More Special Ed

June 5, 2008

My earlier post on Response to Intervention and special education has prompted discussions on Joanne Jacobs’ site and at Flypaper.  I’m struck by how frequently discussions of special education contain claims that are completely at odds with the evidence, but that people seem to prefer repeating. 

This is the central theme of the Education Myths book and there is a chapter in the book that specifically addresses special education.  Despite current and past efforts to dispel some common false claims (myths) about special ed, they just keep going.  As NYC Educator wrote in a comment, “Greene can argue all he likes, but…” [I’ll just go ahead and repeat the claim that he just debunked.]   You can have your facts, say the myth-makers, but I know what’s really true.

Sigh.

Just to briefly review the unsubstantiated and false claims that have come up in this current discussion:

1) Parents are the driving force behind over-identification of disabilities.  (Not true. If parents were the driving force, why are special education enrollments so sensitive to financial incentives facing schools?)

2) External developments, such as improving medical care for premies, deinstitutionalization, and socio-economic forces, account for a large part of rising special ed costs.  (Not true.  The number of premies and deinstitutionalized students pales in comparison to the growth in special ed, which has almost entirely occurred in SLD.  And mental retardation has been declining and total severe disabilities have remained flat over time, contrary to what one would expect if premies and deinstitutionalization were at work.  And poverty cannot, by definition, be the cause of a disability.)

3) Special education students are typically found in self-contained classes with tiny class sizes and high costs. (Not true.  Most disabled students, especially those with SLD, spend a majority of their day in regular classrooms.  Services for most disabled students consist of some accommodations in their regular classroom or a little pull-out, small group instruction.  These services are not dramatically different in character or cost than what is provided to lagging students who are not classified as disabled.)

I’ve attempted to respond to each false claim where it was posted and these topics were previously covered in Education Myths, so I won’t repeat the complete refutations here.  Instead, I’d like to speculate about why people are repeatedly drawn to myths about special education.  Even normally smart and sensible people, including some very good ed reformers, are confident about claims that they cannot empirically support and that most evidence contradicts.  Why?

First, many ed policy wonks live in the DC area and their perceptions of special ed are distorted by the highly exceptional practices in the District.  For example, many people think that private placement, the education of disabled students in private schools at public expense, is a common and financially burdensome arrangement.  In fact, there are only 88,156 such students in the entire country out of almost 50 million students in public schools.  But in DC private placement is almost 17 times more likely than in the rest of the country.  DC is just different (for a variety of reasons) but people feel comfortable generalizing from their immediate experience.

Second, many ed policy wonks run in relatively elite circles.  They know or have heard of savvy parents who have extracted unreasonable services from the public schools.  But as I mentioned above, the evidence contradicts the claim that special ed placements are driven primarily by parents.  Most people aren’t like the ones who went to your selective college, live in your comfortable neighborhood, or who blog about education policy.

Third, school leaders and educators have a vested interest in complaining about the financial burdens of special education or the unreasonable demands of parents.  But newspapers treat their claims as if they were those of disinterested experts.  If the local superintendent says that special education costs are threatening what can be provided in general education or that parents are to blame for a rise in special ed enrollments, it must be so.

Fourth, the hard reality is that most people are primarily interested in their own children.  If they are led to believe that special education is going to drain resources from their non-disabled kids, they want to stop that.  Since this is what they hear from school leaders and the news, they learn to resent special education.  No one repeats that extra money for Title I kids drains money from their children (which is as true as for special ed), so they don’t resist programs for poor and minority students to the same degree.

Fifth, there is a false image in some people’s heads that disabled kids are basically basket cases and that money spent on them is money wasted.  We even see this, to some degree, in school spending analyses by people like Richard Rothstein, who argue that special ed costs should be excluded when examining increases in expenditures over time and the relationship to student achievement.  It’s as if they assume that that money is poured into a black hole and couldn’t possibly improve student outcomes.  Crusty, conservative reformers are also drawn to this black hole view.  Don’t waste the money on losers, they think but don’t quite say.  Survival of the fittest!

Of course, these explanations for the extra prevalence of myths about special education are just speculation.  I don’t have evidence to prove them.  But I do have evidence debunking a number of false claims that are regularly made about special education.  It would be a shame if smart people ignore the systematic evidence and repeat myths because they trust their direct experience and prior prejudices more than facts.  This is why we have systematic evidence — to check the errors that regularly occur from following one’s gut.

