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EDUCATION RESEARCH: IDENTIFYING 

EFFECTIVE PROGRAMS TO SUPPORT 

STUDENTS AND TEACHERS 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON EARLY CHILDHOOD, 

ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION 

COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION 

AND THE WORKFORCE 

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, NOVEMBER 16, 2011 

Serial No. 112–47 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Education and the Workforce 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: 

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/house/education/index.html 

or 

Committee address: http://edworkforce.house.gov 
(II) 

COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE 

JOHN KLINE, Minnesota, Chairman 

Thomas E. Petri, Wisconsin 

Howard P. ‘‘Buck’’ McKeon, California 

Judy Biggert, Illinois 

Todd Russell Platts, Pennsylvania 

Joe Wilson, South Carolina 

Virginia Foxx, North Carolina 

Bob Goodlatte, Virginia 

Duncan Hunter, California 

David P. Roe, Tennessee 

Glenn Thompson, Pennsylvania 

Tim Walberg, Michigan 

Scott DesJarlais, Tennessee 

Richard L. Hanna, New York 

Todd Rokita, Indiana 

Larry Bucshon, Indiana 

Trey Gowdy, South Carolina 

Lou Barletta, Pennsylvania 

Kristi L. Noem, South Dakota 

Martha Roby, Alabama 

Joseph J. Heck, Nevada 

Dennis A. Ross, Florida 

Mike Kelly, Pennsylvania 

George Miller, California, 

Senior Democratic Member 

Dale E. Kildee, Michigan 

Donald M. Payne, New Jersey 

Robert E. Andrews, New Jersey 

Robert C. ‘‘Bobby’’ Scott, Virginia 

Lynn C. Woolsey, California 

Rube ́n Hinojosa, Texas 

Carolyn McCarthy, New York 

John F. Tierney, Massachusetts 

Dennis J. Kucinich, Ohio 

David Wu, Oregon 

Rush D. Holt, New Jersey 

Susan A. Davis, California 

Rau ́l M. Grijalva, Arizona 

Timothy H. Bishop, New York 

David Loebsack, Iowa 

Mazie K. Hirono, Hawaii 

Barrett Karr, Staff Director 

Jody Calemine, Minority Staff Director 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON EARLY CHILDHOOD, 

ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION 

DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman 

John Kline, Minnesota 

Thomas E. Petri, Wisconsin 

Judy Biggert, Illinois 

Todd Russell Platts, Pennsylvania 

Virginia Foxx, North Carolina 

Bob Goodlatte, Virginia 

Richard L. Hanna, New York 

Lou Barletta, Pennsylvania 

Kristi L. Noem, South Dakota 

Martha Roby, Alabama 

Mike Kelly, Pennsylvania 

Dale E. Kildee, Michigan 

Ranking Minority Member 

Donald M. Payne, New Jersey 

Robert C. ‘‘Bobby’’ Scott, Virginia 

Carolyn McCarthy, New York 

Rush D. Holt, New Jersey 

Susan A. Davis, California 

Rau ́l M. Grijalva, Arizona 

Mazie K. Hirono, Hawaii 

Lynn C. Woolsey, California 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Hearing held on November 16, 2011 ...................................................................... 1 

Statement of Members: 

Holt, Hon. Rush D., a Representative in Congress from the State of 

New Jersey .................................................................................................... 3 

Hunter, Hon. Duncan, Chairman, Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education .............................................................. 1 

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 3 

Statement of Witnesses: 

Fleischman, Steve, deputy executive officer, Education Northwest; director, Regional Educational Laboratory Northwest ...................................... 18 

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 19 

Hoxby, Dr. Caroline, Scott and Donya Bommer professor of economics, 

Stanford University ...................................................................................... 11 

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 13 

Smith, Dr. Eric J., former Florida Commissioner of Education, Florida 

Department of Education ............................................................................. 23 

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 25 

Whitehurst, Dr. Grover J. ‘‘Russ,’’ senior fellow and director of the Brown 

Center on Education Policy, Brookings Institution .................................... 5 

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 7 

Additional submissions: 

Foxx, Hon. Virginia, a Representative in Congress from the State of 

North Carolina, questions submitted for the record .................................. 45 

Mr. Holt: 

The Learning and Education Academic Research Network, prepared 

statement of ........................................................................................... 43 

Report, ‘‘From Compliance to Service: Evolving the State Role to 

Support District Data Efforts to Improve Student Achievement,’’ 

Internet address to ................................................................................ 44 

Dr. Hoxby, response to questions submitted for the record .......................... 45 

Chairman Hunter, questions submitted for the record: 

To Dr. Hoxby ............................................................................................. 44 

To Dr. Smith .............................................................................................. 47 

To Dr. Whitehurst ..................................................................................... 48 

McCarthy, Hon. Carolyn, a Representative in Congress from the State 

of New York, policy brief, ‘‘Increasing Participation in No Child Left 

Behind School Choice,’’ Internet address to ................................................ 36 

Dr. Smith, response to questions submitted for the record .......................... 48 

Dr. Whitehurst, response to questions submitted for the record ................. 49 

(1) 

EDUCATION RESEARCH: IDENTIFYING 

EFFECTIVE PROGRAMS TO SUPPORT 

STUDENTS AND TEACHERS 

Wednesday, November 16, 2011 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Subcommittee on Early Childhood, 

Elementary and Secondary Education 

Committee on Education and the Workforce 

Washington, DC 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:01 a.m., in room 

2175, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Duncan Hunter [chairman of the subcommittee] presiding. 

Present: Representatives Hunter, Petri, Platts, Foxx, Hanna, 

Barletta, Roby, Kelly, Payne, Scott, McCarthy, Holt, Davis, and 

Woolsey. 

Staff present: Jennifer Allen, Press Secretary; Katherine Bathgate, Press Assistant/New Media Coordinator; Heather Couri, Deputy Director of Education and Human Services Policy; Lindsay 

Fryer, Professional Staff Member; Krisann Pearce, General Counsel; Mandy Schaumburg, Education and Human Services Oversight 

Counsel; Dan Shorts, Legislative Assistant; Linda Stevens, Chief 

Clerk/Assistant to the General Counsel; Alissa Strawcutter, Deputy 

Clerk; Brad Thomas, Senior Education Policy Advisor; Kate 

Ahlgren, Investigative Counsel; Daniel Brown, Junior Legislative 

Assistant; John D’Elia, Staff Assistant; Jamie Fasteau, Deputy Director of Education Policy; Ruth Friedman, Director of Education 

Policy; Brian Levin, New Media Press Assistant; Kara Marchione, 

Senior Education Policy Advisor; Melissa Salmanowitz, Communications Director for Education; Laura Schifter, Senior Education 

and Disability Advisor; and Michael Zola, Senior Counsel. 

Chairman HUNTER. Good morning. A quorum being present, the 

subcommittee will come to order. 

Welcome to today’s subcommittee hearing. I would like to thank 

our witnesses for joining us today. We look forward to hearing your 

testimony. 

Providing more information about educational quality to families 

and communities is essential to improving K-12 schools in America. 

We are here today to discuss the value of education research, explore the appropriate level of federal involvement, and examine 

ways to improve current law to provide more immediate and relevant data to parents and educators. 
2 

Since the enactment of the Education Sciences Reform Act the 

federal government has played an important role in supporting research and program evaluations and gathering data about educational practice and the nation’s schools. Today, federal expert 

panels and research centers offer support to state and local organizations that perform education research. 

The responsibility for education research is shared by both federal and nonfederal organizations in an effort to examine the quality of existing programs, develop and test innovative practices, and 

ensure the effective use of taxpayer dollars. 

The resultant data allows teachers, parents, and officials to gain 

a greater understanding of successful interventions, school performance, and student achievement. For example, the Institute of 

Education Sciences established the What Works Clearinghouse to 

provide educators, policymakers, and the public with a central and 

trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education. 

Information from the clearinghouse showed the ‘‘I CAN Learn’’ 

curriculum resulted in significant achievement gains for 8th grade 

and math students. However, the What Works Clearinghouse 

needs improvement, especially in providing clear direction on applying research to classroom practices. 

Education research has also helped us identify programs that are 

not helping students succeed. Particularly in these times of trillion 

dollar deficits and record debt, congressional leaders must be careful stewards of taxpayer dollars. 

We can all agree on the need to dedicate federal education funds 

to the most effective programs; if research and data show a program is not working we should get rid of it. That is why my colleagues and I introduced legislation to eliminate more than 40 ineffective or duplicative programs as part of our K-12 education reform package. 

Through the Education Sciences Reform Act and related initiatives we have made great strides in assessing the quality of K-12 

schools, protecting taxpayers’ investment, and identifying successful education practices. However, as we look toward reauthorization of this law we must acknowledge the challenges facing education research and the Institute of Education Sciences. 

For instance, we must find better ways to help states and school 

districts translate the best research principles into classroom practices. Existing research centers designed to provide technical assistance to states and districts need to do a better job sharing information to help local education officials identify and implement the 

practices and programs that are most likely to work for their students. 

Another challenge exists in establishing a more collaborative relationship between the director of the Institution of Education 

Sciences and the secretary of education. Maintaining the autonomy 

and independence of the IES is extremely important; the director’s 

role must stay nonpolitical. However, more communication and 

data sharing between the two entities could ultimately lead to better, more effective federal education programs and initiatives. 

The witnesses here today have valuable insight into the ways we 

can ensure education research is beneficial to parents, teachers, 
3 

and students. I look forward to a productive and informative discussion this morning. 

I will now recognize my distinguished colleague, Rush Holt, for 

his opening remarks. 

[The statement of Mr. Hunter follows:] 

Prepared Statement of Hon. Duncan Hunter, Chairman, Subcommittee on 

Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education 

Providing more information about educational quality to families and communities is essential to improving K-12 schools in America. We are here today to discuss the value of education research, explore the appropriate level of federal involvement, and examine ways to improve current law to provide more immediate and relevant data to parents and educators. 

Since the enactment of the Education Sciences Reform Act, the federal government has played an important role in supporting research and program evaluations, 

and gathering data about educational practice and the nation’s schools. Today, federal expert panels and research centers offer support to state and local organizations that perform education research. The responsibility for education research is 

shared by both federal and non-federal organizations in an effort to examine the 

quality of existing programs, develop and test innovative practices, and ensure the 

effective use of taxpayer dollars. 

The resultant data allows teachers, parents, and officials to gain a greater understanding of successful interventions, school performance, and student achievement. 

For example, the Institute of Education Sciences established the What Works Clearinghouse to provide educators, policymakers, and the public with a central and 

trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education. Information from 

the Clearinghouse showed the ‘‘I CAN Learn’’ curriculum resulted in significant 

achievement gains for 8th grade math students. However, the What Works Clearinghouse needs improvement, especially in providing clear direction on applying research to classroom practices. 

Education research has also helped us identify programs that are not helping students succeed. Particularly in these times of trillion-dollar deficits and record debt, 

Congressional leaders must be careful stewards of taxpayer dollars. We can all 

agree on the need to dedicate federal education funds to the most effective programs; if research and data show a program is not working, we should get rid of 

it. That’s why my colleagues and I introduced legislation to eliminate more than 40 

ineffective or duplicative programs as part of our K-12 education reform package. 

Through the Education Sciences Reform Act and related initiatives, we have made 

great strides in assessing the quality of K-12 schools, protecting taxpayers’ investments, and identifying successful educational practices. However, as we look toward 

reauthorization of this law, we must acknowledge the challenges facing education 

research and the Institute of Education Sciences. 

For instance, we must find better ways to help states and school districts translate the best research principles into classroom practices. Existing research centers 

designed to provide technical assistance to states and districts need to do a better 

job sharing information to help local education officials identify and implement the 

practices and programs that are most likely to work for their students. 

Another challenge exists in establishing a more collaborative relationship between 

the Director of the Institute of Education Sciences and the Secretary of Education. 

Maintaining the autonomy and independence of the IES is extremely important; the 

Director’s role must stay non-political. However, more communication and data 

sharing between the two entities could ultimately lead to better, more effective federal education programs and initiatives. 

The witnesses here today have valuable insight into the ways we can ensure education research is beneficial to parents, teachers, and students. I look forward to a 

productive and informative discussion this morning. 

Mr. HOLT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the 

hearing. 

And I am pleased to welcome the witnesses here today. I think 

we will learn a lot. I thank you for taking time to provide us with 

guidance on how to use data and research to improve educational 

practices at large and individual student performance. 
4 

A few years back I visited an elementary and middle school in 

Union City, New Jersey to learn more about innovations in a school 

district that had been troubled, and how they used data to improve 

student achievement. Union City is what we call in New Jersey an 

Abbott school district. It is a dense urban district with an overwhelming majority of English language learning students, and yet, 

to the surprise of many education experts, the district is meeting 

or exceeding state standards now. 

They did a number of things to accomplish this, but one thing 

in particular they did was to provide frequent evaluation of all students and shared the test data immediately with teachers. Union 

City teachers were able, then, to tailor their instruction to meet 

each student’s individual needs. Data showed that teachers and administrators could identify trends that could be addressed systemically and individually, and this approach of continually using data 

to inform instruction helped the students do far better than previous classes of students had done. 

Now, each of us thinks we are an expert on education because 

we were students. We have to guard against that, and we have to 

remember that there are things that we can learn about how people learn. And we need data, we need evidence, we need research 

to help us understand how people learn and how we can improve 

instruction. 

The Educational Sciences Reform Act was intended to provide for 

the improvement of federal education research, statistics, evaluation, and dissemination of data to inform education policy and education practice. It supports data-driven development and supports 

practitioners in understanding research and data from their 

schools. 

I really believe that it helps educators make decisions about their 

students’ learning experiences, and it helps states use research to 

identify successful instructional programs. It helps teachers and 

principals implement proven school improvement strategies, and it 

would help us if we would use those data and if we would use that 

research. The federal government plays an important role in supporting the research. Educators across the country need reliable research to enable them to make evidence-based decisions in the 

classroom, and they need data-driven systems that support instruction. 

In reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 

I hope we will maintain accountability for acceptable, adequate 

progress for all students. We can be more flexible with how students improve, how schools improve, and how we empower schools 

to use their data, if we make more use of evidence and drive evidence-based decisions. As the committee continues to work on the 

reauthorization of ESEA and ESRA I hope we will continue to pay 

attention to the role of research and data in improving student outcomes. 

I am going to reintroduce soon the Metrics Act to help improve 

data sharing and instruction at the local level. I think improved 

use of data can help all students do better, and I hope we will be 

able to include my legislation in any reauthorization of ESEA. 

Strongly held beliefs or ideological commitment should not trump 

data or evidence. If we want to make the best policy we need evi-
5 

dence-based research. At the individual level, if we really want to 

hold schools accountable for adequate progress for each student 

they have to use data, and we have to see that it is used in the 

most illustrative way. 

So continued federal investment in educational research will be 

necessary if we are to ensure that all students receive a quality 

education that prepares them for life and further study. I hope the 

testimony today will provide us with some recommendations on 

how we can strengthen the ESRA and the federal investment in 

education research. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank the gentleman. 

Pursuant to Committee Rule 7c, all subcommittee members will 

be permitted to submit written statements to be included in the 

permanent hearing record, and without objection, the hearing 

record will remain open for 14 days to allow statements, questions 

for the record, and other extraneous material referenced during the 

hearing to be submitted in the official hearing record. 

It is now my distinguished pleasure to introduce our panel of witnesses. Dr. Grover J. ‘‘Russ’’ Whitehurst is the director of the 

Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. 

Previously, he was the first director of the Institute of Education 

Sciences. 

Dr. Caroline Hoxby is the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in 

Economics at Stanford University, the director of the Economics of 

Education program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, 

and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. 

Mr. Steve Fleischman is the deputy executive officer of Education 

Northwest, formerly known as Northwest Regional Educational 

Laboratory, the organization that has managed the REL Northwest 

Laboratory since 1966. He has also served as director of REL 

Northwest. 

Lastly, Dr. Eric Smith is the former commissioner of education 

for the state of Florida. Dr. Smith is currently a consultant to a 

number of state education chiefs and school districts on several 

education reform projects. 

Before I recognize each of you to provide your testimony let me 

briefly explain our lighting system. When you start it will be green, 

you will have 5 minutes; when you have 1 minute left it will turn 

yellow; and when it turns red we would ask you to wrap up as best 

as you can. After everyone has testified, the members will have 5 

minutes to ask a question of the panel. 

I would now like to recognize Dr. Whitehurst for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF DR. GROVER J. ‘‘RUSS’’ WHITEHURST, SENIOR 

FELLOW AND DIRECTOR OF THE BROWN CENTER ON EDUCATION POLICY, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the 

committee. I really appreciate the invitation to testify, and I am 

pleased that you have such a keen interest in education research 

and reauthorizing ESRA. 

