I am actually letting my email program reproduce the earlier postings on
this below, since it's been a while ...
I was just at the Learning Sciences conference where these issues were much
discussed, with much disgust.
It's important to be clear that the current US administration is only using
"scientific rigor" as a smokescreen for seeking favor with small groups of
ultra-conservative voters who are influential in the Republican party ...
what they really want to do, and insiders are very clear about this, is to
keep funding away from education research that would conflict with their
conservative agenda ... particularly socioculturally based research that
argues for cultural diversity and changes in political priorities for
educational funding based on social justice considerations. These people
will not pay any attention to research that is "rigorous" by their
out-of-date criteria if it does not also agree with their political agendas.
During the last, similar administration (not Bush, Sr., but Reagan), we saw
something of the same approach, an effort to mobilize research in favor of
political agendas in education. I did a critique of that effort as an
example of technocratic discourse and showed how the research itself was
misused and distorted when it was made to serve policy/political ends. (A
version of this forms a chapter in my book Textual Politics.) In that case,
however, other researchers provided contrary results and there was a war of
the experts that resulted more or less in stalemate. This administration
learned the lesson and is now deliberately trying to oppose any research
efforts that might produce contrary findings to what they already believe.
They have a very clever rhetorical strategy, couching what they are doing
in terms of make education a more evidence-based practice. This was a key
recommendation of the national academy of sciences, who also introduced the
comparisons with medicine and agriculture. The NAS was looking for big
money funding for education research, comparable to the investment in the
other areas. They may now regret the use that is being made of their
argument. They did not really say that education should use the same
research methods, only that US society should be making comparable
investments in education research, and that there should be some really
large-scale studies to try to settle some outstanding issues. In fact most
education research is on such a small scale that it is pretty much
inconclusive. Really large-scale, well-designed research would show us, for
example, how different segments of the student population do NOT respond in
the same way to different approaches, or how long it actually takes for a
high school age immigrant student to learn enough English to learn science
as well in English as they could in their home language. We would also find
out that a lot of the easy solution programs for improving reading skills
show only short-term, not long-term gains, and make little difference in
the kind of reading needed in specialized subjects.
The kind of research the administration wants to see is input-output
research, which already assumes that all kinds of students respond in the
same way to the same "treatments" ... they don't want studies which can
show that there is no "best practice" for all students, or studies that
show HOW students and teachers respond to curricular and pedagogical
innovations ... they want research that looks only at test score outcomes
... and so cannot criticize the kind of idiotic testing methods that can
give mass results cheaply. They want research which only makes sense if
your idea of how education should be is uniform, standardized,
sheep-from-goat sorting. Their approach will have the effect of both
standardizing and trivializing education, while covertly preserving the
class advantages of their own children.
The one progressive feature of their program is the effort to close the
test-score gap between social classes (which in effect means mostly poorer
African-American and Latino students vs. Euro-American middle class
students). I don't think they will succeed in this, because they cannot
imagine that students with such significant sociocultural differences might
actually need different educational approaches. But even if they do manage
to create a pairing of tests and teaching that produces greater equality of
test-scores, what the tests measure is so unrelated to what gives
middle-class educated students their advantages in the economy that it will
make no real social difference. It would be interesting to see what would
happen at such a next stage ... the universities would then have to admit
unprepared students who seemed to be prepared based on the test scores. So
someone will have to be at work inventing new kinds of admissions criteria
to keep places preferentially open to the children of the nation's more
politically powerful classes. We are not going to see an expansion in
public university capacity and a two-tier system (the other "solution")
because public higher education has already passed the limit of what
top-bracket taxpayers are willing to fund.
Bertie Russell famously quipped, "Most people would rather die than think.
And many do." The same can be said of nations.
JAY.
At 05:29 PM 10/24/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>Bill et al,
>
>Unfortunately there is far more to this than a risk to the ERIC
>database. The Institute of Education Science which will replace OERI
>will attempt to set new standards for what constitutes scientific
>educational research. The board of the institute will be hand-picked
>by the administration. The problem with standards does not revolve
>so much around a qualitative-quantitative split, but rather whether
>randomized control trials (RCT) become the benchmark by which all
>educational research is judged to be scientific. There are plenty of
>thoughtful folks working within the quantitative tradition who find
>this extremely problematical. For example, the article in the
>August/Sept, 2002 issue of the *Educational Researcher* by Bob Linn
>et al to see an excellent critique of Bush's "No Child left Behind
>Act " of 2001.
>
>The argument made by the Bush Administration's folks is that RCT
>research is the standard in medical research, so why not in
>education, which is rampant with bad research. While there are many
>flaws to their argument, two stand out to me as key. One is that
>only a minority of medical research (usually clinical drug trials)
>actually uses RCT. RCT methodology cannot and is not used for most
>medical research, e.g. epidemiological studies, for reasons of both
>science and ethics. Two, if you take two phenomena that are largely
>confounded in life and use RCTs to unconfound them, then the
>generalizability of your findings are essentially zero, which is
>quite unscientific by most standards.