13 Comments | special ed | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Make Every Day Count

June 3, 2008

In Arkansas, as in many states, standardized tests are given well before the end of the school year.  This year the augmented benchmarks for grades 3 through 8 were administered April 13-17 and the “end of course exams” for geometry, algebra, and biology were given April 21-29.  Apparently the end of the course occurs 6 weeks before school breaks for the summer.

After the tests are done academic work grinds to a halt.  Instead, academic content is increasingly replaced with field days, watching movies in school, parties, etc… as the end of the year approaches.

Don’t get me wrong, field days, watching movies, parties, etc… all have their place in a healthy school environment.  It’s just odd that some educators who so often complain that testing narrows the curriculum and prevents them from pursuing the higher order instruction they really want seem at a loss about what to do when they no longer have the test bearing down on them.  One would think that they would use those last 6 to 8 weeks to find their inner Alfie Kohn.  Instead, a lot of it is used as play time.

Given how important time spent on instruction is to academic achievement, it would be great if we made full use of the academic year.  Perhaps we can push back the tests closer to the real end of the school year.  I know that grading tests, especially with open-ended items, is very slow.  But frankly open-ended items add nothing to the predictive power of standardized tests, so eliminating that would allow faster grading, later testing, and fewer wasted days.

20 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Responding to Response to Intervention

June 2, 2008

(Editorial Note — See also follow-up post here)

Like many well-meaning instructional reforms, Response to Intervention (RTI) is likely to fail if it is not coupled with other reforms that address the perverse incentives blocking its proper implementation.

The idea behind RTI is that we could avoid placing many students in special education if only we provided them with well-designed instructional approaches in the early grades.  The huge increase in special education enrollments consists almost entirely of growth in Specific Learning Disability (SLD), which is an ambiguous category that is difficult for practitioners to diagnose properly.  Almost any student with a normal range IQ but sub-par achievement could be labeled as SLD.  But of course, students may lag in their achievement because they have been poorly taught, not because they have a problem processing information, as is characteristic of a true SLD.  Schools have a variety of incentives to discount the former explanation and instead push students into special ed.

RTI is a federally-backed program that attempts to address this problem by allowing schools to divert 15% of their special education money into well-designed instructional programs for the early grades.  If students are taught well, they won’t be lagging academically and so will not end up being identified as disabled.

This all sounds great, but it is almost certainly doomed to failure if we do not also address why schools were not previously providing well-designed instruction in early grades or why they are so motivated to identify students as disabled.  Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades.  Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.  Even if we thought that the problem was that schools were unaware of the effective approaches that RTI offers, we have no reason to believe that schools will truly adopt or effectively implement those strategies. 

It is a a seductive but entirely mistaken reform approach to believe that schools are eagerly awaiting to be told by the federal government or philanthropists how to teach effectively but are just lacking the critical resources and knowledge to do it.  Schools already hire certified professionals who have been exposed to countless hours of pre-service and in-service training.  Why would we think that the only reason that they are failing to employ an effective technique is because they are unaware of it?  And with school budgets increasing every year, why would we think that the next bit of money is the one that they finally need to pursue effective strategies?

Instead, we have to recognize that educators have reasons for doing what they are doing.  They generally believe that the techniques they’ve adopted are effective, even if they aren’t.  Getting them to switch to something else takes more than just offering it to them.  This is especially the case when they’ve seen untold failed instructional fads come their way.  They’ve learned to tuck their heads down and do what they think works based on their own limited experience and inertia. 

RTI does nothing to address these barriers to instructional reform.  In addition, it does nothing to address the incentives that schools have to place students in special education.  In most states schools receive additional funding when a student is identified as disabled.  If a student is lagging academically and the school would have to devote some resources to helping that student catch-up, the school could either choose to say “my bad” and pay for those extra resources out of their existing budget, or they could say that the student is disabled and get additional money to help that student catch-up.  Of course, they have strong financial incentives to choose the latter explanation.  Research that I’ve done with Greg Forster and that Julie Cullen at UC San Diego has done, confirms that these positive financial incentives play a large role in the growth of special education.  That is, special education is growing, in large part, because we reward schools financially for increasing their special ed enrollment.

