A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Accomplishments

The Board's work can be defined by two periods. The first, from the initial meeting in March 1995 until the fall of 1996, covered a time when the Board faced a continuing series of demands that threatened the basic ability of OERI to continue its role in funding research and development. The second period, the years following 1996, is one in which the Board identified from its array of specific statutory responsibilities those major elements that are most crucial, then organized itself to fulfill those roles. It is now moving toward critical decision points resulting from its work.

The initial committee structure was designed to accommodate urgent funding cycles that focused the Board's attention during 1995 and 1996. A Board committee was formed to review the Department's proposed solicitation for research and development centers. The committee on standards was obliged to approve peer review standards that had to be in place before research centers could be funded. The regional educational laboratories also were up for a new cycle of funding, and a committee was established to review the solicitation for that.

During this period, Board members began to make an investment in their own learning about OERI's context. That investment continues. They have been briefed on OERI and other Department programs. They have visited WestEd in San Francisco and the National Center for Early Development and Learning at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. They have met with an array of individuals whose experience and insights have an important bearing on the duties of the Board. Andrew Porter, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research; Arthur Wise, president of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education; and Patricia Graham, president of the Spencer Foundation, participated in a workshop at the Board's second meeting. Members met with a panel of San Francisco Bay Area superintendents, and many other distinguished individuals and panels have participated in Board meetings and working groups since that occasion.

Also over the first year and a half, solicitations for research and development centers and for regional educational laboratories were approved, standards for review of grant and cooperative agreement proposals were approved, and the first Research Priorities Plan (published in December 1996) was developed with considerable Board involvement and likewise approved. During this time, the Board also conducted an extensive and public search for its Executive Director. Eve M. Bither assumed the position in June 1996.

Through the fall of 1996 and winter of 1997, Board members set aside time to think through their own views about the diverse responsibilities given to them in the law, their perceptions about their work over the first year and a half of their existence, and their preferences about how the Board's work should be conducted and the committee structures that would help them organize to carry out their role. In March 1997, the Board adopted a work plan and committee structure to focus its activities. Committees were built around the important enduring work of the Board in four areas: program, peer review and standards, the research and development system, and executive operations. These committees now serve to organize and direct the work of the Board.

The Board has viewed the December 1996 Research Priorities Plan, Building Knowledge for a Nation of Learners, as a statement of concerns, one that includes all of the program areas currently funded by OERI.

The purpose of its continuing efforts on program priorities now is to narrow the focus of attention to those issues that historically have been identified as most difficult and intractable in the education of the nation's children. There are several strands to these efforts currently under way.

First, the Board made use of the Research Priorities Plan, together with its own judgment, in its successful argument for concentrating on a few important areas with additional funds appropriated for fiscal year 1997, rather than spreading those funds across all areas. In the fall of 1996, Congress provided an unexpected $16 million add-on to the OERI appropriation. This came just after the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future made its recommendations for building teaching as a profession and greatly enhancing the capabilities of that profession so that children will learn more effectively. The Board called on the Secretary of the Department and the Assistant Secretary for OERI not to spread these appropriations across all of the OERI activities. Instead, they proposed allocations of the funds in a way that emphasized improvement of teaching, field-initiated research, and improved student learning in middle and high schools.

Second, the Board participated in discussions surrounding the voluntary national tests, in part in response to an inquiry from a member of Congress in an appropriation hearing. The views of various Board members about the voluntary test spanned a spectrum. This difficult issue was handled (with the assistance of Robert Linn, co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing) by developing a description of topics for a research agenda on national tests. The list, along with a letter, was sent to the President in July 1997 and urged research on the impact of the voluntary national tests on classroom practice, state standards, curriculum guides, and assessment systems.

Third, the Board has identified high achievement for all students as its overriding goal and has defined three possible approaches to pursue that end:

• identify factors that facilitate or that frustrate achievement gaps among social divisions (e.g., ethnicity, gender, language, social class);
• strengthen the professional competence of teachers; and
• improve knowledge and technology for assessments that can more accurately interpret achievement and better design effective interventions.

Fourth, to deepen their grasp on these issues, the Board has contracted with the National Academy of Education (NAE) to determine whether the three approaches listed above or others are the most appropriate areas for investigation and to define research questions that can direct the education research agenda. NAE will prepare a report to the Board that includes:

• priorities for education research that can contribute to ensuring high achievement for all students;
• research questions related to each priority;
• sequences of activities and resources needed, including technologies, to achieve the various research priority goals; and
• funding recommendations to accomplish these goals.

NAE has created three panels to carry out this investigation:

• critical transitions and the curricula and assessment practices that support them;
• professional development and teacher communities, including teacher roles in development of curriculum and assessment practices, and assessment of teaching quality; and
• strengthening the capacity for research that can contribute to educational practice and public policy.

NAE has asked each panel to distinguish areas

• where research findings could support productive work in applied research, policy and innovative practice;
• where there is a strong potential for advances of importance to education policy and practice, and
• topics that would require development of capacities that are now lacking.

The principal investigators for this contract with NAE are Ann L. Brown, University of California-Berkeley, and James G. Greeno, Stanford University. The panels are chaired by Hugh Mehan, Department of Sociology, University of California-San Diego (transitions); Magdalene Lampert, School of Education, University of Michigan (professional development), and Lauren Resnick, Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), University of Pittsburgh (research capacity). Three panel reports will be sent to the Board, and a final synthesis report is due to the Board in spring of 1999.