Everyone in the room knows that education is important. It has 

been true in this country throughout its history. In fact, before we 
6 

were a country a first thing that a small, colonial village would do 

is set up a school once it had enough kids to require schooling. 

But in an age of globalization and the advent of a knowledgebased economy, the imperative for us to educate well is stronger 

than it has ever been. High quality education research is critical 

to the nation’s effort to deliver better education and a future of opportunities to our citizens. Without good evidence we are destined 

to embrace education policies that move us forward, backwards, 

and sideways, and we are not even going to know in which of those 

directions we are heading. 

The Educational Sciences Reform Act, which originated in this 

subcommittee in 2001, made great strides towards improving quality and independence of federally sponsored education research. 

Prior to that legislation the federal stewardship of education research was widely viewed as a failure. 

Since then, we have seen considerable progress in the quality 

and relevance of that research and evidence for that comes from a 

number of sources. Let me just give you a very short list of some 

things we know now that we did not know 10 years ago that are 

a product of the federal investment in education research. 

On teachers, we know that teachers vary dramatically in their effectiveness. A very effective compared to a very ineffective teacher 

can create achievement gains for a child in 1 year that can wipe 

out a third of the achievement gap between white and black students, and you can see the effects of a very effective teacher in elementary school all the way into adulthood, in terms of college-going 

and job earnings. 

On the organization of schools, we know now that no excuses 

charter schools in urban areas do a dramatically better job than 

traditional public schools in raising student achievement. 

On standards, we have learned that the quality of state standards for what students should know, contrary to what seem to be 

reasonable assumptions, bear no relationship to student achievement. The states with the best standards can have low levels of 

achievement relative to states with weak standards, and vice-versa. 

On the effectiveness of federally funded education programs, we 

now know that a significant number of those programs are not 

achieving their intended effects. 

And finally, on basic learning and instructional processes we 

have a whole list of things we have learned, including the interesting fact that testing students on the content of the classroom assignments produces substantially more learning than the same 

amount of time spent restudying the material. 

So I could provide you a much longer list. There are many things 

we know now that we did not know 10 years ago. If knowledge is 

power we are in a much better shape than we used to be, and that 

augurs well for the future. 

ESRA is overdue for reauthorization. I will not take you through 

a to-do list for reauthorizing the law. Let me simply say it is a 

pretty good piece of legislation; I think it needs some fine-tuning, 

and that is about it. 

Finally, I want to address the federal role in incorporating the 

findings from research into program mandates. No Child Left Behind uses the phrase ‘‘scientifically-based research’’ 111 times—I 
7 

counted—and it includes mandates for states and local education 

agencies to base their practices on research. The most extreme example is the now defunct program, Reading First, which dictated 

how early reading instruction was to be delivered at the classroom 

level at a very granular level. 

It is a fundamental mistake, in my view, for Congress to dictate 

how states and LEAs should use findings from research. Research 

is seldom definitive. Its reflection in statute and on-the-ground implementation is typically flawed, and our knowledge advances at 

too fast a rate for legislation to keep up. 

Instead of telling states and local education agencies what they 

should do and appealing to research as a justification, in my view, 

Congress should focus on creating incentives for practitioners and 

policymakers to incorporate research findings into their programs. 

Those incentives should be based around the performance of 

schools. 

When my grandfather learned about research findings that 

would help him generate a higher yield from his farm he didn’t 

need to be told by government that he had to utilize those findings; 

it was in his self-interest to do so and he did. Likewise, education 

providers will use research when it helps them do something for 

which they are accountable. 

There are two ways to fashion an accountability system that will 

create a demand for research findings. One is top-down regulatory 

accountability, as we have seen in No Child Left Behind. Washington says, ‘‘Here are your targets for student achievement. If you 

don’t meet them the following things will happen.’’ 

The other approach is bottom-up marketplace accountability. 

Parents are given choices of where to send their kids to school. 

They get good information on school performance. Funding follows 

kids. Schools that aren’t performing well lose students and funding. 

The managers of those schools are motivated to improve their performance and seek solutions, including those from good research. 

I am in favor of a market-based approach to creating demand for 

research and I urge you to consider it in the context of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. 

In conclusion, as a result of rigorous and relevant education research we know much more than we did about what works and 

what doesn’t in education than we did a few years ago. We have 

got a long way to go before we know enough to assure a good education to every student. 

We have started. We are making progress. I appreciate this committee’s understanding of the importance of the work and the critical role the federal government plays in advancing it. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

[The statement of Dr. Whitehurst follows:] 

Prepared Statement of Dr. Grover J. ‘‘Russ’’ Whitehurst, Senior Fellow and 

Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, Brookings Institution 

MR. CHAIRMAN AND MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE: I am Russ Whitehurst. I direct 

the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Prior to holding 

my present position, I was the founding director of the Institute of Education 

Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education. Before entering government 

service I had a long career as a researcher and academic administrator. 

Thank you for the invitation to testify. I am pleased that there is such interest 

and leadership in addressing the quality of education research in America. 
8 

Everyone in this room knows that education is important. I expect that all of us 

have had an experience with a teacher, a class, an educational institution, or 

through independent learning that has changed our lives. I certainly have. The 

American dream of opportunity and advancement and the educational system of the 

United State are inextricably connected. This has been true throughout our history. 

Indeed, well before the country was founded it was typical for colonial villages that 

had grown to more than a few hundred people to establish and fund a public school, 

with the first dating to 1639. Since that time, we have continued to value education 

and invest in it. But in an age of globalization and the advent of a knowledge based 

economy, the imperative to educate and educate well is stronger than it has ever 

been. The evidence that nations with a better educated populace experience higher 

growth rates is compelling, and during the current economic downturn the unemployment rate in the U.S. for young adults with just a high school diploma has been 

three times the rate for those with a college degree. 

High quality education research is critical to the nation’s effort to deliver better 

education and a future of opportunity to our citizens. Without good evidence on the 

condition of education, what works and what does not, fundamental processes of 

learning and instruction, and breakthrough instructional technologies we are destined to embrace education policies that move us forward, backward, and sideways 

without even knowing in which of those directions we’re heading. Without good education research, our approaches to education reform are more akin to fashion and 

fancy—the width of a man’s tie or the length of a woman’s skirt—than to anything 

that is rational and benefits from a systematic examination of evidence. 

Think of what federal investments in agricultural research have accomplished. My 

grandparents were farmers during the transition from the way things had always 

been to farming based on the knowledge produced by agricultural research. I remember well my grandfather coming back from a meeting with an agricultural extension agent excited about what new seeds and new approaches to crop rotation 

could do for the family farm. And because he was an early and eager adopter of 

research-based approaches to farming, he was always ahead of his neighbors in 

wringing a living from his land. These days America is the breadbasket for the 

world, largely because we invested in agricultural research and figured out how to 

disseminate the knowledge derived from that research to those who farm. We are 

on the cusp of a transformation of education to an evidence-based field that will 

have many similarities to the changes in agriculture that my grandparents experienced. The actions this Committee takes as it shapes the the federal role in education research will have far reaching effects on the quality and productivity of our 

schools, and through that on our economy and future. 

Mr. Chairman, the Education Sciences Reform Act, which originated in this subcommittee in 2001 and currently governs the education research enterprise at the 

Institute of Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education, made 

great strides towards improving the quality and independence of federally sponsored 

education research. Prior to that legislation, the federal stewardship of education research was widely viewed as a failure. To that point, in 1999 the National Academies of Science came to the conclusion that: 

One striking fact is that the complex world of education—unlike defense, health 

care, or industrial production—does not rest on a strong research base. In no other 

field are personal experience and ideology so frequently relied on to make policy 

choices, and in no other field is the research base so inadequate and little used. 

Since the National Academies report and as a direct result of Education Sciences 

Reform Act we have seen considerable progress in the quality and relevance of education research. Evidence for this comes from numerous sources, not the least of 

which is the Office of Management and Budget. OMB’s most recent program assessment of the Institute of Education Sciences concluded that—— 

Since its creation by the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, IES has transformed the quality and rigor of education research within the Department of Education and increased the demand for scientifically based evidence of effectiveness in 

the education field as a whole. 

Let me give you some examples of things we’ve learned from recent education research that are very important to improving America’s schools and student achievement. 

• On teachers 

Teachers vary dramatically in effectiveness—a very effective compared to a very 

ineffective teacher can create achievement gains for a child in one year that can 

wipe out a third of the achievement gap between white and black students. 

On-the-job performance is the single strong predictor of how good a teacher will 

be in the future—almost every other observable characteristic of teachers is at best 
9 

only weakly predictive of how they will perform in the classroom, e.g. whether they 

are regularly certified or not, were trained in a school of education or not, got a high 

or low score on a certification exam, received a lot of professional development or 

a little, and were mentored as novices or not tells us almost nothing about how effective they will be as teachers. 

Most professional development programs for teachers are a waste of time and 

money. 

• On the organization of schools, choice, and competition 

No excuses charter schools in urban areas do a dramatically better job than traditional public schools in raising student achievement. 

Armed with good information on school performance and the ability to choose 

schools, low-income parents choose better schools than the ones to which their 

school district would assign their children, and their children do better academically 

as a result. 

Schools that are subject to competition from other schools for students improve 

more than schools not subject to competition. 

• On standards, accountability, and curriculum 

The quality of state standards for what students should know bears no relationship to student achievement—states with the best standards can have low levels of 

achievement relative to states with weak standards and vice-versa. 

No Child Left Behind-type accountability for schools and districts raises student 

achievement modestly, with the effects focused in mathematics in the earlier grades. 

Curriculum choices can make a sizable difference—for example the difference between using the most effective vs. the least effective elementary school mathematics 

curriculum, each costing about the same, is as much as a third of a year of learning 

over the course of one school year. 

Presently available educational technology programs as used in schools do not 

raise student achievement. 

• On the effectiveness of federally funded education programs 

There is a long-list of federal education programs that have no measurable effect 

on student outcomes, including: • The 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program (afterschool ) • Even Start • Head Start (for outcomes at the end of first grade) • Upward Bound • Reading First • On basic learning and instructional processes 

Spacing the occasions when students are asked to study related content rather 

than massing the study of that content into a short time frame remarkably increases learning and retention. 

Testing students on the content of their classroom assignments produces substantially more learning than the same amount of time spent restudying the material. 

I could provide many more pages of example of things we know now about education that we did not know 15 years ago. If knowledge is power, we’re in much 

better shape than we used to be and that augurs well for the future. 

The Education Sciences Reform Act is overdue for reauthorization. I will not take 

you through a to-do list for reauthorizing the law, one reason being that the National Board for Education Sciences has already generated such a list and I’m supportive of the Board’s recommendations. Let me simply suggest three principles that 

should underlie the reauthorization. 

1. If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It—There are various groups, with the American 

Educational Research Association being the most prominent, that would have you 

make fundamental changes in the law that appeal to their interests. They would, 

for example, have you change the definitions of what constitutes rigorous research 

and evaluation to lower the methodological bar their members confront when trying 

to obtain federal grant money, and they would have you separate the National Center for Education Statistics from the Institute of Education Sciences in order to create another federal entity that they can try to influence and with which they could 

curry favor. The key question you should ask of advocates of any significant changes 

in the language in the bill is, ‘‘What evidence do you have you that the current language has had bad effects?’’ ESRA a pretty good piece of legislation and most efforts 

to change it are going to come from organizations that want a return to the wonderful days of yesteryear when education research produced little of value except funding for education researchers. 

2. Independence Is Fundamental—One of the most important advances in the 

Education Sciences Reform Act was to create a greater degree of independence be-
10 

tween the Department’s research arm and the political leadership of the Department. I led the Department’s research office for 8 years under two secretaries and 

multiple lesser political appointees. I had good relationships with the political leadership of the Department and we worked well together, but I needed every bit of 

independence granted me by statute along with a fair amount of grit to keep my 

office and its functions from being politicized. I think this is in the nature of the 

beast rather than the personalities or political parties involved. Anything you can 

do to further arm future IES directors with independence from political direction 

will be positive. At the same time, the IES director needs to be inside the tent in 

order for the Department to benefit from education research and to have education 

research informed by insights on federal policies. 

3. The Regional Educational Lab Program (the RELs) Is Broken and Should be 

Fixed—The REL program goes back to 1966 and the very first Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Since then, year in and year out, the RELs have pulled down 

a significant proportion of the total federal investment in education R&D with little 

to show of value from that investment and a lot to show that should be an embarrassment. I don’t think any amount of tinkering with the legislative language that 

authorizes the RELs or aggressive intervention by the Institute of Education 

Sciences can fix what is wrong with the program. But there is a function the RELs 

are intended to serve that is desperately needed: helping states answer questions 

about the effectiveness and productivity of their own education programs using state 

administrative data. The goal of having statewide longitudinal education databases 

in every state was pursued vigorously in the George W. Bush administration. The 

Obama administration has added substantially to funding for this effort through the 

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In the near future all states will 

have data warehouses with longitudinal student achievement data linked to a variety of education input variables. However, having data available and being able to 

use it are two different things. Only a few states have the staff capacity within their 

state education office to conduct analyses of longitudinal data to address policy 

questions. This means that most policy initiatives fly blind, both in original design 

and subsequent appraisal. RELs might be assigned through legislation to carry out 

this task, but they have multiple masters (including the federal government, their 

own boards, the governors and state legislatures in their region), they vary substantially in their capabilities, and they have no easy way to prioritize among various 

claims on their resources. It would be much better in my view to eliminate the REL 

program and substitute for it a research voucher program for state education departments. The current REL budget would be split among states, taking some account of state population but making sure that smaller states receive a cut of the 

pie that is large enough to be useful. The states could spend their vouchers to contract for research on issues of high interest to them. The research plans and products would undergo methodological review at IES to assure quality, but would otherwise be independent of the Department. The current RELs could compete for this 

work. If they could do the work well they would prosper. If they could not they 

would have to go into another line of work. It is a marketplace solution to a problem 

that has proven intractable to previous legislative and administrative solutions. 

4. You Get What You Pay For—Although federal budgetary support for education 

research has increased in the last decade, it remains a pittance when compared with 

levels of investment in research, evaluation, and statistics in other areas of the 

economy. For example, more than 40% of the discretionary budget of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is invested in knowledge production and 

dissemination through the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease 

Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and many other operational components. In the U.S. Department of Education, the corresponding investment is less 

than 1%. In education research and development, no less than in R&D in health 

or transportation or communication or energy or agriculture, the public gets what 

it pays for. 

Finally, I want to address the federal role in incorporating the findings from educational research into program mandates. NCLB uses the phrase ‘‘scientificallybased research’’ 111 times, and includes many mandates for states and local education agencies to base their practices on the findings from such research. The most 

extreme example is the now defunct program, Reading First, which dictated how 

early reading instruction was to be delivered at a very granular level based on research findings. There is no evidence that children are reading better as a result. 

It is a fundamental mistake, in my view, for Congress to dictate how states and 

LEAs should use findings from research. Even if the research were absolutely definitive, which it seldom is; and Congress could translate it into legislation without distortion, which it can’t; and bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Education could 

implement it unimpeachably, which is unlikely; science is dynamic. We shouldn’t ac-
11 

cept a process that requires Congress to rewrite legislation in order to bring education practice in line with evolving research findings. 

Instead of telling states and local education agencies what they should do and appealing to research as the justification, Congress should focus on creating incentives 

for practitioners and policy makers to want to incorporate findings from the best research into their programs. Those incentives should be around the performance of 

schools. If those who are responsible for the management of schools are held accountable for schools’ performance, and if research findings are both readily 

consumable and provide a obvious boost to school performance, then the research 

will be utilized. When my grandfather learned about research findings that would 

give him a leg up in the yield from his farm he didn’t need to be told by big government that he had to base his practices on that research. It was in his self-interest 

to do so because he was accountable for earning a living from his farm. Likewise, 

education providers will use research when it helps them do something for which 

they’re accountable. 

There are two ways to fashion an accountability system that will create a demand 

for research findings. One is top-down regulatory accountability as we’ve seen in 

NCLB—Washington says, ‘‘Here are your targets for student achievement. If you 

don’t meet them the following unpleasant things will happen.’’ The other approach 

is bottom-up market place accountability—Parents are given choices of where to 

send their children to school and good information on school performance. Funding 

follows the child. Schools that aren’t performing well lose students and funding. The 

managers of those schools are motivated to improve their performance and seek solutions, including those from good research. 

I’m in favor of the market-based approach to creating demand for education research and I urge you to consider it in the context of the reauthorization of ESEA. 

