Jay P. Greene's Blog

(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.