Introduction
Statement of Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement, Before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
FOR RELEASE: June 25, 2002
Speaker frequently deviates from prepared text
Contact: Dan Langan or David Thomas (202) 401-1576
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today regarding the reauthorization of research functions within the Department of Education.
The shared understanding of the Congress and the Administration about the role of research in educational reform was evidenced vividly in the recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). In that bill, passed by overwhelming majorities in both chambers and signed into law by the President on January 8, the phrase scientifically based research appears 110 times.
Scientifically based research will also be a component of reform in the upcoming reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The ESEA and the IDEA account for approximately $30 billion in annual federal expenditures within the Department of Education. Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, $30 billion is a lot of money. We all recognize that, historically, the huge annual investment in the education of disadvantaged students and students with disabilities has not achieved everything that was expected of it. For instance, in the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading, 40 percent of white 4th graders read at a proficient level, compared with only 12 percent of African-American students. In some urban school districts that serve predominantly disadvantaged children, 70 percent of 4th graders cannot read at even the basic level. Nothing has changed in the last decade in these statistics, and the overall gap between the highest and lowest performing students has actually increased in some subjects.
If scientifically based research is going to be the key to reform of our most important federal education programs, then we had better make sure that the federal office with the principal responsibility for generating that research has the tools it needs to get the job done. That is what we are here today to address.
In facing that task, I want this Committee to understand that we are dealing not only with gaps in student achievement, but also gaps in scientific knowledge. Consider some of the major program areas in the ESEA in which Congress instructed that funding decisions and practice should adhere to scientifically based research. These include the core academic subjects of reading, mathematics, and science, schoolwide reform models, early literacy programs in preschools, professional development of teachers, supplementary educational services, education of gifted and talented students, character education, educational technology, and programs for safe and drug-free schools, among others.
We have a substantial and persuasive research base in only one of these topics, learning how to read. However, even within reading, the research becomes substantially thinner when we move down the developmental range from learning to read in early elementary school to getting ready to read in the preschool period, and up the developmental range from learning to read in elementary school to reading to learn, otherwise known as reading comprehension, at later points in schooling. In the other core academic subjects of math and science, research has not progressed to a level at which it is possible to make strong statements about which approaches produce the strongest effects on academic achievement for which children in which circumstances. In the education and professional development of teachers, we don't have research to answer dozens of fundamental policy issues about how to best train and sustain teachers in order to enhance student learning. The ESEA authorizes supplementary educational services, such as after-school tutoring, for children in failing schools. Which tutoring programs work best for which types of academic skill deficits? Sorry, we don't know. How about comprehensive school reform? The ESEA instructs local educational agencies to consider successful external models and to develop an approach to reform of their school that is derived from scientifically based research. By one count, there are well over 100 comprehensive school reform models from which a local educational agency might choose. Which of these are successful? That is hard to say, because only a few have been subjected to research, and much of that research isn't sufficiently rigorous to permit strong conclusions about the effects of the models compared to business as usual, much less compared to each other.
My point, and I apologize for making it repetitiously, is that there is a lot we don't know about how learners learn and how to deliver instruction effectively.
The extent of our ignorance is masked by a "folk wisdom" of education based on the experience of human beings over the millennia in passing information and skills from one generation to the next. This folk wisdom employs unsystematic techniques. It doesn't demand scientific knowledge of mechanisms of learning or organizational principles or social processes. It is inefficient, and it is hit or miss. It lets us muddle through when the tasks to be learned are simple, or in a highly elitist system in which we only expect those with the most talent and most cultural support to learn advanced skills. But it fails when the tasks to be learned are complex or when we expect that no child will be left behind. The tasks to be learned in a 21st century economy are without a doubt complex, and we have rightly decided that our education system must serve all learners well. We have to do better than we have done in the past.
Consider the analogy of medicine. For thousands of years, folk remedies have been used to cure disease or relieve symptoms. But the successes of modern medicine have emerged in the last 75 years and derive from advances in the sciences of physiology and biochemistry that allowed us to understand the mechanisms of disease, and from the wide use of randomized clinical trials to determine which prevention and treatment approaches drawn from these sciences work as intended.
Or consider the analogy of agriculture. For thousands of years, humans barely managed to avoid starvation by using agricultural methods that were passed from generation to generation. The abundance of inexpensive and nutritious foods that can be found at any neighborhood grocery store today results from agricultural practice that has moved from reliance on folk wisdom to reliance on science.
When we come to education, the picture is different. The National Research Council has concluded that "the world of education, unlike defense, health care, or industrial production, does not rest on a strong research base. In no other field are personal experience and ideology so frequently relied on to make policy choices, and in no other field is the research base so inadequate and little used." At the same time, the National Research Council has concluded that scientific inquiry in education is at its core the same as in all other fields. In other words, the core principles of scientific inquiry are as relevant for education as they are for medicine. There is every reason to believe that, if we invest in the education sciences and develop mechanisms to encourage evidence-based practice, we will see progress and transformation in education of the same order of magnitude as we have seen in medicine and agriculture. I believe we are at the dawn of exactly that process, and it is very exciting.
How quickly will the transformation of education into an evidence-based field occur? The actions of this Committee and the Congress as it considers the reauthorization of the research functions in the Department of Education will have a lot to do with the answer to that question.
A number of significant changes are necessary so that we can operate consistently with the standards of a science-based research agency and so that the research, evaluation, and statistical activities we fund lead to solving problems and answering questions of high relevance to education policy.
Before assuming my current position, I spent 31 years conducting research on children's learning. I am proud to say that some of that research has proven useful to educators and parents. For the last 15 months, I have focused exclusively on OERI, first as a consultant to the Department, and since July of last year as Assistant Secretary for Research and Improvement. My testimony today is informed both by my background as a practicing scientist and by my experiences to date in leading OERI.
I believe that we have made substantial progress in OERI over the last year. To be specific, we have launched three major new cross-cutting research initiatives--in reading comprehension, preschool curriculum, and learning in the classroom; we have hired a number of key personnel; we have brought the responsibility for the evaluation of the impact of federal education programs into OERI and have designed a new generation of evaluations that will use scientifically rigorous randomized trials to provide definitive evidence of what works and what doesn't; we have helped the Department move towards a greater reliance on evidence in its delivery of programs; we have implemented new procedures for peer review of applications for research funding that are modeled on those used at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and that are working very well to help us select only the very best proposals for funding; we have established a What Works Clearinghouse, which will vet the evidence from research on education and make it available to decision-makers in easily understood forms; and we have put forward to the Congress as part of the President's FY '03 budget request an unprecedented and badly needed 44 percent increase in funding for our research functions and a 12 percent increase in funding for our statistics functions. I believe we have also created a positive buzz in the research community about the new OERI that helps us attract strong applications and that enhances the participation of distinguished scientists in our planning and review processes.
If you are willing to take my description of these successes at face value, you might be tempted to draw the conclusion that the current OERI statute doesn't need fixing. Why not report out of this committee a bill that is pretty much the same as current law?
Let me tell you why not: A lot of what we have accomplished in the last year has been much more difficult than it should have been because of the current statute. Further, I have been operating with a remarkable degree of support from within the Department, the Administration, and Congress, and from many non-federal organizations that are eager to see the federal education research agency revitalized. Appreciative as I am for that support, it is natural for enthusiasms to wax and wane. Further, I'm quite concerned that the alternative to progress will be backsliding and entropy rather than the status quo. We need an authorizing statute under which the Department's research agency can develop and sustain a cumulative research program, and we need it this year.
Here are some major problems in the current statute that should be corrected in reauthorization.