We know much more about what works and what doesn’t in education than we 

did 15 years ago as a result of advances in research, but our level of ignorance 

dwarfs our understanding by orders of magnitude. It has been so in the early years 

of the transformation of other fields to evidence-based practice. Moving education 

to a point at which our research base is sufficient to assure a good education for 

every student is the work of a generation, not of a few years. We’ve started and 

we’re moving in the right direction. I appreciate this Committee’s understanding of 

the importance of the work and the critical role the federal government plays in advancing it. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank you, Doctor. 

Dr. Hoxby is recognized for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF DR. CAROLINE HOXBY, SCOTT AND DONYA 

BOMMER PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY 

Ms. HOXBY. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank 

you very much for inviting me to testify. It is an honor. 

The United States faces a bleak future if we do not improve the 

education of our population. The American industries that are still 

growing quickly and exporting are those that are most dependent 

on having educated workers, and if our economy is to grow fast 

enough to solve our fiscal problems we really need to have a more 

productive education sector—in other words, achieve more with the 

same amount of spending. 

As the Education Sciences Research—Reform Act greatly transformed education research and moved it much closer to the successful models that we associate with the National Science Foundation 

and the National Institutes for Health. Crucially, ESRA stated that 

education research should meet high scientific standards. Before 

ESRA, much of U.S. Department of Education-funded research was 

wasted on fairly unreliable studies that misinformed families and 

educators. 

The most acute problem prior to ESRA was that Department of 

Education-funded studies often made bold causal claims when they 
12 

used unscientific methods that really could not support those 

claims. Claims of causation (such as stricter teacher licensure raising student achievement), were made when the study often showed 

nothing more than a correlation. And in that particular case, it 

turns out that the correlation is not particularly informative about 

the causal effect of teacher licensure on achievement. 

I want to make three main points. The first is that although IES 

has greatly improved education research, vigilance and continued 

improvements are needed. We must continue to raise, not relax, 

scientific standards. 

My second point is that the federal government, universities, and 

philanthropic organizations should share the responsibility for supporting education research. And my third point is that the research 

functions of the U.S. Department of Education should be the functions on which people can most easily agree, and this is because 

all markets work better when the people in them are informed, in 

this case parents, students, and educators. 

I think scientific research is one of our best hopes for improving 

American education quickly without our having to spend more 

money. 

So IES has greatly improved education, but now is the time to 

further raise standards, not relax them. I don’t think high scientific 

standards are so ingrained in the education research community 

that IES can afford to take its foot off the gas. 

Since its creation, IES has mainly promoted experimental and 

quasi-experimental methods. These methods tend to produce reliable results as long as they are used properly, and they are not terribly difficult to use properly. 

Perhaps something like 10 percent of randomized base studies 

are unreliable, and that number might rise to about 25 percent 

with quasi-experimental studies. That the mistakes are not corrected by the authors themselves does demonstrate, however, that 

even experimental studies are not dummy-proof. 

Moreover, there are many important questions that cannot be 

answered with experimental studies and the remaining evaluation 

methods require even more expertise to apply. This means that 

IES, if it is to be able to answer all the questions of interest to the 

American people, needs to develop greater expertise. 

Expert review panels are the main means by which IES maintains high standards. While IES reviewing is not yet quite the 

equal of NSF reviewing, in my experience it has made remarkable 

progress, and I would say that the institute is now in a virtuous 

cycle whereby good standards attract good reviewers, and the good 

reviewers attract good proposals. It is a virtuous cycle, but vigilance is needed because that can easily break down into a vicious 

cycle where poor standards attract poor proposals for research. 

Another thing that IES is doing well but that requires vigilance 

is data collection. IES has traditionally been very strong in collecting survey-based data, but now most top-notch education research is migrating away from survey data and towards administrative data sets based on schools’ records. This is because most 

scientific methods now require the completeness and the large scale 

of administrative records. 
13 

Unfortunately, our country is not at the frontier in this. Most 

South American countries and most Northern European countries 

have better administrative data sets than we do. 

This is a problem because researchers tend to migrate towards 

doing research on the things for which there is the best data. For 

instance, right now I could write a much better study of Dutch 

school choice reforms than I could of American school choice reforms. Their data are just better. 

The final thing that IES has done well that Dr. Whitehurst also 

mentioned is really courageously contract for rigorous studies of 

high profile programs. And I would cite as examples the evaluation 

of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and the evaluation of 

the 21st Century Community Learning Centers. It is not acceptable 

for taxpayers to continue to pay for programs year after year after 

year without having any rigorous evidence on whether the programs actually work. 

My second point is that responsibility for education research 

should be shared by the federal government, universities, and philanthropic organizations. Each one of these entities plays a distinct 

role. 

I have already mentioned that the federal government should collect data, but it also needs to be a supporter of university-based 

scholars, and I will return to this point. Philanthropic organizations also play a key role, but unlike the federal government, they 

should be mainly interested in the evaluation of speculative, innovative programs, and that is because they are using donors’ money 

to evaluate programs rather than using taxpayers’ money. 

Finally, universities: University-based researchers are primarily 

responsible for developing new scientific methods, validating them, 

and training people to use them. It is essential that these researchers interact with the federal government on a regular basis so that 

cutting edge methods are known by researchers at IES. 

Another important role for university researchers is to work on 

topics that are currently politically unpopular. If they had not been 

doing research on school choice in the 1990s we wouldn’t know very 

much about it today, and they didn’t make very many friends doing 

that research. 

Finally, I said that the research functions of the U.S. Department of Education should be the functions on which people can 

most easily agree. Americans really do disagree on the extent to 

which the federal government should mandate education standards 

and policies, and many Americans believe that it should be families 

who make most of the choices. 

But really no one argues that anyone—the families, educators, or 

policymakers—would be better off if they had less access to reliable 

information, and that means that it is one of our best hopes to improve education if we use scientific information to spend smarter 

rather than just spending more. Thank you. 

[The statement of Dr. Hoxby follows:] 

Prepared Statement of Dr. Caroline Hoxby, Scott and Donya Bommer 

Professor of Economics, Stanford University 

MR. CHAIRMAN AND MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE: My name is Caroline Hoxby. 

I am the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics at Stanford University 

and the Director of Economics of Education at the National Bureau of Economic Re-
14 

search, the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization. I served for 

several years as a presidential appointee to the National Board for Education 

Sciences. Over my career, first at Harvard and recently at Stanford, I have conducted research on a wide array of topics in elementary, secondary, and higher education including class size, charter schools, college tuition, school finance, and bilingual education. There is a common theme in my research and the research of the 

many Ph.D.s I have trained: we attempt to answer questions in education by applying the most reliable, most advanced, most scientific methods to the best available 

data. 

Thank you for the invitation to testify. It is an honor to address you, and I believe 

that today’s topics are absolutely key to improving education in the United States. 

The United States faces a very bleak future if we do not figure out how to quickly 

and continuously improve the education of our population. The American industries 

that are still growing, thriving, and exporting are the industries that are most dependent on educated workers. If our economy is to grow fast enough to help solve 

our fiscal crisis, we must have a smarter, more productive education sector, not one 

that is simply more costly. 

If this sounds like an insurmountable challenge, it is only because Americans can 

point to so little educational improvement over the past four decades that we, as 

a nation, have begun to believe that very little improvement is possible. Contrast 

this with medicine or almost any other field of applied knowledge. If we were offered 

the choice between a medical procedure that relied on today’s knowledge versus the 

knowledge of 1970, we would—all of us—choose today’s. We would probably be ambivalent about today’s schools versus the schools of 1970. 

The difference between education and medicine is not that improvement is impossible in education but possible in medicine. It is not that all children are difficult 

to manage and all patients are easy to manage. The difference is that education has 

not, until recently, benefitted from rigorous, scientific research. 

The Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) of 2002 greatly transformed education 

research, moving it much closer to the successful models used by the National 

Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. ESRA stated unequivocally that the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) should facilitate research that 

met high, scientific standards in order that it produce reliable results. This was the 

crucial statement. Until ESRA, much of the U.S. Department of Education’s budget 

for research was wasted on studies that were widely recognized to be unreliable. Not 

only was taxpayer money wasted, but the Department unintentionally endorsed and 

promoted poor research methods by funding low-standard studies. 

Prior to ESRA, there were two particularly acute problems with Department of 

Education-funded studies. The first was that they often employed subjective measures of what schools did and what students achieved. If a study relies on subjective 

measures, a researcher’s ideology often dictates what the data says. The second and 

more pervasive problem was that Department-funded studies often made bold causal claims despite the fact that they used methods that could not possibly support 

such claims. Claims of causation—such as ‘‘stricter teacher licensure rules raise student achievement’’—were made when the study showed nothing more than a correlation. For instance, in my example, schools with a higher percentage of teachers 

who are licensed are schools that serve students who come from more advantaged 

backgrounds. These students tend to have higher achievement regardless of how 

their teachers are licensed. It turns out that the correlation between teacher licensure and achievement tells us literally nothing about the causal effect of teacher licensure on achievement. In short, prior to ESRA, Department of Education-funded 

research routinely provided misinformation to American families and schools. 

I support the recommendations that the National Board for Education Sciences 

has already made regarding the reauthorization of ESRA. Those recommendations, 

however, are necessarily detail-oriented. In my remaining time, I wish to provide 

a ‘‘big picture’’ perspective on ESRA, IES, and—more broadly—the role of the federal government in education research. 

I have three main points. 

1. IES has greatly improved education research since the enactment of ESRA, but 

vigilance and continued improvements are needed. We cannot afford to relax standards now. Rather, even higher scientific standards should be the goal. 

2. The federal government, universities, and philanthropic organizations should 

share the responsibility for supporting education research. This mixed model, somewhat peculiar to the U.S., is essentially the right model. Each entity plays an important and distinct role. 

3. The data collection and research support functions of the U.S. Department of 

Education should be the functions on which people with diverse political views can 

agree. This is because no market functions better in the absence of information on 
15 

which parents, students, and schools can make choices. Also, truly scientific research in education is probably our best hope for improving the skills of Americans 

quickly, with the expenditures we are already making. 

Again, my first point is that IES has greatly improved education but that now 

is the time to further raise, not relax, the scientific standards that are the crucial 

contribution of ESRA. We are not yet in the situation where high, scientific standards are so ingrained in the education research community that IES can take its 

‘‘foot off the gas.’’ Since its creation, IES has consistently promoted scientific methods by favoring studies that employ experimental and quasi-experimental methods 

such as randomized controlled trials, randomization built into pilot programs, and 

regression discontinuity. These methods produce reliable results when used properly. That is why they are also used in fields such as medicine and social program 

evaluation. Vigilance is needed, however, because even the best experiment is not 

‘‘dummy proof.’’ IES should continue to raise the bar, insisting on even better training in issues like attrition and measurement that arise in experiments. Also, not 

all important questions can be answered with experimental or quasi-experimental 

methods, and IES therefore needs to develop greater expertise in other evaluation 

methods, methods that produce reliable results only when they are applied by researchers who are very highly trained. 

Expert review panels are the key means by which IES gains access to expert opinion, maintains high research standards, and improves its own staff’s knowledge of 

the latest methods and research. The Department of Education’s expert panels have 

improved greatly since the enactment of ESRA. They now contain a sufficient percentage of well-trained experts that the panel process can be said to, very often but 

not always, fund research that produces reliable results. While IES reviewing is not 

yet equal in quality to the NSF reviewing I have experienced, IES has made remarkable progress. The Institute is only able to convene top experts and attract 

high quality proposals because researchers believe that the Department turned the 

corner with ESRA and now promotes scientifically-grounded research. Top experts 

only participate in review processes in which they believe. Top researchers, who can 

devote themselves to issues other than education, only submit proposals to reviewers who are expert enough to judge proposals well. In other words, IES is currently 

in a virtuous cycle: higher scientific standards induce participation by more expert 

reviewers. This leads better researchers to submit higher quality proposals, and the 

cycle continues. Vigilance is necessary, however: the virtuous cycle can easily break 

down and become a vicious cycle in which poor standards lead to poor participation, 

at which point the review process attracts only poor proposals. 

Another thing that IES is doing well but that requires vigilance is data collection. 

IES, through its National Center for Education Statistics, has been collecting survey 

data on students and schools for decades. These data tend to be well-respected— 

this is one function of the Department’s research arm that was high quality prior 

to ESRA. However, top-notch education research has migrated away from survey 

data and towards detailed administrative data. About 75 percent of studies published by top applied journals now rely on administrative data—datasets based on 

schools recording what a student does, what teachers and policies and classrooms 

he encounters, and what outcomes he attains, both in the short-term (test scores) 

and long-term (college graduation, earnings, and so on). The reason that research 

is migrating from survey to administrative data is that modern scientific methods 

that produce reliable estimates often require the large scale and completeness of administrative data. While the U.S. continues to have some of the world’s best survey 

data on education, our country has fallen far behind the frontier in administrative 

data on education. Currently, most northern European countries and some South 

American countries have substantially better administrative data than the U.S. 

This matters because top researchers are motivated just as much by the availability 

of data that allow them to write excellent studies as they are motivated by funding. 

Thus, researchers are increasingly drifting away from the analysis of U.S. education 

policies and toward the analysis of other countries’ education policies. To be concrete, I could now write a study of English, Dutch, or Swedish school choice reforms 

using better data than are available to me in the U.S. IES is making valiant efforts, 

which I praise, to create and sponsor stronger administrative databases, but this is 

another area in which continued exertion is needed. Integrating states’ data and 

data from its own agencies (like the National Student Loan system) is probably the 

cheapest and quickest way for IES to improve education research. 

A final thing that IES has done well under ESRA is courageously contract for rigorous studies of high profile programs and programs on which the federal government already spends substantial money. I would cite, as examples, the evaluation 

of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the evaluation of the 21st Century 

Community Learning Centers, and the evaluations of Professional Development pro-
16 

grams in mathematics and reading. It simply does not make sense for U.S. taxpayers to fund programs year after year in the absence of scientific evidence of their 

effects, and findings from such rigorous studies should play an important role in any 

debate about their future. You may have observed that I said these contracts were 

courageous. They were. When one conducts a study using strong, scientific methods, 

one cannot know how it will turn out. It is always possible that some constituency 

will be angered by the results, but—then—that is the entire point of doing research. 

If we could accurately choose education programs simply by knowing ‘‘in our hearts’’ 

that they were right, we would already have very successful schools. 

There are a few areas in which IES has great intentions but is not having the 

effect for which it hopes. The Regional Education Laboratories and the What Works 

Clearinghouse are examples. 

My second point is that support and responsibility for education research should 

be shared by the federal government, universities, and philanthropic organizations. 

In the U.S., we have a successful model in which each of these entities plays an 

important and distinct role. While I would never argue that our model is perfect, 

I am routinely struck by how well it functions when I am abroad and experience 

other countries’ education research. A similar mixed model of support is used for 

medical research. 

The federal government should play a few roles in education research. First, and 

most obviously, it should collect and make available accurate data on all aspects of 

education that can be measured: expenditures, revenues, achievement, personnel, 

curriculum, school policy, and so on. Because there are enormous economies of scale 

and scope in data collection and because cross-state comparisons are so important 

to research, it is important that the federal government and not just state governments collect data and make it available in a timely way. 

Second, the federal government should publish descriptive reports on American 

education. The word descriptive is important because such reports are part of the 

government’s duty to disseminate data, rather than a duty to do causal research. 

A report that describes where English Learners enroll is descriptive. This must be 

distinguished from research that attempts to test a causal hypothesis such as 

whether bilingual education raises English Leaners’ achievement. The federal government is not in a good position to conduct causal research itself. This is because 

such research requires methods that need expert review, and the government cannot both convene the reviewers and be the entity that is reviewed. In the same way, 

we would not want an accused person to convene his own jury. A good review process requires independence. 

Third, the federal government should contract for highly reliable evaluations of 

the education programs it supports. These evaluations cost only a small fraction of 

what is spent on the programs themselves. For this small expenditure, a good evaluation can save taxpayers vast amounts of money, either by providing the evidence 

that improves a partially-successful program or by providing the evidence that gives 

Congress the grounds for abolishing an unsuccessful program. The federal government should be prepared to fund evaluations of its programs with little financial 

help from universities or philanthropies. This is because the goal of such evaluations is not to be innovative or to explore new questions. The goal is to produce clear 

answers to well-specified questions regarding established programs. The ideal evaluation should employ methods that are well-validated that the evaluation is boring 

in every way except for the results. Fortunately, in the U.S., we have active competition for such contracts among a good number of organizations: Mathematica, 

Abt, Rand, Westat, AIR, MDRC, and so on. 

