Yesterday, a House education subcommittee "marked up" H.R. 3801, which was recently introduced by subcommittee chairman Michael Castle (R-Delaware), committee chairman John Boehner (R-Ohio) and several other GOP congressmen. The full committee is slated to tackle it next week.
The official synopsis terms it "a bill to provide for improvement of Federal education research, statistics, evaluation, information, and dissemination...." But don't yawn too fast. What H.R. 3801 actually does is radically restructure the federal government's arrangements for education R & D, statistics, program evaluation and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). For the most part, it seems likely to improve the current set-up. But it introduces a couple of risks. And the current version would do serious harm to NAEP.
The present Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) would vanish. From its ashes would arise a new entity called the Academy of Education Sciences, presided over by a director to be nominated by the President (and confirmed by the Senate) for a six-year term. (Incumbent OERI assistant secretary Russ Whitehurst is grandfathered into that post until July 1, 2007.) The new Academy will have its own policy-setting National Board for Education Sciences, also presidential appointees, fifteen in number (plus ex officios), dominated by "highly qualified experts." Though nominally inside the Education Department, the Academy director would enjoy complete autonomy over the programs and activities in his purview. ("The Secretary shall delegate to the Director all functions for carrying out this title.")
The Academy would contain three "national education centers," one each for research, statistics and evaluation, each with a "commissioner" chosen by the Academy director (and vulnerable to being dismissed at will by the director). There would also be a new (and somewhat ominously named) "Knowledge Utilization Office."
In appraising H.R. 3801, keep in mind how often federal education R & D has been restructured-and how little good has been done by those reorganizations, whether spearheaded by the executive branch or by Congress. The problems of federal education research run deep. They begin, but do not end, with the fact that many observers, including lots of researchers, doubt that "education sciences" is a term with much meaning outside a few well-studied areas such as primary reading. So don't expect too much from another reshuffling of the deck chairs on this leaky vessel. Lawmakers can (as they plainly here hope to do) give it the look of the National Institutes of Health-and mandate that everything done by the Academy be based on "scientific validity"-without thereby making education research any more scientific than it's ever been.
That said, H.R. 3801 works two worthy innovations by reshuffling a pair of misplaced programs. First, it shifts responsibility for evaluating federal programs from the Secretary's aegis to the new Academy. This is apt to make for more honest, less political appraisals of Education Department programs-including the kind of evaluations that may run counter to the policy predilections of whatever administration is then in office. There is a science of program evaluation but it's seldom been applied to federal activities in education.
Second, it takes the care and feeding of the infamous "regional labs" out of the research unit and turns them over to the Secretary. Such baldly political creatures should be dealt with by political types, not academics-precisely the opposite of program evaluation. (For those who slumbered these past 37 years, the "labs" were created in LBJ's day to handle research dissemination and technical assistance, back when there was no Internet and few state education departments had this capacity. In the decades since, they've been aggressively successful feeders at the federal pork barrel but they do little good, even as they consume most of the research budget.) Title II of the bill would create ten new "regional entities" responsible for "technical assistance" in education, each with its own board named by the governors of the region's states. Those entities would then dispense technical assistance dollars as they see fit which may, but need not, mean using the existing labs. Though the labs could also bid on Academy research projects, they (and the long-established university-based research centers) would be held to the same scientific standards as other contenders. It appears from the bill as if their automatic federal subsidy will cease-unless, of course, Congress recreates it via the appropriations process.
Problems with this bill? Two risks and then the NAEP mess.
One risk is inherent in making anybody as powerful as the new Academy director will be. If the right person wields this power imaginatively and prudently, good things could happen. But that person's blind spots, hang-ups and favorites will make an enormous difference. Though the new board could serve as a valuable counterweight, one never knows what sorts of people the White House-any White House-will choose for such a body. It could fall into the grip of "highly qualified experts" who would push (for example) a constructivist, anti-testing agenda (like the education "experts" at the National Academy of Sciences) or into the clutches of establishment interest groups. Nor will it be brought back to earth by the participation of governors, mayors, newspaper editors and admirals. It's one thing to assert that everything be "scientifically valid." It's another to vest all authority in experts.
