Organizational Structure
Institutes. OERI is currently divided into four principal operational arms: 1) the National Center for Education Statistics, which conducts surveys and assessments to determine the condition of education; 2) the Office of Reform Assistance and Dissemination, which monitors ten regional educational laboratories and administers a large number of programs funded under the ESEA; 3) the National Library of Education, which manages a physical library in the Department of Education as well as an electronic repository of documents in education called the Educational Resources Information Clearinghouse; and 4) the National Research Institutes, which are five administrative units that manage research centers at universities and field-initiated grants to individual researchers.
This administrative structure is seriously problematic. The five national research institutes have overlapping responsibilities, redundant personnel functions, and statutory restrictions on funding that do not permit the agency to pursue a focused agenda or to support significant programs of research. To be specific, the statute requires that an equal amount of the funds appropriated for research be made available to the Achievement and Assessment Institute and the At-Risk Institute; that each of the five national research institutes use at least one-third of its share of the research appropriation to fund university-based research and development center(s) and at least one-fourth to fund field-initiated research (the statute does not permit the agency to specify even broad topic areas for field-initiated research -- individual investigators choose both the topics and methods of study); and that not more than 10 percent of the total research appropriation (and not more than 33 percent of the share for any particular institute) be used to fund crosscutting research. Crosscutting research is research that is germane to more than one institute and may be carried out jointly by two or more institutes, or by one or more institutes jointly with other offices in the Department or other agencies within the Federal Government.
Each of the initiatives we have launched this year is cross-cutting. Take our new program of research in reading comprehension as an example. Should this be the responsibility of the At-Risk Institute or the Achievement and Assessment Institute? And isn't it also an initiative of relevance to the Early Childhood Institute and the Postsecondary and Adult Learning Institute? It is difficult to assemble staff outside the Institute structure to focus on cross-cutting issues. And, most critically, we have only been able to move ahead with our new programs based on bill language in our appropriations statute that exempts the funds for new initiatives from the statutory requirements for apportioning funds under the institute structure. The appropriators have done this since our statute expired in 1999 based on the assumption that these funding strictures would be removed in reauthorization. I hope their assumption was correct, because it would be impossible to do the new work that needs to be done under current law.
Centers. Another facet of this same problem lies in the current requirement that at least one-third of institute funding go to research and development centers located at universities around the nation. Centers are the major mechanism by which OERI supported research prior to my arrival. Currently, there are 11 R & D centers. Several have been funded for over 15 years. Some of the centers have performed well and the center mechanism is one we intend to continue to use. However, centers have failed as the principal mechanism of supporting field-based research. Why? First, an effective center needs to have scientists who work closely together and interact frequently with the goal of solving a particular problem or closely connected set of problems. Too many of our centers end up being mail drops that serve scholars scattered across the nation. Center support is parceled out to these scientists for individual projects that are only loosely connected to each other, if connected at all, and the goal of the work--the point at which success could be declared--is undefined. In effect, such centers become intermediate funding agencies. We give them money, and then they give it to other people under conditions that are much less competitive, much less strategic, and involve much more overhead than would be the case if we skipped the center mechanism entirely and parceled out the money ourselves. Second, centers as the sole mechanism of support freeze out all those researchers who could be doing important work but aren't part of the club. In the recent history of federal funding of education research, if you were not connected with a center you had scant prospects of continuous funding for a serious program of research. We need much more capacity in the education research community than we currently enjoy. To get there, we need to open up our funding process to all interested and competent parties, including those who are not a part of the existing education research community and center structure.