Fourth, the federal government should share in the support of (but not be the exclusive supporter of) research by university-based and similar scholars. These are 

the people who develop new methods, who ask questions that are still somewhat 

speculative, and who conduct ‘‘basic research’’ in education. I will return to this 

point. 

Philanthropic institutions also play a vital role in education research. In some 

ways, their role parallels the federal role except that philanthropies should focus 

more on trial programs that are innovative and less on established programs funded 

by the government. This is because the government uses money that taxpayers are 

obliged to pay while philanthropic organizations use money that their donors freely 

give. If a philanthropy spends money on a speculative educational program that 

does not succeed, the consequences fall on its donors—people who are affluent 

enough to accept this risk in return for the prospect of developing exciting new programs that benefit society. Philanthropies can obtain reliable evaluations by contracting with the same organizations that contract with the federal government. 

And, like the government, philanthropies should share in supporting research by 

university-based and similar scholars. 
17 

Let me now turn to the role of university-based researchers. As I mentioned, university-based researchers are primarily responsible not only for developing new and 

more scientific methods of evaluation, but also testing them, validating them in an 

array of applications, and training people to use them. For instance, university researchers developed the cutting-edge methods to deal with attrition and non-compliance in randomized controlled trials. They also developed the quasi-experimental 

methods that are currently the workhorses of evaluation. In addition, universitybased researchers are almost entirely responsible for conducting basic research—research that has no immediate policy relevance but that provides fundamental information on which policies should be ultimately based. For example, I study peer effects—how students’ achievement is affected by the other students who share the 

classroom with them. This basic research is a fundamental that we need to evaluate 

policies like school choice that affect which students are in each school. Another 

good example of basic research is the recent spate of studies that show (a) that different teachers have very different effects on achievement and (b) that a teacher’s 

effect is not related to her credentials. This basic research is a fundamental we need 

for thinking about teacher pay incentives, teacher training, teacher tenure, and policies that affect which teachers end up in which schools. Finally, university researchers should be primarily responsible for investigating educational programs that are 

speculative, still under development, or implemented on a purely trial basis. University researchers must also do the uncomfortable work of analyzing programs that 

are currently unpopular with the administration and/or philanthropies. As an example of a purely trial program designed and investigated by university researchers, 

I would point to the recent study that shows that students are more likely to enroll 

in college if their family can automatically file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid when it files its taxes. As an example of unpopular research, I would point 

to studies of school choice from the 1990s. Researchers who worked on such topics 

did not win many friends in the education establishment, but we are now glad that 

the studies exist because they inform us about how to structure choice policies. 

I have said that the federal government and philanthropies should share in the 

support of university-based education research. Why? If the government and philanthropies do not have ‘‘skin in the game’’, they will not attract university researchers 

to study the policies or develop the methods that are important to them (the government and philanthropies). They will not attract top experts to review the contractbased studies they support. They will not learn about cutting-edge research and cutting-edge methods in real time. It is the nature of cutting-edge work that you cannot 

learn about it just by reading an article after the fact. You need to interact with 

researchers—ask them questions, pose alternatives. 

Universities themselves should also share in supporting education research. Why? 

If we want university-based researchers to invent better methods and conduct basic 

research, they need to be rewarded for these activities. No one is better at generating these rewards than universities themselves. This is because universities’ constituents give them incentives to create knowledge that is original and a public 

good, as all basic research is. 

By sharing in the support for educational research, the federal government, universities, and philanthropists also share in setting the research agenda. This is a 

good thing. Innovation never benefits from one entity having a monopoly on what 

questions are interesting. 

My third and final point is brief. The data collection and research support functions of the U.S. Department of Education should be the functions on which people 

can most easily agree. Americans tend to disagree on the degree to which the federal government should mandate educational standards and impose policies on 

schools. Many Americans believe that families and local communities should make 

education choices for themselves. But, it is hard to argue that anyone—families, 

communities, schools, or federal policy makers—will make better choices if they 

have less access to reliable information. As I stated at the outset, Americans badly 

need to be better educated—and soon—because our economic growth and well-being 

depend on this. I truly believe that our best hope is to improve education by spending smarter—using scientific methods to identify which programs and policies are 

effective and which are counterproductive or just a waste of money. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thanks. I think we can all agree, too, that 

5 minutes really is not that long to talk, is it? Not very long. 

Mr. Fleischman? 
18 

STATEMENT OF MR. STEVE FLEISCHMAN, DEPUTY EXECUTIVE 

OFFICER, EDUCATION NORTHWEST 

Mr. FLEISCHMAN. Chairman Hunter, Mr. Holt, members of the 

subcommittee, thank you for this opportunity to offer testimony. I 

think that what I say will continue in the theme of trying to provide better evidence for better decisions. 

I am Steve Fleischman. I am the deputy executive officer of Education Northwest. I have been involved in the promotion of evidence-based education for more than 15 years. 

I believe, however, that my most important qualification for offering testimony today is that I am a former middle and high 

school teacher. When I entered teaching as a second profession in 

the mid-1980s there was almost no evidence that I could find to 

help me manage my class better, teach my history lessons more effectively, improve the writing skills of my students, on and on. We 

have come a long way since then, but not far enough. 

Before becoming a teacher I was a business person, and I often 

think in market terms. To me, the challenge in building an effective education research enterprise is to create a market that has 

mechanisms to supply high quality research, create demand for it, 

and ease its use. 

Peter Drucker often observed that there is no business without 

a customer. Simply put, I believe that we will not have an education system in which reliable evidence is widely used to drive decision making unless and until we provide educators the research 

they want and need. 

Recent studies on research use by educators, including one conducted by my own organization, document this research-to-use gap. 

Three findings from our study, however, suggest important principles to narrow this gap. 

One: Research should be contextualized. The observation that all 

politics is local has its equivalent in the observation that all research is local. That is, participants in our study expressed a 

strong preference for research evidence that is linked to local contacts. 

Two: Research should be easy to read, absorb, and apply. Participants expressed preferences in how studies should be presented, including the report should be brief and written in nontechnical language. 

Three: Research often requires translation and transmission by 

intermediaries. Intermediaries were identified by the participants 

as unbiased organizations and individuals that can help locate, 

sort, and prioritize the available evidence. 

IES has taken significant strides in promoting an increase in the 

amount of rigorous evidence available to educators. As well, regional educational labs and the What Works Clearinghouse have 

begun to move forward the relevance and usefulness agenda. 

Some of the promising practices and developments initiated by 

IES working with other program offices of the Department of Education include the production of so-called practice guides; the holding of REL bridge events; the Ask A REL information services; coordination across the Department of Education in fields such as research, development, and technical assistance projects; and an increased focus in meeting the real-world improvement needs of edu-
19 

cation stakeholders that I think is exemplified in the new REL 

competition statement of work. 

My suggestions regarding how ESRA can be improved in the 

next reauthorization result from many conversations, including 

those held by members of Knowledge Alliance, a trade association 

of leading education R&D organizations. These recommendations 

are: One, engage consumers. The most powerful way to increase research use is to engage the prospective consumers of evidence in 

defining the practical problems that should be analyzed, designing 

the modes in which findings will be presented, and supporting 

ways for the evidence to be applied effectively in the field. 

Two: Pay attention to implementation. Research consistently 

demonstrates that even the best programs fail to provide their intended benefits if poorly implemented. Therefore, greater focus 

should be devoted to learning more about how strong programs and 

practices can be implemented well. 

Three: Support intermediaries. As noted above, research consumers often turn to intermediaries who serve as trusted sources 

that help sort through the evidence. Many of these trusted sources 

represent projects and individuals either directly support through 

current federal research, development, and technical assistance infrastructure or interact with this infrastructure. 

Fourth and finally: Promote the coordination of U.S. Department 

of Education program offices. Taking the point of view of consumers of evidence, education stakeholders should have a much 

clearer idea of who to contact and what services are available to 

meet their evidence needs. 

I believe that when Congress passed ESRA and created IES it 

had a vision that science, properly conducted and effectively applied, could be a significant engine in improving education in this 

country. As Mr. Holt has written and argued, recent history demonstrates that investments in R&D can drive the economy forward. 

Yet, the Department of Education spends less than 1 percent of its 

budget on R&D, one of the smallest investments of any federal 

agency. 

Ongoing federal investment in education research enterprise will 

be required if we are to achieve the promise that all students will 

receive a quality education that prepares them for fulfilling lives 

as contributing citizens in our society. 

Thank you. 

[The statement of Dr. Fleischman follows:] 

Prepared Statement of Steve Fleischman, Deputy Executive Officer, Education Northwest; Director, Regional Educational Laboratory Northwest 

CHAIRMAN HUNTER, RANKING MEMBER KILDEE, AND MEMBERS OF THE SUBCOMMITTEE: Thank you for this opportunity to offer testimony as you consider how 

education research can help to promote the identification and use of effective programs to support students and teachers. 

I am Steve Fleischman, the deputy executive officer of Education Northwest. We 

are a nonprofit organization created in Oregon more than 45 years ago to apply research to improve education in the Northwest, and across the country. Some of the 

projects that we conduct on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education, and which 

provide part of the experience base for my testimony include the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Northwest, Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center, 

and the Region X Equity Assistance Center. 

I have been involved in the promotion of evidence-based education for more than 

15 years. In the last decade, with different organizations, I have participated in a 
20 

variety of U.S. Department of Education projects to provide educators better evidence, including serving as the first communications director of the What Works 

Clearinghouse, director of a project to provide education decisionmakers with consumer reporting on the quality and effectiveness of school reform models, and senior 

leader of the Doing What Works project. Currently, I serve as director of REL 

Northwest. These and other projects in which I have been engaged have given me 

insight into the need for better evidence in education that helps identify and implement effective programs and practices. This need led to the passage of the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) in 2002, and the creation of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). 

I believe, however, that my most important qualification for offering testimony is 

that I am a former middle and high school teacher. When I entered teaching as a 

second profession in the mid-1980s I did what most other new teachers do: scramble 

desperately for any support to help do my job. One of the places I turned to was 

research literature on best practices. There was almost no evidence I could find to 

help me manage my class better, teach my history lessons more effectively, improve 

the writing skills of my students, or do any of the other things I needed to do to 

be a good teacher. This experience has been the single most important one in helping to guide my actions for the past 15 years, as I’ve been increasingly involved in 

the education research enterprise. Although the situation is much better today than 

a quarter of a century ago, we have a long way to go before education research fulfills its promise as an engine of educational improvement. 

Before going further in my testimony on the topic, I would like to clarify how I 

will use the term ‘‘education research.’’ My experience is that when making decisions, educators in the field are focused on ‘‘evidence use’’ which can include formal 

research, program evaluations, reviews of bodies of research, and various data. That 

is, educators turn to many sources of ‘‘evidence’’ when searching for guidance on policy and practice, formal research being only one of them. In this testimony, I will 

use this more expansive conception of ‘‘education research’’ that encompasses the 

sources just mentioned. 

Start with the consumer 

Before becoming a teacher, I was a business person, and I often think in market 

terms. To me, the challenge in building an effective education research enterprise 

is to create a market that has mechanisms to supply high quality research, create 

demand for it, and ease its use. Peter Drucker, the revered management thinker, 

often observed that there is no business without a customer. Simply put, I believe 

that we will not have an education system in which reliable evidence is widely used 

to drive decision making unless and until we provide educators the research that 

they want and need. 

The past decade has seen advances in increasing the supply of rigorous education 

research as well as some closing of the ‘‘research-to-use’’ gap. In my testimony I will 

suggest ways that federal investments and action can help to further close this gap. 

Recent studies on research use by educators point to this ongoing challenge. For 

example, in a 2009 study that my organization and others conducted for the William 

T. Grant Foundation, a wide ranging group of education practitioners and policymakers observed that: 

• There is a gulf between research design and real-world practice, which often results in findings that have limited applicability. 

• They are challenged to apply research because of their own lack of knowledge 

and skills in acquiring and interpreting research. 

• Numerous obstacles exist to research use, including ‘‘time constraints, the volume of research evidence available, the format in which it is presented, and the difficulty in applying research to their own situations.’’ 

• They are often skeptical about research and concerned that it is conducted and 

reported for ulterior motives or can be shaped to ‘‘say anything.’’ 

• Research is often not timely. 

Most troubling is the fact that none of the study participants could identify any 

‘‘breakthrough’’ research or ‘‘cite any findings that they feel had a dramatic effect 

on practice or policy.’’ 

Principles for increased research use 

Our study cited above and others point to current gaps, but also to ways to improve the connection between research and practice. Three findings from our study 

suggest important principles to narrow the ‘‘research-to-use’’ gap: 

1. Research should be contextualized. The observation that ‘‘all politics is local,’’ 

has its education research equivalent, in which ‘‘all research is local.’’ Participants 

in our study expressed a strong preference for research evidence that is linked to 
21 

local contexts. Thus, for research to be seen as useful and to be used, it must be 

contextualized. One way to accomplish this is to involve education research consumers in studies from the very beginning: in setting the questions, designing the 

studies, and writing reports that answer questions of local interest. 

2. Research should be easy to read, absorb, and apply. Participants expressed 

preferences in how studies should be presented, including that reports should be 

brief and written in non-technical language. This principle suggests that much more 

attention needs to be paid to communicating research effectively. Otherwise, potentially important research findings might not be read at all. 

3. Research often requires ‘‘translation’’ and ‘‘transmission’’ by intermediaries. 

Intermediaries were identified by the participants as ‘‘unbiased organizations and 

individuals that can help locate, sort, and prioritize the available research.’’ Among 

examples identified by participants were ‘‘research institutions, professional associations, partners, coalitions, peers, networks, and constituents.’’ A key implication is 

that it is important to find ways to strengthen the role of intermediaries by making 

sure they have the knowledge, skills, and resources to play this important role. 

The IES track record on promoting research use 

Since the passage of ESRA nearly a decade ago, IES has taken significant strides 

in promoting an increase in the amount of rigorous evidence available to education 

decision makers. It has improved the quality of quantitative research and data 

through various mechanisms including grant competitions, sponsored research, and 

the operation of the National Center for Education Statistics, Regional Educational 

Laboratory (REL) system, and the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). While some 

of these mechanisms have focused largely on increasing research and data rigor others, particularly the RELs and the WWC, have begun to move forward the relevance 

and usefulness agenda necessary to meet consumer needs and desires for evidence. 

Some of the promising practices and developments initiated by IES, working with 

other program offices of the Department of Education, include: 

• The production of Practice Guides. These guides, currently numbering 14 and 

largely produced by the WWC, offer practical recommendations based on the best 

available evidence. Developed by panels of nationally recognized researchers and 

practitioners, they offer actionable recommendations, strategies for overcoming potential practice roadblocks, and an indication of the strength of evidence supporting 

each recommendation. Topics range from turning around low-performing schools 

and reducing high school dropouts, to using data to support instructional decision 

making and structuring out-of-school time to improve academic achievement. 

• The holding of REL Bridge Events. These are in-person or webinar events held 

for education stakeholders across the nation by the 10 RELs to share and discuss 

the recommendations of the Practice Guides and other rigorous and relevant evidence. The events have proven to be highly popular and represent a key mechanism 

to link educators to the ‘‘best available’’ research-based guidance on critical topics 

of regional or local interest. 

• Ask A REL information services. Every REL offers this free service that allows 

education stakeholders to call or e-mail with their questions of practice. These questions are posed by state officials, school board members, superintendents, principals, 

teachers, parents, and others seeking to find our ‘‘what the research says’’ on particular topics. The requests, which are turned around quickly, often result in research literature reviews that are then shared with other stakeholders. 

• Coordination across the U.S. Department of Education research, development, 

and technical assistance infrastructure. Centers and projects sponsored by various 

Department program offices have come together more regularly than in the past to 

hold joint activities that provide stakeholders needed information. One example was 

a series of regional events on School Improvement Grants (SIG) jointly sponsored 

by the RELs and Comprehensive Centers this past year. In another recent example, 

REL Northwest worked together recently with two regional comprehensive centers 

and the Center on Innovation and Improvement to bring together state officials and 

leaders from rural SIG schools in five states to learn about effective practices to 

turn around their schools. 

• An increased focus of the REL system on meeting the improvement needs of 

education stakeholders. In a highly encouraging development, the current IES competition for new REL contractors that will launch a new five-year cycle of REL activity beginning in January 2012 is focused on the creation of research and data-use 

partnerships with educators and policymakers in the field. These so-called ‘‘research 

alliances’’ will be long-lasting, help to set the research agendas for the RELs so that 

they concentrate on real world ‘‘problems of practice,’’ and provide capacity building 

so that alliance partners are increasingly able to conduct their own research and 
22 

data-analysis projects. Without sacrificing rigor, these alliances will go a long way 

in deeply engaging consumers of research in its production and use. 

