The American Educational Research Association plans to urge Congress to give much more independence to both the chief federal agency that finances education research—the Institute of Education Sciences—and that agency’s statistics-gathering arm.
In a report scheduled to be released to its members Monday at its annual conference here, the leadership of the association argues that legislation adopted by Congress in 2002, as part of the reauthorization of the Institute of Education Sciences, placed too many restrictions on the institute’s work and gave the IES too much control over the National Center for Education Statistics. The institute is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and the statistical center is one of four centers that carries out its work.
The current federal law, for example, sets forth a list of 13 specific research topics that must be the focus of research centers supported by the IES, and requires that the institute set aside 50 percent of its funds for such centers each fiscal years for long-term research programs lasting at least five years. Such language, the report argues, is “far too prescriptive.”
The changes in law adopted by Congress in 2002 also require the commissioner of education statistics, who oversees the National Center for Education Statistics, to obtain the approval of the institute’s director before establishing any new statistics-gathering program, the report says. That forces the statistics center to seek IES approval of any statistical reports prior to their publication and requires the institute to sign off on the center’s budget requests. The law eliminated a board of statistical experts who advised the center’s commissioner, and instead requires the center to abide by statistical standards set by the director of the IES, who might not have a statistics background.
Such involvement in the activities of the NCES, the report argues, “create ambiguity with regard to the operating independence” of the center and “literally curtail its ability to function at the high level achieved prior to the current legislation.”
The report recommends that the law be altered so that the commissioner of education statistics no longer reports to the IES director, but instead reports directly to the secretary of education. It also calls for the re-establishment of a board of statistics experts to advise the work of the center. Such changes, the research association says in a news release accompanying its report, would enable the center “to be an effective national resource of unquestioned objectivity.”
The report also calls for Congress to give the director of the IES more autonomy, by stripping the law of language that sets the institute’s research priorities and that specifies its research definitions and methodologies.
Among its other recommendations, the report also suggests that Congress include in its next bill reauthorizing the IES a request for some entity, such as the National Research Council, to recommend a structure within the institute that would enable it to track education-related research being done by other agencies. As examples of the type of research the IES would benefit from monitoring, the report cites brain research supported by the National Institutes of Health and research on leadership supported by the Defense Department.
The report is the product of two years of study by an AERA panel that solicited input from other organizations that are concerned with education or education research and likely to become involved in Congressional discussions of reauthorization of the institute.
In briefing members of the news media on the report on Sunday, Felice J. Levine, executive director of the educational-research association, said that Congress has not yet started to discuss the reauthorization of the IES, but that she hopes a reauthorization bill will be passed in the 112th Congress and that her association is seeking, through its report, to get out in front of any debate.
