In a Higher Ed Watch article last week, Jon Oberg discussed the recent recommendations from the American Educational Research Association on how to fix the problems with the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA). ESRA, originally signed into law in 2002, is three years overdue for reauthorization, and much of this has to do with infighting among the different centers housed under ESRA and political meddling.
ESRA provides authorization for several entities, the best-known being the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). There is also the Institute of Education Sciences (IES, or “the Institute”), under which NCES is housed, along with the National Center for Education Research (NCER) and the National Center for Education Evaluation (NCEE). Though technically part of the Department of Education, the IES director is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to a six-year term overlapping presidential election cycles. By statute, the work of the Institute and its centers should be independent of political meddling and policy.
ESRA put NCES under the control of the IES director and tasked NCES with only statistics-collecting and dissemination, not research and evaluation. These responsibilities were given to NCER and NCEE, but only as the research and evaluation related to K-12 education. Higher education was initially left out of the negotiations, but later a requirement was negotiated that the centers had to pay as much attention to the programs administered under the Higher Education Act (HEA) as those authorized under ESEA.
However, the centers have largely ignored higher education, and little research and evaluation has taken place in this area. Instead, research on the effectiveness of federal student aid programs, including Pell Grants and campus-based programs, has largely been left to the mercy of “the big-money politics of higher education and the growing influence….exercised by the big-board players on Wall Street.” The exception has been NCES, who tried to bring in “new blood and fresh ideas” to gather data and information that can help students and their parents plan for college expenses but were prevented by political machinations on every level.
Oberg argues that the recent recommendation made by the American Education Research Association (AERA) for reforming IES fall far short of addressing the real issues plaguing ESRA. AERA views the problem as being essentially one of a power struggle between NCES and the IES front office, and to fix it the Institute’s director needs to be downgraded to the role of “head statistician” rather than presidentially appointed. Oberg claims that this recommendation only increases the rivalry between the statistics center and the research and evaluation centers.
Oberg notes that when considering reauthorization of the Institute, Congress needs to review the Institute’s performance, organizational in-fighting that stems from the NCES commissioner also being a presidential appointee, and the “perennial struggle for independence from the Education Department and the administration in power.” He further notes that IES has not been able to assert its independence or “establish necessary credibility as a higher education research and evaluation organization.”
If Congress decides to proceed with re-authorizing ESRA, Oberg strongly discourages adopting AERA’s “weak” recommendations for reorganizing IES. Instead, he pushes for Congress to make IES a “housekeeping operation,” to make all three heads of each center (NCES, NCER, and NCEE) presidential appointees, and give the centers independence over their operations and make such operations transparent (in order for them to do their jobs but also provide a system of checks and balances that leaves political affiliation at the door). Oberg does, however, agree with AERA’s call for increased appropriations for the operations of IES so that the work can be done thoroughly and scientifically.
To read Oberg’s full article, please visit http://higheredwatch.newamerica.net/blogmain