Considerations for ESRA reauthorization 

Discussions in the education research community regarding how ESRA can be improved in its next reauthorization have been ongoing in the field for several years. 

For example, Knowledge Alliance, a trade association of leading education research 

and development (R&D) organizations that I currently chair, has engaged its members and experts in the field in this discussion. As well, my own organization’s 

Board of Directors composed of nearly 30 education stakeholders across the states 

of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, has been discussing this issue 

over the past two years. The considerations below are suggestions that have arisen 

from these conversations. As Congress considers reauthorization of ESRA, I recommend that you keep in mind the following goals which might result in new mechanisms and practices or the strengthening of current ones to better connect evidence 

and practice: 

• Engage consumers. The most powerful way to increase research use is to engage 

the prospective consumers of evidence in defining the practical problems that should 

be analyzed, designing the modes in which findings will be presented, and supporting ways for the evidence to be applied effectively in the field. This should include building consumer capacity to find, judge, and apply evidence that is provided 

at the federal level and beyond. Key consumers on which to focus capacity building 

efforts might be state education agency and local district staff who lead research 

and data analysis tasks. Finally, this effort might include studies and other efforts 

to determine how to better serve education consumers’ evidence needs. 

• Pay attention to implementation. The identification and sharing of effective programs and practices represents only part of an effort to promote an evidence-based 

education system. Research consistently demonstrates that even the best programs 

fail to provide their intended benefits if poorly implemented. Therefore, greater 

focus should be devoted to learning more about how strong programs and practices 

can be implemented well. 

• Support intermediaries. As noted above, research consumers often turn to intermediaries who serve as trusted sources that help sort through the evidence to find 

that which is most relevant for consumer decision making needs. Many of these 

trusted sources represent projects and individuals either directly supported through 

the current federal research, development, and technical assistance infrastructure 

or that interact with this infrastructure. Examples of the latter are associations of 

state education officials, school boards, administrators, principals, teachers, and 

education journalists. These intermediary organizations must be engaged and supported systematically if we are to improve the connection between research and 

practice. 

• Promote the coordination of U.S. Department of Education program offices. 

There are notable examples of how program offices such as IES, the Offices of Elementary and Secondary Education, Innovation and Improvement, Special Education 

Programs, and others work together to promote evidence use. However, there is 

much more that can be done to promote this coordination. Taking the point of view 

of consumers, education stakeholders should have a much clearer idea of who to 

contact and what services are available to meet their evidence needs. Applying this 

customer-based approach would require the U.S. Department of Education to structure its information and support activities in a more coordinated way to promote 

an evidence-based system. 

Federal investments in education research can pay dividends 

This testimony has focused largely on the supply side of the research use equation, in the hopes that if research can be made more timely, relevant, and useful, 

it will more likely factor into decision making. However, there other aspects of ‘‘market building’’ that I have only mentioned briefly in this testimony that require a federal role. For example, ongoing federal communication regarding the importance of 

evidence use sends a powerful signal in the system to promote its use. Emphasis 

in federal education technical assistance that increases the capacity and support 

provided for evidence use increases the likelihood that research and data will be 

used effectively. 

In the early 1950s, parents in this country had to worry about their child contracting Polio, the dreaded disease of the day. In 1952, the year before I was born 

more than 3,000 children, a record number, died from the disease. Today, thanks 

to significant investments in scientific research and effective public health campaigns, Polio no longer exists in this country. However, what does still exist in 

America are far too many crippling conditions such as students who cannot read by 
23 

grade three, drop out before completing high school, or reach college unprepared for 

success. Like Polio, these conditions demand a substantial investment in research 

and then translation of that research into practical action. 

I believe that when Congress passed ESRA and created the Institute of Education 

Sciences, it had a vision that science, properly conducted and effectively applied, 

could be a significant engine in improving education in this country. Further, as Mr. 

Holt, a member of this subcommittee, has argued, recent history ‘‘demonstrates that 

investments in R&D can drive the economy forward.’’ Yet, the Department of Education spends less than 1 percent of its budget on R&D, one of the smallest investments of any federal agency. 

Ongoing federal investment in the education research enterprise will be required 

if we are to achieve the promise that all students will receive a quality education 

that prepares them for fulfilling lives as contributing citizens in our society. 

In closing, thank you for this opportunity to offer testimony today. 

REFERENCES

Coburn, C.E., Honig, M.I., & Stein, M.K. (in press). What is the evidence on district’s use of evidence? In J. Bransford, L. Gomez, D. Lamn, & N. Vye (Eds.) 

Research and Practice: Towards a Reconciliation. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press. 

Fleischman, S. (2009). User-driven research in education: A key element in promoting evidence-based education. In W. Bottcher, J.N. Dicke, & H. Siegler 

(Eds.), Evidenzbasierte bildung (pp. 69–82). Munster, Germany: Waxmann. 

Fleischman, S., Harmon, J.A., & Darwin, M.J. (2007). Promoting evidence-based 

practice and better student outcomes through improved consumer reporting. 

Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 12(1), 1–7. 

Fleischman, S. (2006). Moving to evidence-based professional practice. Educational 

Leadership, 63(6), 87–90. 

Nelson, S.R., Leffler, J.C., & Hansen, B.A. (2009) Toward a research agenda for understanding and improving the use of research evidence. Portland, OR: Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (now Education Northwest). 

Tseng, V. (2010). Learning about the use of research to inform evidence-based policy 

and practice: Early lessons and future directions. William T. Grant Foundation 

2009 Annual Report. William T. Grant Foundation, New York, NY. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank you. 

I would now like to recognize Dr. Smith for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF DR. ERIC SMITH, FORMER FLORIDA COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, I’m honored to 

be before all of you this morning on what I consider to be an extraordinarily important issue. I will first state that I am not a researcher, but I am a consumer of research. 

I have been a classroom teacher, school administrator, district 

administrator, and B.S. in Newport News, Virginia, and a state 

commissioner, and have had a strong belief in the work of people 

like Ron Edmonds, and others, that give this notion that when 

leadership chooses to make a difference with the outcome of children, when they are committed to making that difference they will 

do so wherever it is important to them to do so. 

It is the fabric of the basis of accountability. That accountability 

hinges on the ability to make smart decisions about what you do 

in schools and classrooms and districts and states. To call yourself 

a reformer requires that you have the ability to move systems in 

a way that brings with it progress and improves student achievement and student outcomes. 

Over the years I have had the opportunity to not only work as 

a consumer, but also been asked to serve as the chairman of the 
24 

Title 1 Review Committee. For a good number of years, I worked 

with Russ Whitehurst and others, and that was an exciting time 

for me. 

That was a time when I did see, in my view, dramatic improvement in the way we approach the question of research, what is important for a high school principal to do in their schools? What is 

important for a district superintendent that is under pressure on 

outcome and achievement to modify and change the way they deliver reading and mathematics? 

One of my questions that I had of Russ one day late in the afternoon was, in this great nation, can’t we tell our educators what the 

most effective method of teaching mathematics is? Should it still be 

a question out there for those that have to and are expected to deliver every day? 

So it has been excited to serve in those capacities. Brilliant people and great passion around trying to find the right answers. 

For the consumer there are two big questions, though, that get 

divided—it is kind of inside baseball to me—divided between how 

research is conducted and the quality of the research, and then 

how that research is disseminated. To the superintendent, to the 

building principal, the classroom teacher, those lines are blurred, 

and it is kind of an inside discussion about how that works. All 

they know is they want an answer and they can’t find it. 

We have seen dramatic, dramatic improvement, and I would, 

part of my recommendation is to continue to fund the kind of research that has been done. But often it comes out rigid, it comes 

out, in order to get it right, to have all the controls in place, it becomes so different from the real world it becomes hard for a practitioner to put it into place. 

What do I do with this? Those aren’t my classrooms. That is not 

my district. 

And so that translation, whether it be fault of the research and 

the way it is conducted or it is a failure of the translation and the 

dissemination of the research, there is still—we are better; we have 

farther to go. There is more work to be done, and those lines are 

blurred. 

So I would move, in my remaining 1 minute and 27 seconds, to 

talk specifically about some recommendations. One is that—I will 

start with my second recommendation in my written remarks 

first—is that I do think we need to be very thoughtful, very wise 

about broadening our scope on how we might gain information; I 

wouldn’t say even conduct research, but gain information about effective practices. I think we can make them more relevant, more 

timely, and more cost effective by broadening our views. 

There are places and things that need to be under a rigorous scientific model and approach, but as I stated in my comments about 

the application of PSAT, it came from a relational table on the back 

of a document produced by—that I get annually. It was translating 

that that makes a difference, so, and as a result we translated 

data, information about a product, and we made lives different for 

tens of thousands of children across America—dare I say, hundreds 

of thousands of children across America. So there are other ways 

of knowing what is important. 
25 

On that note, on the research side it is important that practitioners, the consumers, help to drive the problems that they have 

today and the conditions that exist today, and that researchers 

help inform the best way to get at that answer but look at it from 

a broad view. 

Second, on dissemination, it is hard to get a superintendent or 

a principal’s time, or a commissioner’s time. They are swamped. 

And so the ability to go through existing channels where practitioners will be there and show up, if it is not important to be on 

the keynote panel it probably isn’t important to those out in the 

field. So the dissemination process, how that is done, is critically 

important. 

And I would just finally say is that what this committee, the 

question this committee is asking, is everything. It is about reauthorization. It is about accountability. It is about school reform. It 

is about our nation’s future. 

Our ability to know what works and how to get it in the classrooms is of critical importance today for children sitting in classrooms at this moment. Thank you very much. 

[The statement of Dr. Smith follows:] 

Prepared Statement of Dr. Eric J. Smith, Former Florida Commissioner of 

Education, Florida Department of Education 

I appreciate the opportunity to address this committee about a topic I find to be 

extraordinarily important to our nation’s academic progress; research on the tools 

and strategies that we give our teachers to use in the classroom. I am speaking to 

you not as a researcher but as a consumer of research on educational strategies, 

tools and practices. In my career I have had the honor of serving 7 years as a classroom teacher, 8 years as a high school administrator, 17 years as a superintendent 

and 4 years as a state commissioner of education. Throughout my career, in each 

of these positions, I have been constantly searching for tools, strategies and practices that had some independent evidence that if properly used would result in positive outcomes for children. Said another way, I have always been searching for those 

tools and techniques that are unique, that can be used in a single classroom or used 

on a large scale and will generally result in positive achievement gains for children. 

To be blunt it has been a frustrating search. There are numerous approaches to 

choose from and as a consumer you will always be told that educational practices 

and tools are aligned to your standards, are research based and you will always be 

shown data that is intended to demonstrate that an instructional approach is extremely successful in raising achievement levels. Unfortunately there is still far too 

little independent research or information on the impact of various approaches to 

student learning. 

My interest is in trying to find better information on the effectiveness of educational tools and approaches to help teachers, administrators and governing bodies 

to make more informed strategic decisions on how to improve student achievement. 

The question of effectiveness and impact is central to discussions of accountability, 

and should be part of the foundation in the development of reform strategies. School 

reform and accountability have as a premise that leadership can shape and control 

for academic outcomes by thoughtful strategic planning and execution. There is also 

an implicit assumption that the needs of individual children can be addressed 

through the careful planning of practices and strategies as well. Common variables 

include conditions of time, resources and quality instruction using high quality materials. The primary classroom materials chosen and given to the teacher to deliver 

the level of instruction required is an essential component. An example of connecting instructional strategy to the needs of individual students is found in the 

emerging development of adaptive testing. Adaptive testing is showing great promise in helping educators to be much more student centric in the delivery of instruction and in meeting the individual needs of students. Reform strategies such as 

these should be built around the type of work that is to be done in the classroom. 

Such strategies should be framed by the selection of classroom practices and selection of primary and supporting classroom materials. Those that make the decisions 

about classroom instructional practices and materials should be held accountable for 
26 

their decisions. I have been in classrooms where a school or district has selected an 

instructional strategy with supportive tools and you will see teachers who have so 

little confidence in the approach, that they secretively have hoards of other materials to do the job. The quality of instructional tools and approaches matters to 

teachers and matters to students. Some help, some don’t offer much and it can be 

assumed that some may do harm. 

So my interest in the question of what classroom practices and tools are effective 

resulted in me being selected to chair the Title 1 Independent Review Panel. It was 

an extraordinary experience. My colleagues on the panel were both brilliant and 

passionate about the issue of instructional improvement. I credit the work of Russ 

Whitehurst and others for pioneering a new way to look at the process of educational research. It was bold and aggressive and had the intent to base findings 

on a scientifically rigorous research methodology. As superintendent in Charlotte, 

our children benefited from much of these early efforts to redefine the research. In 

Charlotte we had no district wide strategy for reading instruction. You could go into 

an elementary school and reading would be taught differently at the opposite ends 

of a hallway. Strategically we needed to go to a district adoption so all teachers 

could be supported through professional development and adequate materials. But 

the question was: what approach would be most helpful for students? National research helped us make that decision and it was the right decision, reading achievement went up dramatically. Down the road in Florida, at about the same time, the 

entire state was making decisions about reading. Those decisions were also being 

informed by quality research and the results over the last decade have also been 

extraordinary. 

But often a strict application of scientific research has significant challenges; the 

selection of the control group can be difficult if you are fairly certain that the intervention will be beneficial. There is also difficulty in maintaining the fidelity of the 

experimental group in a real situation and the process is slow and expensive. The 

instructional strategies will ultimately be used in states, schools and districts that 

don’t have strict and rigid structures, kids come and go in classrooms as do teachers, schedules get interrupted, materials sometimes are in short supply and professional development can be delivered with varying quality. As a result, the nature 

of the research often fails to mirror reality. The research methodology has the tendency to be cumbersome in its implementation and lead to findings that are rigid and 

artificial. As a result, the research has limited relevance to the real conditions found 

in schools and classrooms. 

Research that is available is also proving difficult to disseminate and get in to 

the hands of those who have the responsibility for making educational decisions. 

The regional labs are of widely different quality and unfortunately are not the ‘‘go 

to’’ place for information on meaningful research. Some of the labs do very good 

work but the quality and reputation varies, and as a result, they don’t form a network of dissemination that provides national coverage. The What Works Clearinghouse is making good strides in dissemination, but is limited on bridging the research to application challenge, research findings are slow to become available and 

because of the nature of the research often lacks application in real situations. 

My recommendations going forward are three fold; 1. continue to support independent research on the quality of educational strategies, tools, and practices, 2. develop new methods to gain insight into the effectiveness of educational strategies, 

tools, and practices and 3. expand and create new channels for the dissemination 

of educational research. 

My first point; the need for continued support for education research is critical 

because it is so central to all discussions of accountability and reform. I often say 

that schools don’t fail, districts fail. The reason for that belief is that most of the 

important decisions relating to how a school operates are made at the district level; 

leadership, hours of instruction, calendar, staffing restraints and yes, selection of instructional tools and practices. The ability of a district to make sound strategic decisions about their selection of tools and practices is dependent on quality and timely 

information regarding the impact of the tools and practices. That should not be done 

district by district. States and the Federal Government have a responsibility to support independent research on the educational effectiveness of tools and practices. 

The research should be led in large part by practitioners, answering questions that 

are timely and relevant to their work with children. 

Regarding my second point, in my testimony I have cited two examples where 

children benefited by making strategic decisions that were informed by quality research. I would also share that I have used other methods of gaining insight into 

the quality and effectiveness of educational practice that weren’t based on rigorous 

scientific methods and proved to be very timely, cost effective and also resulted in 

significant benefit for students. I would give you one example. In Charlotte, one of 
27 

my staff noted that the correlation between a student’s PSAT scores and AP performance could be built into a program, and rosters of students that had good potential for success in AP could be generated. These simple correlation tables provided 

valuable insight into the use of the PSAT. The impact of knowing the correlation 

information and being able to apply it resulted in significant increases in college 

level high school work that was being offered to students and resulted in a significant increase in overall college readiness for the students in Charlotte. A second example is from my work as Commissioner in Florida. As Commissioner, I was able 

to develop plans that will expand our statewide data base to include the primary 

instructional practices and tools used in each classroom. The intent was that we 

could develop relational information between instructional practices and tools and 

student achievement in a variety of different school settings. These findings would 

be made available to districts for use in their strategic planning process. 

Finally, there needs to be a stronger link between educational research and real 

world application. If there is a judgment about strictly designed research versus real 

world conditions of application, the call should favor the real world conditions in 

every instance. Information that is disseminated needs to be timely, addressing 

challenges the field has today not yesterday. It needs to address broadly defined 

challenges, the big questions, not narrowly defined questions that have little relevance. And dissemination needs to utilize existing organizations to communicate 

findings such as The Council of Great City Schools, CCSSO, Chiefs For Change, 

AASA and ASCD to name a few. If the research findings are not of interest to these 

organizations, they won’t be of interest to their members either and dissemination 

will fail, fail because the research is not important. 

