Accusations of a "politicization" of science in federal regulatory policy are a continual refrain in Washington. Now, an independent, bipartisan panel has some recommendations on how President Obama and his successors can avoid those debates in the future.

In a report this week, the 13 members of the Science for Policy project contend that many such disputes arise from a failure to distinguish scientific questions from policy questions.

"Science can inform some policy choices, but it can't determine them," says the group, which was headed by Sherwood Boehlert, a retired Republican congressman from New York, and Donald Kennedy, a former editor-in-chief of the journal Science. To avoid any suggestion of political bias, the report contends, federal agencies and lawmakers ought to promulgate guidelines to differentiate between questions that involve scientific judgment and those that involve judgments about economics, ethics, and other matters of policy.

"The first impulse of those concerned with regulatory policy should not be to claim `the science made me do it' or to dismiss or discount scientific results, but rather to publicly discuss the policies and values that legitimately affect how science gets applied in decisionmaking," the report says.

If you haven't heard of this group, don't feel bad. I only just heard about it via a tweet from Greg Toppo of USA Today, which carried a story on the report on Wednesday. The panel is diverse, though, and includes people from industry, universities, and national organizations, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, that give a lot of thought to these kinds of questions. There's no one from education land, but the group's advice easily applies to the education sciences, too. The group was pulled together by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a group formed by four retired senators to provide a forum for developing nonpartisan solutions to national problems.

Among its other recommendations, the panel calls for federal guidelines on when to consult scientific advisory panels and who can be on them, more transparency on how panelists filter and evaluate the studies they use in their deliberations, stronger peer-review procedures, and improvement in setting and enforcing clear standards governing conflicts of interest.

That last topic appeared to be the most controversial for the group. The panel specifically recommends that, when considering whether a conflict exists for a potential advisory committee appointee, officials should look back two years rather than just looking at the expert's current relationships. Two panel members disagreed. Here's why: Suppose a scientist was paid 18 months ago to provide expert testimony in a court case. If the proceedings are finished, the dissenters reasoned, the scientist should no longer feel compromised.

This is a readable report, with lots of good specifics and illustrative hypotheticals. Whether the group's advice will get adopted by federal agencies, including the Department of Education, is another question.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you missed it, the full House appropriations committee voted late last week to keep mostly intact a healthy increase for federal education research and development in the Labor-HHS spending bill. In her blog, Politics K-12, my colleague Alyson Klein notes that the committee boosted research and development for education to $199.2 million for the coming fiscal year. "That's a $32 million increase over fiscal year 2009," she writes, "but not quite as high as the $224.2 million the Obama administration wanted."

A good source for all the nitty-gritty details on the committee's actions with regard to federal education research programs is the KNOWLEDGE-able Source, a weekly blog published by the Knowledge Alliance, a Washington-based group that lobbies on behalf of a wide range of research organizations. Here's a link to the alliance's handy chart, which shows current funding levels, the President's budget request, and the committee mark-up levels for the programs that are its priorities.

Politics K-12 will also be reporting more details on the mark-up later today. Next stop for the spending bill: the House floor.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at Empirical Education yesterday, blogger Denis Newman made a case for replacing big, national experiments to find out what works in education with dozens of smaller—and less expensive—local experiments.

Newman, who is the president of the Palo Alto, Calif., consulting firm that hosts his blog, pitches the small-experiment idea in response to a blog post last month by Office of Management and Budget director Peter R. Orszag. If you're a regular reader of Inside School Research, you'll recall that Orszag shared some of this thinking in that post on the need for more evidence-based policymaking in government. (See my write-up from last month for details.)

The problem with Orszag's plans, Newman says, is that he has "bought into the idea that a single, national experiment" will yield useful information on whether a government policy or program is effective. Borrowing from Donald Campbell's concept of an "experimenting society," Newman says 100 or more local experiments might be a better way to go. He writes:

First, the education domain is extremely diverse and, without the '100 locally interpretable experiments,' it is unlikely that educators would have an opportunity to see a program at work in a sufficient number of contexts to begin to build up generalizations. ... Second, the information value of local experiments is much higher for the decision-maker who will always be concerned with performance in his or her school or district. National experiments generate average impact estimates, while giving little information about any particular locale.

He also contends that local experiments are faster than national studies at as little as one-tenth the price.

This is no idle chit-chat. Newman and his colleagues recently completed a study on the feasibility of local experiments for the federal Institute of Education Sciences. You can request a copy of the study here.

.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you missed it, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an excellent package of articles last week dissecting the downfall of Robert D. Felner, the former education school dean at the University of Louisville.

Felner is facing federal charges of mail fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion in connection with a $694,000 grant he got from the U.S. Department of Education to establish a research center to help Kentucky's public schools. Prosecutors say that most of the money, as well as $1.7 million in payments from three urban school districts, ended up in the pockets of Felner and a former co-worker.

In his articles, though, writer David Glenn also raises questions about the Education Department's oversight of Felner's project. He writes:

But what about the U.S. Department of Education, which was responsible for overseeing the grant on taxpayers' behalf? Should it, too, be doing some soul-searching in the aftermath of Mr. Felner's indictiment?

Good question. Glenn writes that the project was twice given "no cost extensions" on the basis of "extraordinarily vague statements" about the status of the work.