The other risk is downgrading the National Center for Education Statistics, the oldest and, to my mind, most important function of the federal government in the field of education. NCES would retain no autonomy nor could its Commissioner defy the Academy director in the name of statistical integrity or accuracy. That's a hazardous move for any federal statistical agency, one that likely wouldn't fly at the Census Bureau or Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The big problem: H.R. 3801 makes a confused mess of the constitutional arrangements for NAEP and its National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) and does so at a precarious time, considering that the recently enacted No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act made major changes that NAEP and NAGB have barely begun to assimilate.
Under NCLB, NAEP bears a heavy burden as the external "auditor" of state and national achievement in reading and math. The testing cycle is accelerated and all states are required to take part. NCLB also changed NAGB's composition and lobbed new threats at the security of NAEP tests and the validity of the NAEP sample. For the first time in its three-decade history, NAEP turned out to be a major political battleground. We'll be lucky if it emerges with its credibility intact.
The drafters of H.R. 3801 intended not to make any more changes in NAEP and NAGB, yet the bill makes big ones, while not solving any of the problems that antedate NCLB, such as confusion over where NAGB's jurisdiction ends and that of the executive branch begins. (In the notorious episode when then-Vice President Al Gore took over a NAEP press conference to spin some new assessment results in ways that he found politically advantageous, NAGB was powerless to prevent this abuse of NAEP's neutrality because it doesn't really control the release of NAEP results.) Another long-standing problem unsolved by H.R. 3801: NAGB members' terms are too short for newcomers to master the complexities of NAEP.
So the status quo isn't great. But H.R. 3801 makes one whopping change in it by placing NAEP and NAGB within the new Academy of Education Sciences, creating a brand-new jurisdictional tug of war between "independent" NAGB and the "independent" Academy director (and the new Education Sciences board).
NAGB, please understand, does not actually administer NAEP. It sets policy for NAEP but the program itself has been run by the National Center for Education Statistics, now to be submerged into the new Academy. This means, for example, that NAEP reports will be subject to the Academy's peer review processes, thus (at minimum) making assessment results even slower to emerge and harder to understand than today. It means the Academy director-and Education Sciences Board, with its very different composition from NAGB's-will control NAEP's budget and personnel as well as the multi-million dollar contracts to conduct the actual testing program. It means the authority to employ NAGB's own staff, currently delegated from the Education Secretary to NAGB, will now be entrusted to the Academy director as, apparently, will the appointment of NAGB's chairman. Myriad other "delegations" of authority that now flow from the Secretary to the governing board will instead flow to the Academy director.
This is a mistake. It's a mistake to disrupt NAEP's constitutional arrangements at such a vulnerable time. And it's a special mistake to subordinate NAEP to "experts" at a moment when the credibility of the "nation's report card" depends on confidence that its own governing board-bipartisan and carefully balanced among elected officials, top-notch educators, parents and the general public-is truly independent and truly in charge.
What do to? Ideally, NAGB and NAEP would be freed from both the Education Department and the Academy, placed in a separate entity responsible for nothing but national assessment. Such a bill emerged-with unanimous bipartisan support-from the same House subcommittee in the previous Congress. Today, we're told, that plan is "unacceptable" to conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, though nobody will say why or who. If they wield a veto, however, the second best approach is to put NAGB in clear charge of NAEP and move both out of the new Academy while leaving them in the Department of Education. Considering the new responsibilities that Congress recently placed upon NAEP, it would be smart to put this vital testing program in a place that thinks it's important-as Secretary Paige plainly does-rather than in a new, unproven, expert-driven Academy whose views on testing are unknown and that, in any case, is going to have plenty else on its plate.
A press release describing the new legislation can be found at http://edworkforce.house.gov/press/press107/oeriintro22702.htm
To read more about the problems of federal education research and the challenges of improving OERI, see "Fixing Federal Research," by Maris Vinovskis, Education Next, Winter 2001.