This committee is addressing an issue of great national importance, important to 

our country and also important for our children. I commend you for your work. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank you. 

I thank the panel, once again, for your testimony. 

I would like to start out by saying that it is interesting—I spent 

some time in the Marine Corps, so if you noticed, in the U.S. military there are four different uniforms, and when you go to combat 

there are four different uniforms—two or three, because the Navy 

wears the Marine Corps uniform now. But the problem is, if you 

look at it scientifically—and you should be able to using different 

light spectrums and so forth, and matching up the uniform with 

the surroundings and the environment in which you are fighting— 

there has got to be one good uniform. 

There is obviously, if you test these uniforms using different 

spectrums of light and so forth, there is one uniform that protects 

the wearer better than any of the other uniforms do. But if that 

was true then we would all just have one uniform. We wouldn’t 

have a Marine uniform, and an Army uniform, and an Air Force 

uniform, but that is what we have. And you would think—it is kind 

of sad, if we can’t do it at that level what makes us think we can 

take best practices and scientific research and datum and use it at 

this level. 

And secondly, there seems to be some disparity between the ability to get the best practices and things that work and the best curriculums for teaching teachers that then transfer to teaching students, and then the implementation—there seems to be a disconnect. I don’t necessarily think we are talking about that disconnect today or the implementation of research and your findings, 

but that has got to be, that is, that gap has to be bridged at some 

point, and that is going to be fairly difficult to do, I think. 

First, Dr. Whitehurst, you say it is a mistake for Congress to dictate how schools—how states and school districts should use findings from research. Can you provide some examples of this? 
28 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I mentioned Reading First 

as an example of the federal government specifying at a fine level 

of detail how reading should be taught. There is no evidence indicating that kids are reading better as a result. 

We have in current federal policies and Race to the Top specifications an indication that there are four ways that a failing school 

should be turned around. How do we know that there aren’t nine 

ways, or seven ways, or six ways? 

So to try to get down to the operational level, in terms of how 

a teacher should do his job, or how a district superintendent should 

do his job, through legislation seems to me to be a mistake. And 

if you go through the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act you will find almost every section of the bill 

dictates that practice be based on research findings. 

Often, the research findings aren’t there. I remember when Dr. 

Smith pulled me aside and said, ‘‘Well, what math curriculum 

should I be using?’’ And I said, ‘‘I don’t know.’’ And he said, ‘‘How 

could you be requiring me to meet the mandates of No Child Left 

Behind to use the scientifically-based research and there is no research to tell me how to do that?’’ 

So, you know, it is easy to overreach at the federal level. Again, 

my point is if the research is done, if it is relevant, if we have good 

ways of transmitting, and if educators are held responsible for the 

results they will use it. You don’t have to force them to do it. 

Chairman HUNTER. Answer this, too: How do you make sure, 

then, if you have the data, and you have the best practices, and 

you have the research that shows what should be taught, how do 

you—if you don’t want to get down in the weeds on implementation, because you don’t want to because every—there is no silver 

bullet for—you could have two schools side by side on two different 

blocks and they would require different implementation. How do 

you guarantee, then, that the research is taken to bear in that 

school, or do you? Do you just let—kind of let the—if they want to 

use it then they can use; if they don’t want to use it then they don’t 

have to use it? 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Well, you certainly raise a very great challenge. But there is research relevant to that challenge, and it is research on implementation. So we are developing a knowledge base 

about the ways you need to transmit knowledge, the ways you need 

to provide professional development around that knowledge, the 

way you need to monitor implementation to make sure that a program is being carried out well. 

So I think, you know, on the forefront of education programs that 

are being shown to be effective is a very strong component having 

to do with implementation. So you are not asking school personnel, 

you know, to take something off the shelf and figure out how to implement it. The implementation is built into the program—to the 

program itself. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank you very much. 

And as my time is expired, I would like to recognize Mr. Holt for 

5 minutes. 

Mr. HOLT. Thank you. 

Actually, we have a very broad topic today, or a collection of 

many topics. Of course, we must not forget that what underlies all 
29 

this is that research communicated well and made relevant is our 

best protection here, and also the teachers’ best protection, against 

allowing one’s deeply held beliefs and ideologies from blinding 

them, us, to reality and best practice.—And we need to make that 

research practical. 

We are talking today about national research. We are talking 

about the National Center for Educational Statistics. We are talking about comprehensive centers. We are talking about the regional 

labs that are—I like to think of as akin to the Agricultural Extension Service that maybe your father the farmer actually used, because there are best practices that come from the federal level that 

a farmer would depart from only at his own peril. 

But we are also talking today about local data. I mentioned in 

my opening remarks that I will be reintroducing the Metrics Act 

to provide federal assistance to local agencies to apply data and use 

it locally. Let me start with Mr. Fleischman and then Mr. Smith 

to ask, what do you think is a useful federal role in supporting 

local data system development, and can you give me examples of 

how that has or how it could be used well? And then as time allows 

we will go to other questions and other witnesses. 

Mr. FLEISCHMAN. Yes. Thank you for that question. 

And first of all, I would say there are a couple of very good recent 

reports out of the Data Quality Campaign that I think are worth 

looking at. One came out last month and one just came out this 

month, and it looks at the connection between state data systems 

and how districts use that. I think they have a number of recommendations in there that are valuable to keep in mind, because 

in the end, the state data systems have to be used at the district 

level, the school level, and the classroom level. So the question is 

how to better connect all of those pieces of the system. 

Going back to this notion of focus on the consumer or the user 

of the data, I think it is really important—and the Data Quality 

Campaign cite some examples of how states have worked really 

well with their end users—to create the support mechanisms necessary so that data is not used for compliance purposes but for continuous improvement purposes. I will cite one specific example at 

the local level—for me a local level is both the state and the district—through our Regional Educational Laboratory work right 

now. We are using some of the framework that is provided by a 

number of practice guides. These are kind of taking best available 

evidence and then helping educators by providing them practical 

recommendations. 

We are working with several of those practice guides, including 

one on turnaround and one on data-driven decision making, with 

a set of local schools and local school districts in the Columbia 

Gorge area of Oregon to help them use in a rapid increase cycle 

where they look at their data continuously for the purpose of improvement. So they take the action, they look at the data, they 

focus, and they—— 

Mr. HOLT. To give Mr. Smith some time to answer that—— 

Mr. FLEISCHMAN. Sure. 

Mr. HOLT [continuing]. Let me turn to him. 
30 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much. I think, you know, the driver—why do people in the field want to do anything? Why do they 

want to look at data? What data do they need, and so forth? 

And it has been my experience as commissioner and superintendent that the school leadership and district leadership is driven by data because of the issues around accountability and trying 

to find out if they are being effective or not, how do they benchmark their work over the course of the year, if they need to make 

corrective action. And so I think there is a—based on the structure 

we have in our nation, there is inherent desire on the part of districts and schools—— 

Mr. HOLT. My specific question is, can we help local educational 

agencies use data better, and do you have examples of that? 

Mr. SMITH. I think—I don’t know if that is—the federal government needs to be involved with that or that is more of a state and 

district issue. I think that in terms of—— 

Mr. HOLT. But it is not happening. 

Mr. SMITH. I would share that there is a great deal of data analysis going on in schools every day trying to determine the effectiveness of instruction that takes place. Connecting that between what 

is effective—what do I do when I find that the work that is going 

on in the classroom or schools isn’t working isn’t effective? What 

is the solution? Where do I go? 

That is where the breakdown is. It is not so much that I don’t 

know that School X, as a commissioner, is failing and has failed. 

What do I do? What solution set do I bring to it and apply to it? 

Mr. HOLT. Thank you. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Holt. 

I would now like to recognize Mrs. Roby, from the great state of 

Alabama. 

Mrs. ROBY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I, too, know how 

quickly 5 minutes goes by, so we will just jump right in. 

Dr. Whitehurst, you talked with the chairman a little bit about 

implementation. I just want to expand on the fact that in your testimony you said that Congress should focus on creating incentives 

for practitioners to want to incorporate findings from the best research into their programs centered around the performance of 

schools. 

And we hear that word a lot in here—incentives—and rarely are 

we given the opportunity to hear specifics as to what those incentives might be and how the federal government actually offers 

those incentives. So could you expand on that a little bit? 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Yes, I can. I think there are two categories of 

incentives. The one is top-down regulatory incentives, where, as 

has been the case in No Child Left Behind, states have to define 

targets for performance of schools. Schools that are not meeting 

those targets face various consequences. You have similar sort of 

mechanisms structured around positive incentives in Race to the 

Top. 

But somebody at either the state or the federal level is saying, 

‘‘This is what you need to do, and here are the things that are 

going to happen if you don’t do those things well.’’ There is decent 

evidence that that kind of top-down accountability has effects, and 

you will hear practitioners like Dr. Smith say, ‘‘Well, we are con-
31 

cerned with accountability. We wanted to do something about the 

schools that were failing, as defined by the accountability system.’’ 

The other form of accountability is market-based accountability. 

Your school is failing not because you are not reaching some target 

set by the state; your school is failing because parents don’t want 

to send their kids there and they have other places to send their 

kids—— 

Mrs. ROBY. And I guess that is the—and sorry for interrupting—— 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Yes. 

Mrs. ROBY [continuing]. That is the problem, because not in 

every school district do you have that opportunity to make that 

choice. And that is the real rub is that if my school is failing and 

I don’t have a choice to go anywhere but that school then that incentive doesn’t exist. 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Well, I think that it is possible for the federal 

government to do more to incentivize states to incentivize districts 

to allow at least public school choice. Now, if you live in a community in which there is only one elementary school obviously you are 

not going to have choice. But if you live in a community like Washington, D.C., in which there are hundreds of elementary schools, if 

you can choose among them based on good information on how you 

are performing, that sends a very strong accountability message. 

And again, I think that is a different form of accountability. It 

is not fundamentally incompatible with top-down accountability, 

but I believe we need more of it. And the best evidence is that 

when that accountability is in place the schools that are subject to 

the loss of students improve, and that parents—low-income parents—given good information, will choose a better school than the 

school that the district assigns their child to, and their kids will do 

better as a result. 

So incorporating that kind of market-based approach in the accountability system, I think, is a way to go, and we could do more 

of that at the federal level. 

Mrs. ROBY. And certainly we know that part of that challenge, 

too, is how to get that information into the hands of the parent, 

and that is a whole ’nother topic of conversation. But thank you for 

your answer. 

Dr. Hoxby, how can IES effectively partner with the private sector to conduct quality research and make it accessible to teachers 

in the classroom? 

Ms. HOXBY. Well, I think in many ways the best way to answer 

that question is to explain what happens abroad in other countries, 

because there is no partnership between the private sector and the 

government in most other countries, and as a result, their education research is very narrow. The government really has a monopoly on what are the interesting questions and what are the 

right ways to answer those questions. And also, they don’t tend to 

have very much advancement in terms of their scientific methods 

for answering those questions. 

In the U.S. we do have a pretty effective partnership already between the government and philanthropic organizations and universities. And I think if we look at what something like the Gates 

Foundation does, it starts interesting, innovative programs, some of 
32 

which are never brought to scale; it has those programs evaluation, 

sometimes by university researchers, sometimes by other private 

sector researchers, like Mathematica, a contracting organization, 

and then it makes decisions about which of these programs to continue and which of these programs should be discontinued. 

I think that is a fantastic role for philanthropic organizations because it is their money and they want the, if they want the credit 

for being innovative they should take the risks of being innovative. 

I think universities play a much bigger role in the United States, 

as well. I don’t know whether we consider that the private or the 

public sector. I suppose it depends on the university. 

But I think the key thing that the universities do is that they 

will do basic research, and basic research is important not because—basic research is research that doesn’t apply immediately to 

policy, but it usually applies to policy just one step down the road. 

So as an example, all of the research that has come out recently 

on teachers—the effects that teachers have on students—some 

teachers have much more positive effects, some teachers have 

much worse effects on students. 

That is all basic research because all it tells us is that we know 

that teachers differ a great deal. It doesn’t tell us how we ought 

to pay teachers, but we need to know that if we are going to then 

consider teacher pay policies. 

Mrs. ROBY. Thank you so much. My time is expired. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank you. 

Mr. Scott is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And I want to welcome Dr. Smith. You just breezed by, Mr. 

Chairman—breezed by the highlight of his career, and that is superintendent of the Newport News, Virginia public schools. 

Dr. Smith, it is good to see you again. When you were superintendent I think that they had the research—federal research was 

under—I forget what it stands for, but it is OERI. Did you ever use 

any of that research in Newport News? 

Mr. SMITH. No. 

Mr. SCOTT. In your other capacities have you used federal research in your—you asked Dr. Whitehurst for research on things 

you needed. Was the research there? 

Mr. SMITH. No. We have. We got it and we have used it a lot, 

and—from a variety of sources, but research from the federal government, where available and applicable, I would—we have a—in 

Florida we have a very well developed reading office and we constantly stay up with the most current research on reading, and so 

forth. 

And I would say that, you know, in the field—and again, it varies a bit from state to district to school; perhaps it goes back to the 

question asked earlier about data. A lot of research can inform the 

work in general and overall. Day to day, a lot of schools—most 

schools I run into—do have good data, or they have data; they don’t 

have good data, and they actually are doing research on their own. 

Mr. SCOTT. But that data and research are two different things. 

If you have done some research and found out what works, do you 

report back to whoever did the research to see if it worked in your 
33 

locality? Because I suspect that some very successful programs 

would work in one setting and not in another. 

Mr. SMITH. We do find that the application of what is learned 

can vary from setting to setting. And again, you know, sometimes 

information we will gain helps us with that; what practices work 

best with students that have limited experiences when they come 

to the classroom, or the converse. 

Adaptive testing is helping us now, because we have some work 

with adaptive testing that allows us to measure up and measure 

down, and so we can be more student-centric in our review and trying to find the right kind of solutions to, you know, based on the 

research, on what needs to be done. 

Mr. SCOTT. Thank you. 

Dr. Hoxby, you indicated the importance of making sure you get 

the best proposals. Does the Institute of Educational Research wait 

for proposals or do they put out RFPs of subjects that need to be 

studied? 

Ms. HOXBY. Both, and I think both are important. By putting out 

priorities IES does get researchers engaged in questions that are 

important for policy, especially federal policy makers, and certainly 

some of the priorities come right out of federal programs that are 

funded. I think those are very important priorities. 

But I don’t think we want IES to be establishing all of the priorities simply because sometimes the most important innovative programs really come out of nowhere, or out of some educator’s idea, 

out of a particular school, out of a particular school district that is 

doing something innovative, and then often those proposals flow 

into IES. So I think we have a pretty good balance at this point 

of establishing priorities and attracting researchers to them, but 

also allowing researchers to notice what is going on out there in 

the field and then bringing that into IES and saying, ‘‘I can evaluate this.’’ 

Mr. SCOTT. And with that process do we have information—I 

mean, if we want to reduce the achievement gap and the school 

board gets together and says, that is our priority; we want to—is 

there somewhere you can go to get research on what they need to 

do? 

Ms. HOXBY. Well, I think that is a tricky question. Ideally they 

could go to the What Works Clearinghouse, which is part of IES, 

and look up something like, ‘‘How do I close the achievement gap,’’ 

but it is really not that straightforward. What the What Works 

Clearinghouse would tell you is maybe what reading curriculum 

works best, or what math curriculum works best, or it might give 

you a good sense of whether charter schools are doing better than 

public schools in a particular domain. 

So we still have a problem in that the school superintendent 

really has to put all of these pieces together, and I do think that 

is the gap everyone is identifying. 

Mr. SCOTT. So we have 15,000 superintendents home making 

their own process and no central research to help them out. Is that 

what we have, Dr. Whitehurst? 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Not exactly. We certainly have research to 

help them out. I agree with Dr. Hoxby that often a practitioner will 

come at the problem with different slices than the research commu-
34 

nity has, and so there is a challenge in putting it together and answering the practitioner’s immediate problem. 

Part of this is simply a lack of knowledge. We have not been at 

this game seriously for very long, and one of the frustrations I had 

when I was the director of IES is people would ask me what to do 

and they would want an answer, and I could not give them an answer based on the knowledge base that we had created. 

So some of it is a problem of translating what we know more effectively. Some of it is a problem of our just not knowing yet the 

best way to go about doing what needs to be done. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank you. 

Mrs. Foxx is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mrs. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And I want to say that this has been a very enlightening panel. 

I want to thank all of you for coming today. I have had a little experience in this area, and am very fascinated by the subject of research. 