>
>The current U.S. administration's agenda actually has relatively
>little to do with science...
>
>Cheers,
>
>King
>
>
>>Apparently the following legislative initiative may put at risk the ERIC
>>system and the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. One thing that strikes me
>>is the conflation of "scientific rigor" with "large-scale studies". Where
>>did the authors of this initiative mis-learn about science?
>>
>>If you have an answer, please respond (but not to me -- respond to Roderick
>>R. Paige, the education secretary -- the survey must be double blind) -- I'm
>>looking for a sample of 10,000 with a confidence interval that will prove
>>robust. Oh yeah, if you do have an answer, first please ask a stranger to
>>flip a coin to decide whether you should respond or not. Then can we satisfy
>>the criterion of random sampling.
>>
>>Perhaps we could interview the authors of this initiative and their teachers
>>to investigate the developmental history of this misconception, but that
>>would be darned un-sci-en-ti-fic.
>>
>>bb
>>
>>>
>>> This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
>>>
>>> _________________________________________________________________
>>>
>>> This article is available online at this address:
>>>
>>> http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/10/2002102101n.htm
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Monday, October 21, 2002
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Congress Passes Bill to Overhaul Federal Education Research
>>>
>>> By RICHARD MORGAN
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The Department of Education's Office of Educational Research
>> > and Improvement will be replaced by an autonomous Institute of
>> > Education Sciences, with the goal of infusing the beleaguered
>>> area of federal education research with "scientific rigor,"
>>> under legislation passed by Congress last week. President Bush
>>> is expected to sign the bill.
>>>
>>> The legislation, HR 3801, the Education Sciences Reform Act,
>>> is the brainchild of Rep. Michael N. Castle, a Delaware
>>> Republican and chairman of the Subcommittee on Education
>>> Reform of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the
>>> Workforce.
>>>
>>> The new institute is needed, according to Mr. Castle, to end
>>> the current practice of following "one education fad after
>>> another" and instead to conduct rigorous, large-scale studies
>>> to determine the best teaching methods.
>>>
>>> "Without sound science to back the claims of increased
>>> academic achievement, schools are often disappointed," Mr.
>>> Castle said, adding, "At a minimum, we must expect scientific
>> > rigor."
>>>
>>> The new institute would be part of the Department of
>>> Education, but would function as a separate office under the
>>> direction of a 15-member National Board for Education
>>> Sciences, whose members would be appointed by the president
>>> and confirmed by the Senate. The board would advise and
>>> consult with the director of the Institute of Education
>>> Sciences in setting the institute's policies and priorities.
>>> The director would also be appointed by the president, subject
>>> to Senate confirmation.
>>>
>>> A Knowledge Utilization Office, under the director, would pool
>>> research findings and other information, and present them in
>>> accessible language to teachers, school administrators, policy
>>> makers, government officials, and the public.
>>>
>>> The Office of Educational Research and Improvement, which was
>>> created in 1979 by the same legislation that established the
>>> Education Department, coordinates, develops, and disseminates
>>> federally supported education research. It sponsors five
>>> national institutes, which focus on curriculum and assessment,
>>> early-childhood education, policy and management, continuing
>>> education, and education for at-risk students. The office also
>>> finances a dozen campus-based research-and-development centers
>>> and 10 regional laboratories that transform research findings
>>> into programs and products.
>>>
>>> The new legislation calls for re-establishing many of those
>>> agencies and functions under 10 regional boards across the
>>> nation.
>>>
>>> Roderick R. Paige, the education secretary, praised the
>>> legislation. "One of the major tenets of our education policy
>>> is that teaching and learning practices be based on sound
>>> scientific research," he said. "Congress shares that
>>> understanding with us, and it is clear from this bill that
>>> they view the role of research as the cornerstone of
>>> educational reform."
>>>
>>> Officials of the American Educational Research Association
>>> were also pleased with the legislation. Gerald E. Sroufe, the
>>> association's director of government relations, said that the
>>> measure "provides an important degree of political
>>> independence for the agency" and "improves prospects for
>>> developing a culture of research that has been lacking" in
>>> federal studies of education.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _________________________________________________________________
>>>
>>> You may visit The Chronicle as follows:
>>>
>>> http://chronicle.com
>>>
>>> _________________________________________________________________
>>> Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
>>
>>__________________________________________________
>>D O T E A S Y - "Join the web hosting revolution!"
>> http://www.doteasy.com
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>--
>______________________________
>King Beach
>Learning, Technology and Culture
>Michigan State University
>phone: 517-381-8884
>fax: 517-381-8885
>email: kdbeach@msu.edu
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
---------------------------
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