency; alternatively, too much patience, i.e. no real demands that it produce anything timely or useful; too many missions, lots of them trendy and faddish; and an overemphasis on "development" at the expense of "research."
I also noted, though with insufficient alarm, that the new NIE wasn't truly starting from scratch because Congress made it shoulder responsibility for "a wild assortment of ongoing R & D programs," including "a dozen regional laboratories, research and development centers, and hundreds of scattered university research programs."
Trouble came fast. Within three years, the new Institute was in trouble. I wrote in 1975 that it "was slow to begin," "generally failed to develop a comprehensible statement of what it was trying to do," had a staff that "exhibited a certain political na??vet?? about Congressional needs" and, by paying too much attention to basic research and not enough to "the dissemination of immediately usable ideas," had already lost support on Capitol Hill. (Yes, that last problem contradicted one of my initial concerns but turned out to be a big political liability in its own right.) [See "On the National Institute of Education, The Yale Review, Spring 1975, pp. 477ff.]
A decade after its birth, I termed the NIE a "profound and hopeless disappointment" and proposed its abandonment. (See "What the NIE Cannot Be," Phi Delta Kappan, February 1983, pp. 407 ff.) Two years later, as the new assistant secretary responsible for this part of the Education Department, I worked with Bill Bennett, Emerson Elliott and others to dismantle that creaky structure (using general "reorganization" powers entrusted to the Secretary of Education) and replace it with the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). Subsequently, Congress reorganized OERI at least once more (a 1994 bill championed by Representative Major Owens) before the latest round.
Hence the new Institute of Education Sciences is (at least) the fourth major reconstruction of the federal education research enterprise in thirty years. Perhaps it will work better than its three predecessors. But I doubt it. For five reasons:
First, the greedy slurpers at this trough - the selfsame entities that have consumed most of the agency's limited resources for three decades, namely the labs, centers and ERIC clearinghouses - are still there and slurping faster than ever. Congress once again lacked the gumption to starve them, even to shove them to a different trough.
Second, the talent is sparse and isn't likely to be recruited. What kept NIE and OERI from being more like NIH is that large numbers of distinguished scientists couldn't be drawn to work there. Soon-to-be Institute director Russ Whitehurst thinks this will now change. We'll see.
Third, while the new agency's commitment to scientific and experimental research in education is commendable, it's going to be a long, hard sell, both on Capitol Hill and in the education community, which tends to want quick fixes and "practical" information - the more so as NCLB ratchets up the stakes.
Fourth, education research has few fans. Three decades of slim pickings and paltry payoffs have made the 1972 problem worse. We've all had way too much experience with statements that begin "Research shows" and then go on to promote unproven nostrums. Is there some gold amid all the pyrite? Sure. But America doesn't have clear-cut mechanisms for distinguishing one from the other. It has lousy dissemination systems and reluctant users. And we've grown cynical that education research has much to contribute to improved pupil achievement, which is the real coin of the realm today.
Fifth, many of the dreams that people invested in the latest restructuring rested upon the assumption that the new Institute will be more independent than its predecessors, less vulnerable to political pressure, better insulated from the evanescent priorities of Congress and the executive branch. Yet Congress spelled out a zillion things that it must and mustn't do. And on November 5 the White House accompanied the bill signing with a curious, legalistic statement that reasserted the authority of the Education Secretary and the President over the new Institute's functions and said, in effect, that all other input concerning its work is merely advisory. [See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/11/20021105-4.html.] Considering that the new agency inherits no tradition of autonomy or scientific respectability, this combination of Congressional meddling and executive authority suggests that, when it comes to executing the Institute's work, very little has truly changed.
The moral of this tale: don't expect much from the latest reorganization of the federal education research enterprise. The real problems of education research are not structural and, to the extent that they are, this new set-up fails to solve them.
PS: Keep your fingers crossed for the new Department of Homeland Security. Education research is not the only government activity where restructuring is no panacea.
PPS: Memo to myself: don't write any more about federal education research for a long time. Readers are weary.
