Juggling act: the politics of science in education research.(feature)(Essay)

Two education bills from George W. Bush's first term are long overdue for reauthorization. One, of course, is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in late 2001. The other is the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), which in November 2002 replaced the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) with a new Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

The first bill is already iconic: a Lexis-Nexis search covering NCLB since its passage quickly overloads and shuts itself down. No such difficulties, however, hamper a hunt for stories about IES. Half of the meager fourscore hits produced by the agency's title turn out to be for a similarly named organization in Angola. Searching instead for IES director Grover "Russ" Whitehurst only confirms that many high school sports teams have a Whitehurst on the roster. It seems safe to say that IES is operating well under the radar of mainstream media attention.

But as the organization responsible for putting the "scientifically based" in the scientifically based research mandated by NCLB--not to mention the home of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)--IES deserves attention in its own right. With Whitehurst moving to the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution after his term expires this month, and as drafts for IES reauthorization begin to make the Beltway rounds, it is time to assess the contribution of IES to the history of federal education research and look ahead to its future.

At best, education research is hard to do well: it studies a field in which all else is too rarely equal, one often driven not by facts but by values and aspiration. "Scientific" study of education at the federal level is thus a difficult mission. Achieving it has been made harder still by the inability of a succession of research agencies to withstand pressures to politicize or gain significant funding. Lawmakers constantly tout the virtues of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) when discussing what they want from education research, but they have just as constantly failed to endow that vision with either firewalls or cash.

IES, however, has a structure that heightens its autonomy from political interference. Whitehurst has used the opening provided to promote a new culture of favored research that, while sometimes narrow in methodological scope, has changed the conversation in the research community about rigor and relevance--and thus changed, at least at the margins, the research enterprise itself.

Still, has education research managed to move from tracing a vicious circle to a virtuous one? With new sets of policymakers--in the White House, Congress, and IES itself--taking office after the 2008 elections, the real tests may be yet to come.

Truth vs. Partisanship