Fifth, in March 1998, the Board conducted a one-day workshop, entitled "Creating a New Research Agenda on the Race, Gender, and Class Impacts on Educational Achievement and Underachievement." This event brought together nationally known experts on these issues (John Stanfield, University of California-Davis, facilitator; Frank Bonilla, City University of New York; Eugene Cota-Robles, The College Board; Evelyn Hu DeHart, University of Colorado at Boulder; Vivian Gadsden, National Center on Fathers and Families; Antoine Garibaldi, Howard University; Edmund T. Gordon, University of Texas at Austin; Robert Hill, Morgan State University; Scott Miller, The College Board; Jessica Nembhard, Morgan State University; Charlene Rivera, George Washington University; and William Trent, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana).

The workshop examined issues of how race, gender, and class should be conceptualized in education research; identified educational research questions and an overall research agenda; considered theoretical and methodological criteria that should guide educational research; and examined ways that research can incorporate analyses to examine isolated and interactive effects of race, gender, and class.

The results of all these Board activities will be available for synthesis in 1999.

The Board has continued its work on quality standards for OERI. Standards have recently been approved for exemplary and promising practices (adding to the peer review standards adopted in 1995). Current activities on standards include the following:

• standards for evaluating the quality of OERI-supported projects came to the Board for approval at the September 1998 meeting; and
• publication of a brochure to announce all three sets of standards and provide information about their importance and contents to a wide public audience.

The Board commissioned an evaluation of the implementation of the OERI peer review standards as they were applied to the 1996 and 1997 national research center and field initiated studies competitions. The intent is to assist OERI and the Board in considering whether to make changes in the standards or their application. Specifically, the study was charged to examine:

• whether the standards are appropriate and useful,
• whether they contribute to fair and high quality competitions, and
• how the competitions have operated and might be improved. The study will conclude with recommendations on how to configure and maintain peer review panels.

The study, conducted by researcher Diane August, is guided by a panel consisting of Christopher T. Cross, Council for Basic Education (CBE); Carl Kaestle, Brown University; Sharon Lewis, the Council of Great City Schools; Penelope Peterson, Northwestern University; and Judith Sunley, National Science Foundation. The final report was received in October 1998.

Again, the Board will be in a position to make new contributions to OERI's work as a result of these efforts. Two issues in this area of long standing, both of them coming repeatedly from the experience of agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health in peer review procedures, have not yet been addressed by the Board. The first of these concerns the establishment of continuing or standing review panels. These would permit individuals to develop expertise in some cognizant area, and not only approve proposals but evaluate results, then make adjustments in subsequent rounds of grants competitions. The Department and OERI have discouraged this approach in favor of ad hoc panels for individual competitions. The idea continues to come forward when comparisons are made between OERI and other agencies. The second issue is the involvement of OERI staff in the peer review process. OERI regulations set out a very narrow set of responsibilities for staff, as compared with NSF, for example, where staff have key roles on aspects of grant decisions involving social utility versus scientific merit of proposals. Lacking such roles makes it more difficult to attract and hold competent OERI staff, individuals who are, and are viewed as, peers to researchers in academia.

Many responsibilities assigned to the Board nurture the system for conduct of research, development, and dissemination in education. For that reason, and recognizing that the responsibilities in this area would be continuing, the Board established a separate committee to direct its work. Several activities are underway, all relating to an initial report that was completed in the fall of 1998:

• Workshops have been held to present and discuss many aspects of the research and development system with the Board. Members have heard from Carl Kaestle, Brown University; Carol Johnson, Superintendent in Minneapolis; Jane Hannaway, Urban Institute; Robert Slavin, Johns Hopkins University; Karen Seashore Lewis, University of Minnesota; Michael Timpane, formerly Teachers College, Columbia and now Rand Corporation; Tom Glennan, Rand; Larry Rudner, ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation; Dena Stoner, Council for Educational Development and Research; Maris Vinovskis, University of Michigan; William Raub, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Science Policy, HHS; John Hollifield, Center for Social Organization of Schools; and Willis Hawley, College of Education, University of Maryland.
• At the Board's request, Maris Vinovskis has written a history of the education research and related activities of the U.S. Department of Education and its predecessors. Titled Changing Federal Strategies for Supporting Educational Research, Development, and Statistics, the Vinovskis paper covers a span from 1867 to the present, with emphasis on years since the establishment of NIE in 1972. The paper, which concludes with recommendations, has been widely circulated and a final version has been published.
• The Board has commissioned papers from American Institutes for Research/Mathtech on four aspects of the research, development, and dissemination (RD&D) system: a descriptive and analytic mapping of the existing system, not limited to OERI; the fit of the existing system capabilities in relation to the needs for education RD&D work identified by key stakeholders; a comparative analysis with RD&D in other parts of the federal government; and an analysis of the Department's role in knowledge building and information gathering. A synthesis paper in draft format came to the Board for review at the September 1998 meeting. This will provide candid assessments of the functioning of the current system, and realistic responses to the affects of stringent funding on the work of OERI's institutes. The intent of the Board is to begin laying out priorities for elements of an RD&D system that will be capable of conducting the work addressed by the Program Committee, and of performing in a high quality way to address problems for which research can be useful.

• In June 1998 the Board along with OERI sponsored a two-day meeting on the coordination of education research agenda planning. The purpose of the meeting was twofold: to bring together leaders and representatives from a dozen or more research planning efforts under way in federal agencies and professional organizations; and to connect those planning efforts with each other and with educators and policymakers who could both use education research results and who have responsibilities to develop future plans. Conference moderator Michael Timpane concluded that the conference identified several opportunities for collaborative work. These included strengthening capacity to identify priorities; establishing standards for research; synthesizing findings; strengthening the education research system; building connections across research, policy, practice, and the public; and shaping research planning responsibilities appropriate to principal agencies and institutions.

By early 1999, the Board will have significant new work for public release and for integration with the efforts of the Program Committee.

[Role of the Board]

[Prospects for the Future]