Education Research : Anatomy of U.S. Agency That Failed

In 1970, a young White House aide who recently graduated from Harvard University worked up a long policy memo seeking to convince President Richard M. Nixon that what the nation needed was a research agency that would do for education what the National Institutes of Health had done for medicine.

Not only did the Republican President like the idea, so did the Democratic-controlled Congress, which in 1972 created the National Institute of Education.

The law spoke of the new agency bringing about “the reform and renewal” of American education through research and development. It would, said one of its backers, “bring to education the same degree of intellect, intensity and direction that we have grown to expect in health through NIH, in aerospace through NASA and even in agriculture.”

Political Bumbling

But, rather than gaining new respect for education research, the institute in its early years gained a reputation for political bumbling, constantly shifting priorities and incomprehensible project descriptions.

“We get all this soft, mushy education jargon from them that doesn’t tell us a thing,” Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) said in 1975.

A decade later, even Chester Finn Jr., the former Nixon aide, concluded that the agency was a “hopeless disappointment.” Its “political, intellectual and organizational ailments are incurable,” he wrote.

Recently named a top adviser to Secretary of Education William Bennett, Finn in his first days on the job moved to reorganize the National Institute of Education out of existence.

Today, the agency officially goes out of business.

Watergate Victim

What went wrong? Its sponsors and critics say now that the National Institute of Education was to some degree a victim of the Watergate era, since it lacked crucial political backing during its start-up time from the Nixon White House. Its first directors also made the mistake, they say, of believing that they could ignore Capitol Hill.

But the institute’s main problem may have been education research itself. Unlike research in medicine, science or agriculture, research in education rarely yields clear and useful conclusions.

“In the public mind, education research is equated with wasting money,” said Finn, who makes clear that he does not entirely disagree with that assessment.

“There is a lot of lousy research in education. Some of the journals are so dull that you couldn’t light a fire with them,” said Gray Garwood, staff director for the House education subcommittee that oversees the National Institute of Education. “Research in education just doesn’t have the glamour and status of biomedical research or research in the other hard sciences.”

Disenchanted by the lack of clear results, Congress steadily whittled away the institute’s budget, from a high of more than $140 million in 1973 to $53 million this year, a tiny sum when compared to the $4.4-billion-a-year federal health research institute.

What is worse, many of the institute’s research projects yielded conclusions that appear obvious. For example, one major project that analyzed learning in elementary schools confirmed what educators call the “time on task” notion. That is, children tend to learn more about a subject if they study it longer.

“The reaction we always got was, ‘It cost you $6 million to discover that!’ ” one institute staff member said ruefully.

However, even the National Institute of Education’s sharpest critics usually note that some of the research studies had a worthwhile effect on the schools.

For example, studies of unusually effective schools, whether in affluent or poor neighborhoods, found that their success turned on an active principal who closely monitored what the children were learning. Although it is an unsurprising conclusion, school systems throughout the nation have used it to either redirect or replace principals who saw themselves primarily as building managers or office-bound bureaucrats.

“Even if our work had an effect, we didn’t get much credit for it,” said the same institute official, who asked not to be identified.

Others blamed the National Institute of Education itself for failing to get credit on Capitol Hill for the good projects it had financed.

“The NIE was a case study of how not to be effective in Washington,” said Michael Kirst, professor of education at Stanford University. “In fact, I use it with my students as a worst-case example of how to operate in Washington.

“They never built any political bridges to the key people in Congress or to the teachers unions, the school administrators or state officials. They had no political coalition to support them,” Kirst said.

Isolated, Elite Agency

The first institute officials “thought they could create an isolated, elite agency that would do purely academic research. That’s just not very pragmatic, since Congress expects to see some results in the schools,” said Joseph Schneider, a Washington lobbyist for 17 education research centers that depend on the education institute for funds.

By stressing practical improvements in the schools, Schneider has succeeded for more than a decade in gaining money for the education research centers, including ones at UCLA and Stanford. Congress has ordered that the centers continue to be financed after the National Institute of Education’s demise.

Kirst said the institute not only ignored political lobbying but failed to set any dramatic goals for itself.

“You don’t see NIH going to Capitol Hill to say they’re going to work in the area of biology and chemistry. They say ‘we’re attacking heart disease and cancer,’ ” Kirst said. Rather than saying it was working on a problem such as “illiteracy,” the National Institute of Education told Congress it was studying the “learning process,” he said.

Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), who chaired a subcommittee overseeing the National Institute of Education, said he strongly supports research in education but added, “There seemed to be a lack of focus in what they were doing. It didn’t seem that they always used the money very constructively.”

In 1975, after an institute official had bumbled through a budget hearing, the Senate took the unusual step of voting the National Institute of Education a zero budget. However, its supporters in the House were able to restore its budget to $70 million for the year.

Internal Opposition

But, at the start of the Reagan Administration, even the institute’s own officials turned against the agency. In 1981, its director, Edward Curran, and the chairman of its policy-making council, George Roche, the president of Hillsdale College in Michigan, urged President Reagan to abolish the agency. Conservatives then took up the cause, charging that the institute was using research to inject liberal social views into the public schools.

The agency’s one steadfast supporter was former House Majority Whip John Brademas, now president of New York University. In 1972, he sponsored the law creating the agency and helped keep up its budget throughout the 1970s.

“If you look at the Defense Department, or agriculture or health, we always set aside a huge percentage for research and development. But we don’t do that in education,” Brademas said in a telephone interview. “That was my concern then and I would defend the same view today. In education, just as in those others areas, we need to get the same kind of thoughtful analysis and evidence about what works and what doesn’t work.”

Brademas said that many of the most controversial questions in education don’t benefit from impartial research. Just last week, Bennett said in a highly publicized speech that “we have no evidence” that bilingual education has helped non-English-speaking students succeed in school.

But education officials also have no evidence that other approaches would work better. Despite 17 years of controversy over bilingual education, the government has not financed studies that compare bilingual education to other methods of teaching English.

Lack of Money

The Education Department estimated recently that the nation will spend $261 billion this year on education at all age levels. But this year, National Institute of Education officials said they had virtually no money to finance new research projects.

Finn, the Bennett adviser who has reorganized the National Institute of Education into a smaller research unit within the department, said he still believes that education research can shed new light on important questions.

“As an example, there are schools attended by underclass kids that are working well. We need to find out what’s going on there and how can we create more of those exceptional schools,” said Finn, who over the last decade has been a prolific writer and commentator on education issues.

“In another very different area, we need to learn more about what is character, how is it acquired and what influence if any that schools can have on building character,” he said.

This time, however, Finn’s optimism for education research efforts has been scaled back.

“Education research is a rather precarious enterprise,” he said in an interview. “I think with some new priorities and new directions, we can make it work. But it’s probably no better than a 60/40 chance that we’ll succeed.”