Over at The Quick and the Ed, though, Kevin Carey lays the blame for this fiasco on the Congressional pork-barrel process, which gave birth to this earmarked project. He says:

This is what happens with pork. The U.S. Department was exercising minimal oversight because, hey, it's not really their project, is it? They'd rather decide how to disburse FIPSE money but Congress won't let them. ... But Congress—in this case, Representative Anne M. Northrup (R-Kentucky), who wangled the money—isn't set up to monitor grants. Nor do they have any incentive to root out corruption and incompetence for their own earmarks ... . Colleges, meanwhile, are culpable as they've increasingly decided to play the game along with everyone else by hiring special pork lobbyists etc. etc

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and John Q. Easton, the Ed Department's brand-new research chief, are scheduled to say a few words this morning at the Institute of Education Science's fourth annual research conference here in Washington.

The conference, begun by Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, the department's last IES head, provides an opportunity for the institute's grantees to meet, discuss common problems, and share their work. Princeton University economist Cecelia Rouse, a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, is also on the agenda.

This may be the first major public appearance for Easton, who's been on the job exactly one week, and may provide an opportunity for him and Duncan to drop a few details about what's in store for IES under the Obama administration.

Yours truly will be there, too. Come back to this space tomorrow for a report on the goings-on.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An independent review out today takes issue with the federal study of the District of Columbia's private school voucher experiment.

Published in March by the Institute of Education Sciences, the study found that after three years, students who nabbed a tuition voucher through the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program were doing modestly better in reading, and no better in math, than public school peers who tried for, but failed to win, a scholarship.

You'll recall that interpretations of the findings were all over the map in the news media, with some writers pronouncing the program a success and others seeing them as an indictment of it. The results were reason enough, though, for the Obama administration to suggest allowing program to sunset, and possibly grandfathering in the 1,600 students who now receive the vouchers, worth up to $7,500 a year.

In his review of the federal study, though, Stanford University economist Martin Carnoy contends the researchers were not as nuanced as they could be. For instance, he says, they did not emphasize the fact that most of the gains came among students who were "more academically adept before they were offered the voucher."

But, as the study's lead researcher, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, points out, he didn't exactly hide that information, either. "What's more important," he asked. "the average effect for all participants or on those who seemed to benefit the most?"

Carnoy has other quibbles as well. For one, there was a lot of school-switching going on among voucher students, and some never used their vouchers at all. (Wolf says those patterns are typical of big-city voucher programs.) For another, much of the academic gain in reading came among the first cohort of students. (Even so, Wolf says, differences between the two cohorts were not statistically significant.)

The review is part of the Think Tank Review Project based at Arizona State University, which was formed to set the record straight on reports issued by think tanks looking to advance their point of view. The project, it has to be said, is financed by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, which is made up of the National Education Association and its state affiliates in that region—presumably no fans of private school vouchers.

Extraneous note to the Think Tank Review Project from Wolf: Since when is the federal government a think tank?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In this space a month ago, I reported that Marshall S. "Mike" Smith, a senior adviser over at the U.S. Department of Education, was hinting that the final version of President Obama's proposed 2010 budget would contain good things for research. He wasn't joking.

My colleague Alyson Klein reports in a May 8 article on the budget that the Institute of Education Sciences, the department's key research arm, would see its budget increase by 11.7 percent, to $689 million, under the proposed spending plan unveiled last Thursday. Here's the way the Obama administration wants to distribute the additional IES money: research, development, and dissemination overall, an extra $56.8 million; the regional education laboratories, $3 million more; the National Assessment of Educational Progress ("the nation's report card") and its governing board, a $34.7 million hike; grants for states to develop statewide data systems, $16.7 million more; and special education research, $2 million in added funds. See the details here.

Education research got no mention at all in the president's economic-stimulus package, so, if you hear a soft whooshing sound, it's probably a collective sigh of relief from the research community. Stay tuned, though. Experts are predicting a long and difficult budget battle ahead in Congress.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It could be weeks, even months, before the U.S. Senate confirms nominee John Easton as director of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The lull in leadership at the nation's top education research agency leaves Washingtonians to engage in their favorite armchair sport: reading tea leaves. What direction, they wonder, will the institute take under the new regime?

One insightful reading came last week from Mark Schneider, a vice president of the American Institutes for Research. As the former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of IES, Schneider is someone who actually knows what he's talking about. In last Friday's Education Gadfly—in case you missed it—he offers a unique insiders' roadmap to some of the areas where change is most likely to occur under Easton's watch.

He suggests keeping an eye, in particular, on the regional education laboratories, or RELs, that the institute operates around the country.

Under their current contracts, the RELs have been instructed to conduct RCTs [randomized controlled trials] and much of their autonomy and regional responsiveness has been curtailed. That has led some lab staff and constituents to complain that their ability to address the needs of state and local education agencies has been weakened and that they have been forced to sacrifice relevance on the altar of rigor.

According to Schneider, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the research group that Easton currently heads at the University of Chicago, offers an alternate model for the labs—one that is rooted in the needs of the local community and involves practitioners and policymakers. And the labs' contracts, he notes, are due to be re-competed in about a year.

The former statistics commissioner also recommends watching the institute's 13 national research-and-development centers.

Will he [Easton] establish processes that align the work of the R&D centers with that of the RELs and build a coordinated system whereby research-based tools and resources get to practitioners in usable forms?

You can read the full text here. In the meantime, at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli puts in another pitch for the Fordham Institute's call for making research and development the engine of federal education policy.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

HEARD IN THE BALLROOM: The final details on the proposed 2010 spending plan that President Barack Obama outlined in February may not yet be available, but one of the department's top advisers said yesterday that the budget promises good things for education research.

"Where is the research money going?'" Marshall S. "Mike" Smith, a senior adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and a former undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton administration, told a packed crowd at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association here in San Diego. "I think you'll see in the budget that it's not going down at all."

"Let's put it this way," he added coyly. "I would be very surprised if it went down or stayed even."

That had to be a bit of a relief to this group, because education research got nary a mention in the federal economic-stimulus package.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)