I know that many people claim that special education is a horrible financial burden on schools because it costs far more than the subsidies they receive.  But people who say this are either simply advocating for more subsidies or don’t properly understand what a “cost” is.  A cost is an expenditure that one would not otherwise make.  Simply showing that more is spent on special education students than subsidies received does not prove that the subsidy is less than the cost of identifying a student as disabled.  More is spent on students lagging academically whether they are identified as disabled or not. 

The positive financial incentive for identifying students as disabled exists when the subsidy is greater than the expenditure required by the special ed label beyond what would have been spent on that student anyway.  Because proper accounting is almost entirely absent in education, it is difficult to measure these additional costs directly.  But from the research showing the response to financial incentives, we know that there is often a financial reward for putting students in special education.

I don’t mean to suggest that educators are cynically gaming the school finance system or are even aware of its details.  My point is that the systems that school districts have adopted for the evaluation and identification of disabilities are shaped by these financial incentives so that even well-meaning practitioners will tend to over-identify disabilities when there are financial rewards for doing so.

Of course, RTI does nothing to address these financial incentives for increasing special ed enrollments.  In fact, it may contribute to those perverse incentives because schools are rewarded even more by placing more students in special education because they now get to divert 15% of that money for general education, which is essentially fungible.  And to make matters worse, diverting 15% of special education money away from disabled students may short-change truly disabled students who need those resources.

I’m sure that the people backing RTI are completely sincere in their confidence that we could prevent disabilities (and save money) if only we had proper instruction.  But wishing does not make that happen.  Reformers need to stay focused on combining promising instructional reforms with fixing the perverse incentive systems that undermine those instructional approaches. 

The incentive reforms should include changing the process by which we provide financial subsidies so that there are not strong rewards for over-identification of disabilities.  One way to do that is to provide vouchers for students with disabilities equal to the full value of what is spent on them in public schools.  That way schools would have to think twice before identifying a student as disabled.  Sure, they’ll get extra resources if they put a kid in special ed, but they also risk having that student walk out the door with all of his or her resources.  It places a check on perverse financial incentives. 

RTI with special ed vouchers could be a winning combination.  RTI by itself is just increasing federal subsidies for the status quo.

28 Comments | instructional reform, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Grad Rates Higher in Milwaukee Voucher Program

May 31, 2008

In case anyone missed the release of this study this week, Rob Warren of the University of Minnesota has a new study comparing high school graduation rates in Milwaukee’s voucher program and public schools.  The bottom line is that students graduate at much higher rates in the voucher program. 

Warren is careful to emphasize that he cannot draw causal inferences from this work.  That is, the voucher students graduate at higher rates than public students, but he can’t say whether the voucher program caused their higher graduation rate.  That kind of conclusion can only be drawn from a study that compares apples to apples.  With Pat Wolf I am involved in an evaluation that will be able to produce a graduation rate comparison of matched samples of voucher and public students, but results are still a few years down the road.

1 Comment | research reports, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Get Lost 5

May 30, 2008

 

 

 

 

 

The season finale did not disappoint.  I’ll sing its praises but first let me vent a complaint.

Jack’s decision to get the Oceanic six to lie about the island makes no sense.  He justifies the decision by citing the strength of the conspiracy to create a false Oceanic crash site in which they are all supposed to be dead.  But the first law of conspiracies is that you cease to be a threat once you tell as many people as possible as much as you know.  If you’ve already spilled all of the beans, then the conspiracy gains nothing by killing you.  Anyone trapped in a John Grisham novel would do well to keep this law in mind. 

I hope they provide additional justification for this decision, but keeping the secrets of the island does nothing to protect them or the people on the island.  Bad guys can and still do target them.  And because they don’t know where the island is, keeping secrets is not needed to protect the people left there.

Now on to the good stuff.  We now have some sense of why Jack wants to go back to the island — Locke has told him that his friends there are in trouble.  And now that Locke is dead he feels responsible, both for Locke’s death (in all likelihood) and for those remaining on the island. 

We also know why Kate does not want to go back.  She’s having dreams of Claire warning her not to bring Aaron back.  This is consistent with my earlier expressed theory that Aaron is supposed to be the next leader and there is a struggle about whether he should assume that role or not.

