The National Educational Research System

Last year nearly 100 of the top corporate CEOs met and concluded that to ensure a healthy economy, the nation's top priorities are more effective science and mathematics education and increased investment by the federal government in fundamental research. Illustration: A. Canamucio It is time to eliminate the defensiveness that greets every critique of education and take strategic action. To succeed, our education systems must become "learning organizations" that learn every week how to be more effective. Lifelong learning is not a distant goal for a few scholars; it is a necessity for everyone in American education systems. At the midpoint of the 20th century, we did not even conceive of such wonders as cracking the universal genetic code, transplanting hearts, or making human insulin in bacteria. We now expect revolutions. Our most regular mistake is that we make excuses for all the learning that doesn't happen and then expand the scope of areas of activity someone favors in the hope that it will solve the problem. These major resource reallocations are rarely based on definitive research, and they usually fail. A century ago, when a child lay dying, the family gathered around to offer hope, but the child often died. Medical research, an endeavor begun seriously in America only about 60 years ago, changed that. It provided rapid, accurate diagnosis, an array of prescriptions, and even potent preventives. It provided experts steeped in the research knowledge as its professionals and practitioners. The reason we have so many guesses to the solutions to our educational problems in America now is that we have so little research to give us definitive answers. We cannot let the children of the next generation die educational deaths, nor can we continue to manage by hope. In education, every argument that A is better than B or C is subject to validation by well-designed, well-executed research by well-qualified experts, and subject to translation into success by well-qualified professional practitioners. It is time to stop sitting around tables to gather more opinions; hopeful opinions on education are as numerous as the stars. Every good idea must be challenged by the tried-and-true methods of definitive research performed by enough skeptics until the truth alone stands. Our challenge is clear. It is not to guess how to modify this or that part of the status quo, nor to centralize educational research decision making. It is not to make a laundry list of what research you or I guess might pay off. It is not to again pin our hopes on any apparently promising but unreplicated educational anecdotes of success. We must help others realize that even today's best answer may be made obsolete tomorrow. In 1950-52 our children were paralyzed by and dying of polio. Our best answer was the iron lung. Our technical skill, resources, and national will could build enough of them to treat every patient. It would be a massive undertaking, but Congress approved of it. As we were about to get the green light, we were sidetracked in 1952 by a few researchers who built on each other's ideas, and then in 1953 we had polio vaccines. We could have become the world's leading manufacturers of iron lungs by now. Our challenge is to design and execute a major creative revolution in the process of educational research and development so that our children's education regularly achieves the success that they deserve. This revolution will have to be continuous, and it will have to always address moving targets. It will be massive enough to have significant and measured impact on learners learning. It should be free as possible of unnecessary assumptions, and it should address perpetual improvement systems and learning organizations in its framework. The learner learning should be the focus of all our educational research. The most counterproductive of the educational myths that waste huge amounts of energy, money, and irreplaceable time, are: Political agendas should decide educational research agendas; Educational successes spread themselves; We have enough research already--we just haven't used it yet; Educational research must be managed within the existing federal structures. To overcome these myths, we need to reframe the education of our children and teachers. Of the thousand-plus places that prepare our new teachers, none has followed graduates to validate how well they teach and verify how well students learn from these graduates, or to verify that anything the institutions do to prepare teachers makes a difference in how well their students learn. This is not an indictment. It is a simple failure by the institutions to conceive their task as a system, follow through the required evaluation of results, and bring this evaluation back into the process of preparing new teachers. It is crucial to the success of the system model that we "close the loop." Without understanding the system, it becomes nearly impossible to regularly improve the outcome. We should rethink the whole enterprise of education and rethink the federal role in the 21st century. If we can agree that the learner learning should be the core focus of all our educational research, then we need to adopt three policies: Federal tax dollars' best use in education is investment, not consumption; Federal tax dollars' best use in education is as a catalyst to regular improvement, so every five to seven years education dollars can be redirected to new opportunities; We should include systems thinking in building learning organizations as the basic strategic framework underlying our next generation of educational research policy and priority endeavors. The nation badly needs a massive scale-up of educational research that is top-quality science and produces definitive results based on the above principles. We need to start with $1.5 billion per year of new educational research money to address multiple, related areas. That sum is 5 percent of the Department of Education's annual budget. If it only improved the effectiveness of the spending of the other 95 percent, it would be valuable enough. But its role is to serve as the national catalyst, and it thus represents only one-third of one percent of the national investment in education each year, hardly enough. How much educational research is enough? The impact on our national future of educational success or failure is at least as large as the impacts of health success or failure, and the national effort in educational research should rapidly reach parity with health research. Whatever the structure of the educational research system, it must have built-in flexibility to reorganize as needed to more effectively meet its changing challenges. It could start with seven areas as key research domains, perhaps each temporarily structured in separate interacting institutes, that also help establish and synergize with potentially collaborative research centers across the nation. Such functional focus areas would be: Research on Learning and the Learner--understand what we need to know and discover it; Curriculum R&D, with emphasis on verified effectiveness in the learning of thinking skills (e.g; finding patterns and analogies, discovering/finding the problem, brainstorming, hypothesizing testable explanations, logical and systematic investigations, deductive and inductive reasoning, critical evaluation, making effective decisions, and transfer of understanding to new situations); Assessment R&D, with emphasis on assessments that can both facilitate learning and measure real understanding; * Research on Teachers and Teaching--"close the loop" on the whole system and ensure that teaching effectiveness is defined by what and how well students learn; Educational Engineering--create a new profession of change leaders who mentor others to learn how to apply fundamental research into best practical learning results; Development and Franchising--active multiplication of successes, once their success is rigorously verified by skeptical inquirers; Graduate Education Research Fellowships--develop thousands of new rigorously mentored educational research Ph.D.s, develop new online journals. To ensure the quality of this research, we need to follow several tried-and-true principles based on the history of the best federally funded research. Accountability for the federal investment in educational research can be best met by ensuring the quality of the research. This is best achieved by an independent, high-quality, continuous merit review of all research proposals and an assurance that all qualified scientists have equal access to the opportunities. How should our educational research system be better prepared to meet the challenges of the educational function in the next century? I believe we need to ensure opportunity for, not restraint upon, change and creative breakthrough. In essence, no part of the educational research system can remain static and adapt to many ongoing changes at the same time. Every component of the educational research system must become an active part of a learning organization, and we must focus on how to develop the research function so it best promotes the most robust creativity, innovation, and increased probability of major breakthroughs. Human organizations tend to develop their leadership, focus, change mode, planning, and other attributes into connected patterns. To reach the proactive and high performance levels of system operation may require major shifts in the defining attributes of these operations. Educational research and development are most effectively carried out in meritocracies that both increase rigorous challenge and foster ever-increasing creativity; these differ from existing models of government efficiency. Three fundamental principles could be applied to all aspects of foundational educational research and could be adopted as guidelines for future resource allocation. These principles are: Use learner learning as the core research framework; Fund all research through competitive individual awards based on merit reviews by qualified experts, where the criteria for evaluation are the quality and prospect of the ideas, the design of definitive tests of multiple hypotheses, and their relevance to educational missions; Set priorities for federally funded research consistent with addressing important scientific opportunity and probability of conferring significant, long-run national value. How shall we regularly revise our educational research priorities? A bottom-up decision strategy for priorities will ultimately be more successful, and the nation should continue to use the vast and deep expertise of its entire science research community as the dominant priority setter for scientific research within the framework of national needs. Martin Apple, Ph.D. (cssp@acs.org), is president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, P.O. Box 33999, Washington, DC 20033.

The National Educational Research System

Sep 26, 1999

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