Serendipitously, over the weekend I read an article from National Review Online—and I am sorry Mr. Scott left—it is called 

‘‘Closing the Achievement Gap.’’ I don’t know the people who wrote 

it; Reihan Salam and Tino Sanandaji are their names. But it is a 

fascinating article that brings up the issue of research and how different people can look at the same research in different ways. And 

I think that is an underlying issue that is pretty important. 

I want to make a couple of comments and then ask some questions. As I said, I have been in this field for a long time, and as 

you all were talking and as I have read your statements, I kept 

coming back to that statement, ‘‘Everything I need to know I 

learned in kindergarten.’’ 

Dr. Whitehurst, while you said we are in this field only a short 

time, the comment you made about what we have learned from research, teachers vary dramatically in effectiveness. A very effective 

teacher compared to a very ineffective teacher can create achievement gains for a child in 1 year that can wipe out a third of the— 

haven’t we always known that? I mean, did we need to do research 

to figure out that there are some good teachers and some not-sogood teachers? I mean, why did we have to have research to teach 

us that? 

And I guess the question that I would like to ask and quickly get 

a quick answer, if I could, from all of you—very quick answer: Is 

there research that has not been done that needs to be done? Just 

give me two or three words, each one of you, if you would. What 

don’t we know that we should know? 

Dr. Whitehurst? 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Well, there is a lot we don’t know about effective curriculum, particularly how to deliver it digitally. We are 

moving into a digital age, and being able to use that medium would 

be extraordinarily important. 

Mrs. FOXX. Okay. 

Dr. Hoxby? 

Ms. HOXBY. I think the most obvious gap is that we don’t know 

how well teacher incentives work for improving teaching in the 

classroom. Most of our studies are now from other countries, not 

from this country. 
35 

Mrs. FOXX. Mr. Fleischman? 

Mr. FLEISCHMAN. I think we need more research on data use, 

how to use it effectively, and also, across the board, implementation—how to implement more effectively. 

Mrs. FOXX. Mr. Smith? 

Mr. SMITH. Yes. I would say how to help classrooms to better 

adapt to the variability that comes to the teacher every day—the 

high flyer, the high performer—and still be able to adapt to the 

need of the child that is struggling on a given topic. 

Mrs. FOXX. I have one child. She is an average kid, and I always 

felt sorry for every teacher she had because she was always in a 

class—we were in a small community—where they had very, very 

bright kids and kids with major challenges, and a whole lot of kids 

right in the middle. And I felt sorry every year for those teachers 

because they had that range to deal with, and I think you have 

identified a very important point. 

The other thing I would like—Dr. Hoxby, you brought this up so 

let me direct the question first to you, and then if others want to 

respond I would be happy for you to do that. You mentioned the 

Gates Foundation and what they have been doing. Has the Gates 

Foundation been more effective in its implementation of what they 

have learned than the federal government has been, or other places 

like the Gates Foundation? 

Ms. HOXBY. I wouldn’t say that they have been more effective. 

I would say they have looked more at speculative programs as opposed to established programs. I think that is a difference between 

the role of the philanthropic organization and the government. 

I would say they are also faster at shutting down unsuccessful 

programs. That is the other thing: When they figure out that something is unsuccessful it doesn’t take them a couple of years to shut 

down; it takes them a couple of months. 

Mrs. FOXX. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank you. 

I would like to recognize Mrs. McCarthy for 5 minutes. 

Mrs. MCCARTHY. Thank you. Actually, I am finding this quite 

fascinating, and I have got 2 million questions in my head as we 

go through all this. 

One of the things that I have always been kind of looking at— 

you know, we have great people that want to be teachers. Yet we 

find when they get into a school to be teachers most of them are 

put into lower grades. I am just wondering if the research has been 

out there on what our teaching colleges are doing to make sure 

that teachers are well prepared to go into the lower grades. Because what I have found in talking to an awful lot of young teachers when they first start, they felt totally unprepared to be teachers. A lot of them have left within 5 years because they felt that 

they had the biggest responsibility to take the youngest and to give 

them the best, and yet they felt they were not capable of doing 

that. 

I would just be interested because I think when you talk about 

the digital age that is coming in—our younger people that are 

graduating, hopefully they are going to be more focused, because 

that is the way kids want to learn today. I think that is one of the 

problems that we are seeing in our schools, also. 
36 

I guess the other question that I would have would be that when 

the data come in and if you have someone that is a superintendent 

or a principal that is not interested in data or doesn’t even have 

time to look at data, is the state prepared to be able to get that 

information down when they see those schools are failing? I will 

throw that open to everybody. 

Oh, and before I forget, I have an article from the RAND Education on some research that I would like to submit to the committee, because I am a supporter of charter schools. I also believe 

it is not the silver bullet that everybody is looking for. With that, 

Mr. Chairman—— 

[The policy brief, ‘‘Increasing Participation in No Child Left Behind School Choice,’’ may be accessed at the following Internet address:] 

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9424/index1.html 

Chairman HUNTER. Without objection. 

Mrs. MCCARTHY. Thank you. 

Mr. WHITEHURST. I will go first, since I am on the right here. 

There are good survey data indicating that teachers in general 

have the reactions that you have just described. They feel badly 

underprepared for the jobs that they have to do. It does result in 

a lot of loss from the profession. 

Innovations around that are several. Some districts are setting 

up their own teacher preparation programs so that the practical experience is directly related to what the district wants to provide. 

We have programs like Teach for America that are providing alternative pathways in teaching that bypass the traditional school of 

education preparation routes. 

But clearly, we need to do a better job in preparing teachers for 

the jobs that they have to do, that we are, for the first time, to Mrs. 

Foxx’s issue, actually able to measure teacher effectiveness rather 

than just having the intuition that there are good and bad teachers. It allows us to tie the performance of classroom teachers to 

their preparation institutions, so for the first time the colleges of 

education can be held responsible for the quality of instruction that 

the teachers provide. So I will handle that question, and I will let 

my colleagues take on that or other ones, if they wish. 

Ms. HOXBY. Let me just follow up on that, and I won’t repeat 

what Dr. Whitehurst said. But we do know that if you look now 

at data it does not appear to be the case that teachers who are educated in different channels are systematically better or worse than 

one another. Teachers who are educated through alternative teacher channels often look about the same, in terms of their performance, as teachers who go all the way through a traditional ed 

school and it takes them 6 years to get their degree. 

And that is somewhat disturbing because it means that whatever 

it is that we are doing in the training, it does not systematically 

work. I think these days we have to look backwards, the other way. 

Because we can identify teachers who are effective, we can look at 

the schools that are producing effective—the education schools that 

are producing effective teachers systematically. 
37 

Another thing that we have learned is that effective teachers are 

good at spreading effective teaching around them. If you drop one 

effective teacher into an elementary school it turns out that the 

teachers who interact with her will also become more effective. 

So we are getting a better understanding of how teachers can 

learn, but it appears, to a large extent, that they learn from one 

another and that they learn from classroom practice, not so much 

just from getting a credential. 

Mr. FLEISCHMAN. I think we still have a ways to go in terms of 

what was just said, in terms of having teacher preparation institutions and other vehicles to prepare teachers to be ready to do the 

job. In part, having been a teacher, there is a lot of on-the-job 

training, and mentoring, and support you need once you get there, 

but there is no question that there could be better preparation. 

In fact, I mentioned before the Data Quality Campaign report, 

just out this month, and they looked at 10 state actions to support 

effective data use. Only one of them was implementing policies to 

ensure educators know how to use data appropriately once they 

have that in place. So there is a lot of work that needs to be done 

in the system to get to the issue that you just raised. 

Mr. SMITH. I would just add that, very quickly, one, on teacher 

quality issues, a lot of states aren’t out pursuing the link between 

student achievement and the institution that prepared the teacher 

to enter the profession. There is some work done by some organizations to gather more national information on teacher preparation 

and they are having an extraordinarily difficult time getting state 

institutions to give that data up, so having to actually go to a Freedom of Information Request to get that information, so it is a very 

slow process, but very important one. 

On the data side, there—you know, data management systems— 

again, a lot of schools have data; it is not the data that they need 

to focus their attention on the things that are important, and an 

area that I think we need to continue to do research on is what 

are the most effective data management systems out there and the 

most informative for school administrators and superintendents to 

use to, you know, to help drive improvement. 

Mrs. MCCARTHY. Thank you. 

My time is up. 

Chairman HUNTER. Thank you. 

Mr. Hanna is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. HANNA. I would like to use the balance of my time and give 

it to Mrs. Foxx. Thank you, Chairman. 

Mrs. FOXX. I want to thank the gentleman from New York for 

yielding me his time. 

I could not let this panel get away without mentioning something 

that is a particular bone of contention with me, and so far three 

of you have sort of violated my norm on this. You used the term 

‘‘training’’ in association with human beings. It is a shame to admit 

this, but I remember one thing from my doctoral program, and one 

of my professors said, ‘‘You train animals and you educate people,’’ 

and that has really stuck with me. 

And so especially when I am in education settings I try to point 

that out to people because I want you to think about the fact that 
38 

we are educating people. Dr. Whitehurst, it is in your material that 

you put out. 

And, Dr. Hoxby, you and Mr. Fleischman both just said it. 

So I would like you to think about whether you want to use that 

term in conjunction with human beings, because I think that has 

something to do with our mindset in education. I really believe language is important, and I am sure you all would probably agree 

with that. 

There are a couple of things that came up. Dr. Whitehurst, in a 

time—we always have limited resources, and I know, as you say, 

in research this has been an area where we have used a very small 

amount of resources, and in some ways have come to it very lately, 

so I agree with you on that aspect of it. 

I would like to start with you again, particularly. Again, I asked 

this question a slightly different way; where could we best use our 

dollars? And something none of you have mentioned, which I would 

like you to think about as you answer that question, we are always 

focused on the teacher, and obviously that is important. The teacher is the person interacting most with the student. 

But I have felt in all my life of being involved in education is we 

never look enough at the structure of education. I believe that most 

of what we do in education is designed for the adults and not the 

children. 

For example, we have known for a long time that adolescents do 

a very poor job early in the morning, and yet, high schools begin 

at 8 a.m. We have ignored that research for the convenience of the 

adults. 

So would you make any recommendations in terms of research 

on structure of education, and would you make some comments 

about that; and again, very quickly so each person has a chance to 

make some comments about that? 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Well, if you mean by structure the arrangement of the school day and the circumstances in which instruction 

is delivered, yes, I think we need policymakers and practitioners to 

pay attention first to the research that we already have. We know, 

for example, that investments in pre-K programs pay a large dividend, and yet they are typically underfunded. 

We have very strong research demonstrating that high school 

kids’ learning is negatively affected by starting them before they 

are awake in the morning. We have a variety of research that rates 

the organization of the school day. 

And so, you know, I am in favor of—certainly we ought to use 

what we know when we can do that. 

Ms. HOXBY. I think that you are making a very important point. 

I often say to people that the problem in some areas of education 

is not that we don’t know the answer but simply that the stakeholders will not listen to the answer or will not use the answer. 

An example of that, for instance, is the longer school year and 

the longer school day. These are just not popular with stakeholders, but it—the evidence suggests that they are very good for 

students. So that is a perfect example of where the structure gets 

in the way of improvement. 

Mrs. FOXX. Mr. Fleischman? 
39 

Mr. FLEISCHMAN. Yes. Mrs. Foxx, first of all, thank you for that 

reminder about training. It was made to me by my colleagues last 

week. I didn’t remember. Thank you. 

The one place, I think, where we need to do a lot more research—it is also on structure—is the connection between secondary school and college-going—college readiness, college attendance, college success. That is one of those places where there are 

two different structures coming together and we need to better understand how the secondary school can do a better job and how the 

institutions of higher education can do a better job to ensure the 

students’ success. 

Mr. SMITH. I would just agree with you that a longstanding belief 

of mine that schools don’t fail; districts fail—that when you find— 

that districts are the ones responsible for setting the policies that 

drive much of what goes on in schools. And to fix schools schoolby-school is extraordinarily challenging because the envelope that 

it operates within is usually broken also. 

Mrs. FOXX. Again, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you very much 

for your tolerance, and I want to thank the panel. 

You have been a—— 

Chairman HUNTER. I thank the gentlelady. 

I would now like to recognize my neighbor in San Diego, Mrs. 

Davis, for 5 minutes. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Thank you to all of you for being here. You have all had a great 

deal of experience in this area, and I am wondering what you see 

has been the best way that research has been disseminated to 

teachers. 

I think, Dr. Hoxby, you mentioned that we do know—and I have 

heard Bill Gates say—that putting new teachers or teachers who, 

perhaps, aren’t doing as well in front of teachers who are doing 

very well and seeing how they engage with students, and how they 

get so much from students is beneficial. We don’t see that enough. 

It seems to me we fail to do that. We fail to provide the resources 

so that we can have those really great teachers in front of new and 

unsuccessful teachers. 

Is that one way that we could do that? Have you seen that? How 

do we do that? 

Because going to a practicum 1 day is not going to do it. We 

know that. How do you think it works? 

Ms. HOXBY. Well, let me first say that one of the things we know 

because of IES is that a lot of the professional development programs that are highly regarded in the United States don’t appear 

to have the effects that we—that they are intended to have. So simply putting teachers into a professional development program does 

not necessarily have big effects. 

I think that we—one thing that we lack in the United States 

that other countries have, and particularly England has, is a system of school inspectors, and these inspectors it sounds like someone is just coming down to inspect your school like inspect your 

house, but that is not really what they do. They come into your 

classroom, they observe you for several days. They are experts; 

they have all of the data on what is happening in your classroom 
40 

and the achievement of your students; they have the diagnostic 

data. 

And they sit down with the teacher at the end of the inspection 

and try to relay best practices to the person. And they have an intense experience that we simply do not have paralleled in the 

United States where a principal would often spend as little as 

maybe an hour in a teacher’s classroom each year. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Right. Yes. 

Mr. SMITH. I would just share a couple thoughts. One is that you 

have to get the information out to where people go, where they attend, whether it be through national conferences, or whatever, but 

there has to be a strong push to disseminate good quality research 

through the normal channels. 

The second, what I have learned from my experience in Florida’s 

commissioner is that there is, I think, a great deal of dissemination 

that could be done—I don’t think it is being done yet in—at least 

consistently across the nation—by working with a combination of 

state departments of education and legislative committee staff in 

state government, where there is a keen interest in taking research 

findings, be it school day, or connecting teacher quality with teacher preparation, and trying to drive that into state policy and state 

statute. 

Mrs. DAVIS. So where—is that a federal role? Should there be 

some way—we are all familiar with the military and defense research, and others in environmental and energy areas. 

Mr. SMITH. I think the dissemination—and again, I think—you 

know, the dissemination is, you know, if, I would say that if some 

sources of information, be it regional labs or whatever, my friend 

here, but if they had to depend on checks coming in for how much 

service was provided they might go broke within a month. And so 

I think that, again, there needs to be that consumer-driven process. 

This research is critically important to us. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Mr. Fleischman? 

Mr. FLEISCHMAN. What I would add is not to forget the human 

factor. Just in the same way that we are having a dialogue right 

now and we are learning about something, I think that a lot of the 

learning that takes place takes place in context with people doing 

their jobs and then having better data and better research to inform that. 

A good example of that through the Regional Educational Laboratory system are the so-called bridge events, where we take 

things like the practice guides, which are based on the best available research, and give practical recommendations, and then work 

with folks out in the field. We just recently held one on rural school 

turnaround where we were looking at the recommendations of 

rural school turnaround, looking at the school improvement grant 

models, working with rural school educators and state departments 

of education, and working through the process of learning how to 

apply that in real time for real problems. 

Mrs. DAVIS. If I might, but really—oh, looks like my time is up. 

I can’t do that. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman HUNTER. I thank the gentlelady. 

Mr. Barletta is recognized for 5 minutes. 
41 

Mr. BARLETTA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Dr. Whitehurst, current law requires that education programs be 

supported by scientifically-based research. Based on your past experiences in the field of education policy and your current work at 

the Brookings Institution, how do you define scientifically-based research? 

Mr. WHITEHURST. Research in education that draws on the methods that are the canon for the social and behavioral sciences is scientifically-based research. People are trained to do it. People who 

are trained to do it recognize it when they see it and recognize it 

when it is not happening. 

It is a moving game in that the methods improve and our ability 

to focus those methods on questions that are important changes 

over time. And I think there is, you know, a congressional role in 

mandating that federally funded research meets high standards for 

its scientific base. And it is also ultimately the role of the science 

community, the research community, to define specifically what 

that means, because again, it will change and advance over time. 

Mr. BARLETTA. And upon the reauthorization of ESEA, how do 

you think this definition needs to be revised? 