The struggle over whether they should return or not will likely be a main plot for next season.  One other interesting angle on Ben’s declaration that they all need to return is that he may use that to find Desmond and then Penny so that he can take his revenge on Charles Widmore by killing his daughter.  (hat tip to Greg for this observation) 

The discovery that Charlotte was previously on the island and may have even been born there seems quite important, especially given the fact that pregnant women seem to die before they can give birth. 

I’m assuming that Michael is dead and probably so is Jin (although he could have somehow been blown from the deck).  Having Christian Shepherd appear to Michael telling him that he could go was meant, I think,  to say that his purpose for the island was now done and he could die.

That vision strengthens the show’s reliance on mysticism, but the show also took steps to stay within the framework of sci-fi by revealing the negatively charged exotic material that moves the island (as well as bunnies).  It’s like dilithium crystals on Star Trek.  We don’t know how they work, but there is some physical substance that could account for a large chunk of the magic.

Now that the show is on hiatus for a few months, we’ll have to find some other distraction for Friday afternoons, but that shouldn’t be hard.  We are chock-full of distractions.

8 Comments | Lost | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

More Mascot Mania

May 27, 2008

To follow-up on my post Monday on high school mascots, I have now assembled a fairly comprehensive national data set of high school mascot names.  In total I have 19,786 high school mascot names from a school athletics site called MaxPreps.  According the the US Dept of Ed’s Digest of Education Statistics there 23,800 secondary schools, not all of which have a mascot.

It will take me a little while to analyze it, but here are some things that stand out right away:

For good or bad, political correctness has not overtaken high school mascot names  There are still 430 schools whose mascot is the “Indians,” 72 still called “Redskins,” and 209 still called “Crusaders.”  There are 348 “Devil” mascots compared to only 18 “Angels.”

The national names, like those that I examined more closely in Texas, appear to be mostly animal mascots.  Among those predator birds and big cats predominate.  Among human mascots, the most common are Indian names (of some sort), Raiders, Pirates, Warriors, etc…  Whether animal or human, mascots tends to have a fierce and intimidating quality. 

One of the more frightening is the Marshall High School “Lawyers” from Cleveland, Ohio.  Just imagine chants of “Go Lawyers” as the football team charges down the field.

The question that I have not yet been able to explore is whether newly selected mascots differ from ones selected many years ago.  It may well be that new mascots are much more PC, while the non-PC names atrophy over time as those schools close.

8 Comments | civic values | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Mascot Mania

May 26, 2008

The names we choose matter.  When we name our children, or name a public school, or name a public park or courthouse — we are signaling what is important to us.  Once names are given, there is an opportunity for people to learn about the values those names represent and promote those values in the world.   

With Brian Kisida and Jonathan Butcher, I have already analyzed patterns and trends in what we name public schools.  We found a trend away from naming schools after people, in general, and presidents, in particular.  Instead, schools are increasingly receiving names that sounds more like herbal teas or day spas — Whispering Winds, Hawks Bluff, Desert Mesa, etc… 

As you observe this Memorial Day remember that there are more public schools in Florida named after manatees than George Washington.

Now I am turning my attention to school mascots.  I understand that mascot names aren’t taken very seriously and are often chosen without much deliberation or care.  But even something trivial, like what we name our pets or the mascot names we adopt says something about us.  Besides, this is a bit of fun.

I found a fairly complete list of mascot names for schools in Texas.  The website has 1,363 mascots and there are about 2,000 secondary schools in Texas.  If anyone knows of other databases of mascots, please let me know.

A quick analysis of the names reveals a few things.  First, 71% of the mascots are animals, 25% are people, and the remainder are something else, like tornadoes or rockets. 

Second, Indian mascots have not gone away.  Almost 15% of the people mascots are related to Indians, including 36 actually named Indians, 5 Chiefs or Chieftains,  2 Apaches, 2 Braves, 2 Comanches, 2 Redskins, 1 Cherokee, and 1 Kiowas.  There are only 14 Cowboys.

Third, a significant number of both people and animal mascots are fierce and bellicose.  No pacifism here.  There are 35 Pirates, 24 Warriors, 20 Raiders, 12 Rebels, 10 Vikings, 9 Crusaders, etc…  Among animals 76 Tigers, 66 Panthers, 34 Hornets, 23 Bears, etc…  Although we do have some pretty gentle sounding mascots, like 1 Unicorns, 1 Praying Hands, 1 Daisies, and 1 Doves.

