John Q. Easton, the new director of the Ed Department's Institute of Education Sciences, used his first major public appearance yesterday to broadly outline some of his plans for the research agency over the next six years.

Easton, who began his term as IES director on June 1, is the former director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, an independent research group that studies school reforms in Chicago. And, as might be predicted, he said he expects to bring some of the principles that guided the consortium to his new gig at the department.

"We know IES sponsors top-notch research," he told participants at the annual IES research conference. "I think our greater challenge is in working better with practitioners and policymakers to make schools places where students learn more and have greater opportunities for success in life."

Easton said the IES, like the consortium, plans to work toward building the capacity of practitioners and policymakers to use data and research and to make the agency's work transparent and openly available.

He also made a pitch for integrating results from studies across fields to "provide the guidance the field wants to hear" and synthesizing the "major learnings" from the studies the IES has funded over the past several years.

Easton wasn't the only Ed Department official to make a policy address at the June 7-9 conference. His boss, Arne Duncan, talked about building better longitudinal data systems, which, he says, are the first of four "assurances" that are built into the federal economic-stimulus law. For more on what he had to say, see the description of the speech by my colleague Michele McNeil in Politics K-12.

Conference-goers also heard from Jon Baron, the vice chairman of the National Board for Education Sciences, which advises Easton's agency. As executive director of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, which promotes the use of rigorous experiments, Baron represents a bit of the old guard at the IES. But he used his time in the pulpit to put forth a new idea as to why so many of the randomized controlled trials that the agency funded failed to turn up findings of positive effects.

"Perhaps the process does not give sufficient attention to innovative, practitioner-generated ideas," he said, noting that, in welfare reform, the models that yielded the most promising outcomes in experimental studies were those that came from the field.

I bet there are more than a few teachers out there who would say "amen" to that—or perhaps "I told you so."

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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)

Yesterday, as a Senate committee in Washington approved his nomination to be the new research czar at the U.S. Department of Education, John Easton shared one idea that he hopes to bring to the job.

Easton, who is currently the executive director of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, talked to me at a conference that his organization hosted in Chicago. Here's what he had to say:

One thing that I would like to see as a real priority for myself is to look carefully over the last six years and ask under what circumstances, and under what conditions, are particular kinds of research strategies and methodologies most likely to give the most information.

That, of course, refers to ongoing debates over what some think has been an overemphasis at the Institute of Education Sciences on strict scientific experiments, over other kinds of studies. What Easton has in mind is a commission of sorts to generate some "good thinking" on the topic. (What do you think, readers? Is he on the right track or have organizations like the National Research Council already plowed this ground thoroughly enough?)

Easton also said he wants to take stock of findings from the dozens of studies that IES has financed over the past six years to see if any cross-cutting themes emerge that can be shared with the field.

The confirmation process has not ended for Easton, though. Even though the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee gave its thumbs up yesterday, the full Senate still has to take up the matter.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm in Chicago today, where the Consortium on Chicago School Research is holding a two-day confab for educators and researchers looking to start partnerships between school districts and researchers similar to the Chicago model. In a testament to the growing interest in that model, representatives from 19 districts around the country have showed up for the event. (It probably doesn't hurt matters, of course, that the consortium's director, John Q. Easton, is President Obama's pick to head the federal Institute of Education Sciences, the key research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.)
Look for a more comprehensive story on the goings-on here later on in Education Week.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)