One reason why politicians spend more time talking about education reform than actually engaged in it might be that they benefit greatly from the status quo. “Legislative interest” has been “sporadic except for earmarking,” Dickinson College’s Andrew Rudalevige said recently at the American Enterprise Institute.
Earmarking, which the last Republican-controlled U. S. Congress came under fire for, is the process by which individual U. S. senators and representatives set aside large amounts of federal funds for projects in their district in their names, many of dubious value, that they can claim credit for with their constituents. In the paper he presented at AEI, Dr. Rudalevige showed how this dynamic played out with the National Institutes of Education (NIE).
“The NIE’s structural autonomy, so clear in statute, was never allowed to take form,” he wrote. “On the one hand, Congress battered it with a lethal combination of cuts and earmarks.”
“The education research community has rarely been a unified public interest, and NIE failed to attract support from local educators or (as its funding vanished) educational researchers.” These problems continued at NIE’s successor in the new Department of Education, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), according to, according to Christopher Cross, one-time head of OERI.
“On the other hand, the R & D centers and especially the regional laboratories had what OERI’s Cross would call ‘a wonderful political network’ centered on a Council for Educational Development and Research (CEDaR) that ‘protected them from everything’ from budget cuts to NIE attempts to control their behavior,” Dr. Rudalevige writes.
“As the centers and labs evolved, the former had become home to larger-scale research projects and the labs providers of technical assistance to states and school districts. The local focus of the latter had (as OE had, in fact, predicted) made them important to local constituencies and thus to members of Congress.”
One of the healthiest programs that the Department of Education runs was designed in such a fashion as to take advantage of this logrolling. “Title IV labs are going to be pork barrel,” former Office of Education commissioner Francis Keppel once said. “Every Congressman is going to want one in his region.”
That was back in the 1960s. Some things never change, yet billions of dollars later we have to ask ourselves what all this government spending has to do with education.
But then, some might ask what education schools have to do with education. “It has often been said that education research is a field polished by hope but unfettered by data,” Harvard’s Ellen Condliffe Lagemann pointed out in her remarks at the AEI event. “Canons of research that are likely to win you credits academically are not likely to be useful to lawmakers or practitioners.”
“Usable research is not likely to be tenureable research.” A Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education, Dr. Lagemann is the author of The Politics of Knowledge, which examined the educational efforts of the Carnegie Corporation.
“Economics is a discipline,” she explained. “Education is a field of research.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