Fourth, devils outnumber angels by 5 to 3.  Alert the Praying Hands.

Others have collected funny mascot names from around the country.  But I think there is something serious here beyond the funny names.  From Texas mascots we see that people continue to find benefit in fierce competition.  They believe the qualities of a fierce competitor can be found in animals, but also in Native American names, natural phenomena (such as Tornadoes, Cyclones and Blizzards), and in tools (such as Rockets, Javelins, and Hammers).

Periodically some of these mascot names provoke conflict over whether they promote the proper values.  But there seems to be a broad consensus that the martial spirit of fierce mascot names is desirable.  Just ask the Daisies when they have to play the Conquistadors.

6 Comments | civic values | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Strawman — er, I mean — Strawperson

May 22, 2008

The American Association of University Women released a report this week attempting to debunk concerns that have been raised about educational outcomes for boys.  The AAUW report received significant press coverage, including articles in the WSJ and NYT. 

But the AAUW report simply debunks a strawman — er, I mean — strawperson.  The report defines its opponents in this way: “many people remain uncomfortable with the educational and professional advances of girls and women, especially when they threaten to outdistance their male peers.”  Really?  What experts or policymakers have articulated that view?  The report never identifies or quotes its opponents, so we left with only the Scarecrow as our imaginary adversary.

Once this stawperson is built, it’s easy for the report to knock it down.  The authors argue that there’s no “boy crisis” because boys have not declined or have made gradual gains in educational outcomes over the last few decades.  And the gap between outcomes for girls and boys has not grown significantly larger. 

This is all true, as far as it goes, but it does not address the actual claims that are made about problems with the education of boys.  For example, Christina Hoff Sommers’ The War Against Boys claims: “It’s a bad time to be a boy in America… Girls are outperforming boys academically, and girls’ self-esteem is no different from boys’. Boys lag behind girls in reading and writing ability, and they are less likely to go to college.”  Sommers doesn’t say that boys are getting worse or that the gap with girls is growing.  She only says that boys are under-performing and deserve greater attention. 

Nothing in the new AAUW report refutes those claims.  In fact, the evidence in the report clearly supports Sommers’ thesis.  If we look at 17-year-olds, who are the end-product of our K-12 system, we find that boys trail girls by 14 points on the most recent administration of the Long-Term NAEP in 2004 (See Figure 1 in AAUW).  In 1971 boys trailed by 12 points.  And in 2004 boys were 1 point lower than they were in 1971. 

In math the historic advantage that boys have had is disappearing.  In 1978 17-year-old boys led girls by 7 points on the math NAEP, while in 2004 they led by 3 points.  (See Figure 2 in AAUW)  Both boys and girls made small improvements since 1978, but none since 1973.

Boys also clearly lag girls in high school graduation rates.  According to a study I did with Marcus Winters, 65% of the boys in the class of 2003 graduated with a regular diploma versus 72% of girls.  Boys also lag girls in the rate at which they attend and graduate from college.  While boys exceed girls in going to prison, suicide, and violent deaths.

It takes extraordinary effort by the AAUW authors to spin all of this as refuting a boy crisis.  They focus on how the gap is not always growing larger and that boys are sometimes making gains along with girls.  They also try to divert attention by saying that the gaps by race/ethnicity and income are more severe.  But no amount of spinning can obscure the basic fact that boys are doing quite poorly in our educational system and deserve some extra attention.

To check out what other bloggers are saying on this report see Joanne Jacobs, and just this morning, Carrie Lukas in National Review Online.

3 Comments | methodology, research reports | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Devil’s in the Implementation

May 13, 2008

What went wrong with Reading First?  Don’t blame the evaluation.  Its regression discontinuity design approximates a random assignment experiment — the gold standard of research designs.  It allows us to know with confidence the effect of Reading First on the marginal adopter’s reading achievement.  We can’t assess the effect of Reading First on the first adopters or those who were rated as most in need, but a broadly useful program should have effects beyond those most eager or most desperate.  Reid Lyon is correct in noting that the evaluation did not address everything that we want to know.  And it is always possible that the program needs more time to show results.  But so far we have a null result.

We’re left with two possible explanations.  Either Reading First is conceptually mistaken or it was improperly implemented.  We have good reason to believe that it is the latter.  The science behind Reading First is pretty solid.  A greater emphasis on phonics seems to have a particularly beneficial effect on students from disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Reading First is probably the right idea but as with almost every instructional reform the devil is in the implementation.  The problem is that educators have few incentives to embrace and properly apply new instructional ideas.  It’s not that educators are uninterested in improving instructional approaches.  The problem is that they have often developed approaches from their own experience and training that they think works and are very skeptical of the latest great thing thrown their way.  Any theory of reform that is based on the assumption that educators are eagerly awaiting being informed of what works and will gladly do it once they are told is incredibly naive. 

Even if we could find the right techniques, the difficulty is in getting educators to adopt it and implement it properly.  This is so difficult because teachers don’t experience any meaningful consequences if they properly implement an instructional reform or if they don’t.  And since most teachers have developed routines with which they are comfortable and that they believe are effective, getting them to do something else without any real carrots or sticks is like getting children to eat spinach merely by suggesting it.  You can tell them that it’s really good for them, but they’d rather stick with the familiar mac and cheese.

The evaluation helps confirm that the problem was in implementation.  The differences between the treatment and control groups in time spent on phonics were very small.  And the treatment group was doing far less than the program has planned.  Similar problems have plagues other instructional reforms.  For example, see Mathematica’s evaluation of technology in the classroom, where usage of the technology by the treatment groups was only marginally greater than the control group.  Or see SRI’s evaluation of Following the Leaders, where the treatment group similarly barely used the intervention.  It should come as no surprise that the medicine doesn’t work if people won’t take their pills.

The solution that is usually offered when educators fail to implement an instructional reform is that we need to improve professional development so that they learn better how wonderful the intervention is and why/how they should use it.  Call it education disease — the solution to all problems is more education.  It’s an infinite regress.

Instead the obvious solution is that we have to address the incentives that educators have to adopt and properly implement effective instructional reforms.  Either the direct incentives of accountability with real consequences for teachers (like merit pay or job security) or the indirect incentives of market-based reforms (like school choice) would sharpen educators’ efforts in this regard.

This is why instructional reforms and incentive reforms have to go hand-in-hand.  Educators need to have effective ideas of what to do and they have to have the proper incentives to adopt and implement those effective ideas.  That’s also why pitting instructional reform against incentive reform makes no sense.  We need both.

2 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Ask Reid Lyon

May 13, 2008

(Guest Post by Reid Lyon)

“How did scientific research become influential in guiding federal education ‎policy given the field’s historical reliance on ideology, untested ‎assumptions, anecdotes, and superstition to inform both policy and practice?‎”

It has not been an easy journey. In fact it’s like getting a root canal every other week.  What makes it tough is that you are always bumping up against the anti-scientific thinking that has had a misguided influence on the perceived value of research throughout the history of education and increasingly in the past two decades. Many researchers have tried to infuse scientific research into education policy over the years but it never gained political traction. Jeanne Chall gave her career to this cause, but the political will was never there.  Many at the policy level rarely listened to her, much less took her advice.  Chall would tell me frequently that by not basing reading instruction on research we do grave harm to the students education seeks to serve. I repeated her wisdom every time I testified before congressional committees. I also repeated myself time and again that education like other sectors that serve the public, must have reliable information about what works, why it works, and how it works. The alternative was to basically throw mud against a wall and see what sticks – a practice in place for a very long time.  I would argue that scientific research and dissemination of reliable information to the educational community is non-negotiable given that all sectors of a productive society depend on an educated workforce. To be sure, many in the education community sure got medieval on me for holding to this position.

But logic, congressional testimony, research syntheses, or policy papers were not going to change the culture in education which had reinforced an “everything and anything goes” spirit for the past century. Infusing research into policy and practice was going to take strong  support from  a senior  member or members of congress who could argue the need in a compelling way.  Bill Goodling, past chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, did just that and in 1996 began to support the concept of “research-based education”.  Goodling was a past educator and was floored when he began to delve into the fact that millions of kids could not read.  His staff learned that the NIH had been studying reading development and reading difficulties since 1965 so they called me in early 1996 to brief the chairman on what we knew about reading from a research standpoint.  At that time, I directed the NICHD Reading Research program at the NIH. During the briefing, he was literally taken aback to learn that NICHD/NIH had studied over 40,000 good and not so good readers, many of them over time, and we had a good idea of what it took to learn to read and what to do about reading difficulties. He could not understand why there was such a massive gap between what research had demonstrated vis-à-vis reading development and instruction and what was actually taught to teachers and  implemented in schools. 

1996 turned out to be a pretty important year in bringing the massive reading failure issue before the public and mobilizing some scientific efforts. It was also an important year for laying the foundation for research-based education policy as it is reflected in federal legislation today.  President Clinton called attention to the tragedy of reading failure in his State of the Union address that year.  His attention to the issue clearly put the problem on congressional radar screens.  In the same year, the Department of Education and the NICHD supported the convening of a National Research Council (NRC) panel to synthesize and summarize research on the prevention of reading difficulties.  Interestingly, at the same time, state leaders were becoming interested in the “research to policy and practice issue”.  Interestingly, in 1996, then Texas governor George Bush asked me and members of several strong research teams in Texas and around the country to brief him on how scientific research in reading could help reduce reading failure in Texas. In one of the meetings he asked a pretty prescient question about how scientific research could help kids whose first language was Spanish to learn to listen, speak, read, and write in English.  This question actually gave birth to the NICHD national “Spanish to English” study carried out in multiple sites across the country.

 But during that year it was Goodling and his staff who went to work on the specifics and the need to educate other congressional members not only about the drastic need to address the reading issue, but to emphasize the role of scientific research in solving educational problems.  He and his staff devoted substantial time in 1996 reviewing the NICHD reading research. In early 1997, he and his counterparts in the senate held hearings on literacy development and the role of scientific research in developing and implementing effective instructional practices. It came as a surprise to me that in my testimony that year before both House and Senate committees, members asked about research on reading and how it could help guide policy and practice.  Their interest in using scientific research to guide  practice and policies would later extend to other education programs beyond reading as I was asked to cover the issue in testimony on Title I, Head Start, and IDEA re-authorizations which took place over the next 9 years.  And Goodling was the first legislator to formally infuse scientific research in reading into a federal education program.  In 1998, He sponsored the Reading Excellence Act, which for the first time required that federal funding be contingent on states and local districts using scientifically based programs.

To further underscore the interest and commitment that congress had in using research to guide federal education policy, Senator Thad Cochran and Representative Anne Northup asked the NICHD in 1998 to convene a National Reading Panel (NRP) to build on the findings of the 1996 NRC panel on preventing reading difficulties in young children.  The NRP was tasked to undertake a review of research on reading instruction that would identify the types of programs and principles that were most effective in improving reading proficiency.  While the NRC and NRP reports were initiated and published during the Clinton administration, the Bush administration used the findings not only to craft Reading First but to serve as an example of the overarching principle that educational policy and instructional practices should be predicated on research.  From this principal evolved the established of the Institute of Educational Sciences, the NRC Report on “Scientific Research in Education”, the Partnership for Reading which served as a resources to disseminate scientific research findings, and the What Works Clearing House.  Private groups such as the Council for Excellence in Government, which established the Coalition for Evidence Based Policy,  began to contribute to this effort as well.

If you take all of this together, the recent influx of educational science into policy came about through a concerted effort to solve a national reading problem. Using research to guide educational policy and program development has now been extended far beyond reading.   A number of actions such as congressional hearings, funding of research reports on science in education, requiring federal funds be contingent on the use of research-based programs and approaches, passing legislation such as the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, and building a federal infrastructure which, by its inclusion of the Institute of Educational Sciences and the What Works Clearing House, explicitly sent the message that research-based policies and programs were the rule, not the exception.  It is the case that much of the integration of actions and events was strategic and designed to provide a role for scientific research in education.  A research to policy and practice culture had to be strengthened through federal legislation and in the scientific infrastructure within the Department of Education. 

Time will tell if the gains made in using research to guide education policy will last.  History tells us that education is impatient and subject to fads, superstition, anecdotes, and the next magic bullet.  To be sure, education is more political than scientific and subject to all the negatives that the political world brings but few of the positives. And many do not understand that by its cannons, evidence is apolitical.  There is a tendency to forget that research is not only essential for informing policy but critical for improving policies and programs once in place. But trial and error has become a habit in education and it will take real courage and persistence to overcome that.  In a sense, the world of education policy is  like a slinky–it can expand to take new steps, but it ultimately recoils back to its original configuration.   All this said, I am optimistic.

12 Comments | instructional reform, methodology, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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