Mr. WHITEHURST. The current definition, I think, is a pretty good 

one. I think you have a choice either to leave it out and leave the 

definition up to the research community or to take what is there 

and fine-tune it where necessary. 

I think it would be a mistake to take the current definition and 

water it down because that is a signal that we will be moving back 

to where we were 15 years ago, where what passed for education 

research was frequently a subject of derision in any department 

and any university except the education school. 

Mr. BARLETTA. Dr. Hoxby, same question: How do you define scientifically-based research, and do you think the definition needs to 

be redefined? 

Ms. HOXBY. I really define scientifically-based research in the 

way I would define it in medicine, or physics, or anything else. It 

is the use of the scientific method. 

And one of the ways that we know we are doing scientific research is that we should be able to come to conclusions that are 

based on the data and the logic as opposed to based on our presuppositions. Sometimes you should realize that the data overturns 

your presuppositions. That is the scientific method. 

I don’t think that we need to take science out of ESRA reauthorization. I completely agree with Dr. Whitehurst that the situation 

we were in 15 years ago is so much worse than the situation we 

are in right now that we need to keep that scientific standard in 

the legislation. 

At the same time, it is almost impossible to define what scientific 

method is because it is a moving target, and that is a good thing, 

right? We wouldn’t want it to be true in medicine that the science 

of today was the same as the science of 10 years ago. 

And similarly in education, one of the great points of using the 

scientific method and requiring that it is used is that the methods 

actually improve because we realize we can’t answer this sort of 

question so we need to have a new method to answer that sort of 

question, or this question has been answered very imperfectly so 
42 

we need to develop a new method. We want to actually keep the 

development of methods so that 20 years from today we are not 

just in a different place in terms of what we know on education but 

we are in a different place in terms of what we can know because 

we have better methods. 

Mr. BARLETTA. And, Dr. Smith, as a past classroom teacher and 

school principal, how do you define scientifically-based research? 

Mr. SMITH. You know, I have worked with this a lot and I don’t 

know—I don’t think that the definition needs to be changed a lot. 

Because, again, I came out of the world when we didn’t really have 

any research. Whatever felt good and seemed right and the adults 

were comfortable with seemed to be okay. 

And so I think we have made huge strides forward. I think the 

question is what drives the application of the definition, and is it 

being driven by—strictly by researchers that don’t understand the 

connection and application in the real world or is it—is working 

within that definition in a way that gives you real-world, timely 

answers? 

And I think, as in medicine, you can deal with an epidemic in 

a lot of ways—you can define it very narrowly, very rigorously, 

with controls, and by the time the epidemic has already taken its 

toll. Or you can find other ways of working on very scientific, highly respected results that give you more practical—mirroring the 

conditions that exist at the moment in a timely fashion. 

So I think how that gets gauged and who helps guide the structure of the research I think is the key. 

Mr. BARLETTA. Thank you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman HUNTER. I thank the gentleman. 

I think that is all the questions we have. 

I would like to thank the witnesses and finish by just saying 

this: I am optimistic because—not necessarily because I think we 

are all smart people and we can all handle this, but because technology, and especially adaptive learning technology, you know, it is 

going to be working and it is going to be implemented at some 

point, I would say, over the next decade or two, and—I mean, if 

they already have adaptive video games, things that work that way 

where the smartest kids get to learn as the smartest kids do and 

excel and the average kids get to have the education curriculum 

matched to them, and so forth for every learning possibility. 

So I am optimistic, one, and I do think that sunshine and data 

can create accountability. I think just the fact that if it is easy to 

consume and it is easy for all the players to be able to read it, and 

understand it, and see who is winning and who is not, and where 

they should send their kids to school and where the educators want 

to go to work at, I think that is a big motivator for everybody at 

every level for all the different stakeholders. 

So thank you, again, to our witnesses. 

And there being no further business, this subcommittee stands 

adjourned. 

[Additional submissions of Mr. Holt follow:] 
43 

Prepared Statement of the Learning and Education 

Academic Research Network 

As the panel considers reauthorization of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 

2002 (ESRA), the Learning and Education Academic Research Network (LEARN Coalition) is pleased to submit this statement in support of this process and, in particular, to highlight the role of research-intensive colleges of education in fulfilling 

the potential of this landmark legislation. 

The LEARN Coalition was formed nearly seven years ago to advocate for quality 

education research at the federal level. Our institutions are dedicated to the most 

rigorous standards for designing and executing the critical research needed to inform better teaching, stronger schools, and, most importantly, higher performing 

students. The Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the 

National Institutes of Health are our primary agency partners in this endeavor. As 

a result of the investments that have been made in education research, new tools 

have been developed to inform teacher practice and impact student performance. Investments in research across the education spectrum are required to translate what 

we have learned through basic research on the brain, cognition, and learning into 

effective teacher preparation and practice, standards for learning, assessment, and 

inform curriculum development. Investments in educational research and rigorous 

evaluation systems lead to better educational programs, schools, effective teaching, 

and higher student achievement. It is a direct investment in our nation’s economic 

competitiveness. 

Since LEARN’s launch, we have witnessed significant expansion in the federal resources invested in education research. Moreover, there has been an ongoing and 

collaborative effort between institutions of higher education and government leaders 

to ensure that taxpayer resources are used to address the most important challenges 

for our schools and students. ESRA, and the Department of Education’s Institute 

for Education Sciences (IES), are critical building blocks in an increasingly robust 

education research system. In particular, IES facilitates the kind of research that 

enables the translation of theory into practice using systematic study of phenomena 

from small scale to large. LEARN member institutions contribute to the mission of 

IES by conducting research and setting the knowledge base in a variety of different 

areas including: Teacher Performance Systems; Assessment Standards; Educational 

Interventions for Special Education Students; STEM Education; and English Language Learners. 

As the Committee moves forward with ESRA reauthorization, we encourage careful consideration of how IES and its programs can fully utilize peer-reviewed, high 

quality research capabilities, such as those found in the nation’s higher education 

community, to drive student achievement. The benefits of this approach include: 

1. Innovation—higher education faculty are at the center of critical, creative 

thinking about the learning and teaching processes, including with interdisciplinary 

teams that combine insights across biologic, environmental, and social factors; 

2. Evaluation—universities frequently work with state and local education agencies, as well as other stakeholders, to conduct field-based research and evaluation 

that promotes timely understanding of what works; and 

3. Dissemination—through a variety of education, publication, and engagement 

tactics, higher education participants are a critical link for translating new knowledge into practice, on both a focused and larger scale. 

The LEARN members are prepared to provide the Committee with a comprehensive perspective on how research-intensive higher education institutions contribute 

to better student outcomes. The ESRA reauthorization process clearly is an opportunity to accelerate and expand the nation’s efforts here through sound evidence development and use. Our institutions are committed to being at the forefront of producing these student performance solutions and to working with federal policymakers to improve student outcomes. 

LEARN MEMBER INSTITUTIONS

Indiana University, W.W. Wright School of Education 

Iowa State University, College of Human Sciences 

New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development 

Purdue University, College of Education 

Rutgers University, Graduate School of Education 

State University of New York at Buffalo, Graduate School of Education 

Syracuse University, School of Education 

Texas A&M University, College of Education and Human Development 

The Ohio State University, College of Education and Human Ecology 
44 

University of California—Irvine, Department of Education 

University of California—Santa Barbara, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education 

University of Florida, College of Education 

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, College of Education 

University of Iowa, College of Education 

University of Maryland College Park, College of Education 

University of Minnesota Twin Cities, College of Education and Human Development 

University of Pittsburgh, School of Education 

University of Southern California, Rossier School of Education 

University of Virginia, Curry School of Education 

University of Washington, College of Education 

Vanderbilt University, Peabody College of Education and Human Development 

[The report, ‘‘From Compliance to Service: Evolving the State 

Role to Support District Data Efforts to Improve Student Achievement,’’ may be accessed at the following Internet address:] 

http://dataqualitycampaign.org/files/From%20Compliance%20to%20Service.pdf 

[Questions submitted for the record and their responses follow:] 

U.S. CONGRESS, 

Washington, DC, December 5, 2011. 

Dr. CAROLINE HOXBY, 

Department of Economics, Stanford University, 579 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305. 

DEAR DR. HOXBY: Thank you for testifying before the Subcommittee on Early 

Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education at the hearing entitled, ‘‘Education 

Research: Identifying Effective Programs to Support Students and Teachers’’ on 

Wednesday, November 16, 2011. I appreciate your participation. 

Enclosed are additional questions submitted by members of the Committee after 

the hearing. Please provide written responses no later than December 19, 2011 for 

inclusion in the final hearing record. Responses should be sent to Dan Shorts of the 

Committee staff who can be contacted at (202) 225-6558. 

Thank you again for your important contribution to the work of the Committee. 

Sincerely, 

DUNCAN D. HUNTER, Chairman, 

Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education. 

REPRESENTATIVE DUNCAN HUNTER (R-CA)

1. Given that the focus of this hearing is to examine the most effective ways of 

utilizing student research to help teachers better understand students’ instructional 

needs, it would be helpful to hear your thoughts on computer adaptive assessments. 

These assessments adjust automatically to each student’s ability level, generating 

more difficult questions if the student is answering correctly and easier ones if the 

student is answering incorrectly. In doing so, these assessments enable teachers to 

pinpoint the proficiency level of each student across a range of subjects that correspond with the standards set by a state’s curriculum. 

There are a few states who have already implemented computer adaptive assessments as a tool of measuring student achievement and growth—including Oregon— 

and a number of others who are interested in following suit, given that computer 

adaptive assessments provide essential and timely data that can more accurately illustrate student placement, student growth, and instructional needs. 

Can you provide the Committee with your views on computer adaptive assessments and whether they can be of benefit to teachers, administrators, parents, and 

ultimately students? 

2. How does education research play a role in providing reliable information to 

parents? How can the federal government aid states and school districts in improving these efforts? 

3. With such high standards for scientific evaluation, how can the federal government ensure that the research methodology is not overly cumbersome, leading to artificial results that are not relevant in a dynamic and fast-changing classroom? 
45 

REPRESENTATIVE VIRGINIA FOXX (R-NC)

4. During the hearing you mentioned that other countries (specifically in Europe 

and Latin America) have better administrative data sets than the United States, 

and you could therefore do better research in other countries. I think a specific example you cited was the Dutch school reform and choice movement. Why do other 

countries have better data sets? Is there something in the US prohibiting them from 

collecting the same data sets (i.e. student privacy concerns)? Please expand more on 

why other countries do a better job with administrative data sets. 

Dr. Hoxby’s Response to Questions Submitted for the Record 

CHAIRMAN HUNTER

1. Given that the focus of this hearing is to examine the most effective ways of utilizing student research to help teachers better understand students’ instructional 

needs, it would be helpful to hear your thoughts on computer adaptive assessments. 

These assessments adjust automatically to each student’s ability level, generating 

more difficult questions if the student is answering correctly and easier ones if the 

student is answering incorrectly. 

In doing so, these assessments enable teachers to pinpoint the proficiency level of 

each student across a range of subjects that correspond with the standards set by a 

state’s curriculum. 

There are a few states who have already implemented computer adaptive assessments as a tool of measuring student achievement and growth—including Oregon— 

and a number of others who are interested in following suit, given that computer 

adaptive assessments provide essential and timely data that can more accurately illustrate student placement, student growth, and instructional needs. 

Can you provide the Committee with your views on computer adaptive assessments 

and whether they can be of benefit to teachers, administrators, parents, and ultimately students? 

Computer adaptive assessments are evaluation tools that are extremely helpful 

because they promote good decision-making at all levels: the classroom level, the 

school level, the district level, the state level, and the federal level. They prevent 

most cheating and crude ‘‘teaching to the test.’’ Because adaptive assessments put 

neither floors nor ceilings on the achievement of students, they allow students who 

are behind or ahead of their grade to be evaluated well. Every student can be appropriately challenged, and no student ever need face a ‘‘dumbed down’’ test. Computer 

adaptive assessments also allow tests from different states to be equated fairly easily so that states’ performance can be compared well. 

Let me expand just slightly on some of these points. 

When taking a computer adaptive assessment, a student’s answers to the initial 

questions affect whether he or she offered more or less challenging questions from 

then on. This is the way in which the assessment adapts to the student’s level of 

knowledge and skill. Because students spend their time answering questions that 

efficiently diagnose what they know and do not know, a computer adaptive assessment delivers a very accurate evaluate of a student’s learning. In contrast, a student 

who is taking a pencil-and-paper test may find that most of the questions are very 

hard or very easy for him or her. For such students, even the best pencil-and-paper 

test delivers only a crude or imprecise evaluation. The results of computer adaptive 

assessments are available immediately, not months after the test is taken. This allows teachers to use the test results to modify their teaching immediately, in order 

to provide extra instruction in the areas in which the student was weak. Also computer adaptive assessments provide not only an overall score, which can be used for 

little else but overall evaluation. They provide diagnostic information on exactly 

what knowledge and and skills the student lacks. For instance, a teacher might 

learn that a student can add, subtract, and multiply fractions but does not know 

how to divide one fraction into another. Many assessments give teachers lesson plan 

suggestions as well as results. Thus, the teacher might receive suggested lessons, 

examples, and practice problems for helping students learn how to divide fractions. 

In short, computer adaptive assessments have at least five properties that make 

them very useful to policy makers at all levels: (i) they can be much more accurate 

than a pencil-and-paper test that occupies the same time, (ii) their results are available immediately; (iii) their results are useful for diagnosis, not merely for rewarding someone who does well overall or punishing someone who does poorly overall; 

(iv) they generate lesson plans to improve a student’s learning, quickly. 

Computer adaptive assessments prevent outright cheating as well as ‘‘teaching to 

the test.’’ It is easy to make a computer adaptive assessment far more secure than 
46 

pencil-and-paper tests are at present. The main way in which people cheat on pencil-and-paper test is inputting or changing answers during the period before the 

legal testing time or in the period after the legal testing time. This method of cheating requires no sophistication or cleverness, which is probably why it is the only 

common method. While such behavior is easily curbed by having proctors deliver the 

tests, remain during testing, and remove the tests, states have so far refused to use 

proctors, citing cost concerns. (Whether such cost concerns are legitimate is not at 

all clear, but the point remains that pencil-and-paper tests are not proctored and 

therefore not secure.) In contrast, computer adaptive assessments can easily be designed to be electronically available only during the legal testing period. While a 

very sophisticated hacker might possibly hack into a computerized assessment and 

enable people to cheat, we have little or evidence that school staff are willing to try 

complex or difficult methods of cheating. 

Because computer adaptive assessments draw upon a very large bank of questions 

and no two students can be expected to take exactly the same test, these assessments strongly deter ‘‘teaching to the test’’ in its crude form where teachers literally 

train students to answer particular questions. Of course, computer adaptive assessments do not and should not prevent teachers from helping their students excel by 

having the learn the knowledge and skills likely to be tested by the assessment. 

2. How does education research play a role in providing reliable information to 

parents? How can the federal government aid states and school districts in improving 

these efforts? 

Education research can be a much more reliable source of information to parents 

than are schools themselves. This is mainly because researchers do not feel a strong 

need to defend existing policies or support proposed policies. They can afford to be 

objective. In addition, researchers often bring modern scientific methods to bear, 

and these methods are sometimes less familiar to school and district staff. However, 

in order to help parents, it is essential that research (i) be held to a high scientific 

standard, (ii) be as timely as possible, (iii) be made available to parents in an easily 

interpretable form. The federal government can be helpful on all these dimensions. 

By setting high scientific standards for its grantees and contractors, the Institute 

for Education Sciences can strongly encourage the use of the most scientific methods. By encouraging schools, districts, and states to build databases that take fairly 

standard forms, the federal government can ensure that research is timely. This is 

because delays in getting data are the main cause of slow research. Most schools, 

districts, and states will build accurate, fairly standardized databases given sufficiently strong incentives: they are collecting the information anyway. Finally, the 

federal government can encourage federally funded researchers to publish a version 

of their research that is intended for parents and other non-researchers. Non-profit 

organizations often play this ‘‘translation’’ role as well, and it is very important. 

3. With such high standards for scientific evaluation, how can the federal government ensure that the research methodology is not overly cumbersome, leading to artificial results that are not relevant in a dynamic and fast-changing classroom? 

High research standards really have no effect on how quickly we produce research. It takes no longer to evaluate a rigorously conducted randomized controlled 

trial that it takes to evaluate the same policy in a less scientific manner. In fact, 

many researchers would say that evaluating a randomized controlled trial is faster 

because it is easier. There are three things that do slow education research down, 

and the federal government can improve two of the three. The first thing that 

makes education research rather slow is simply that students change slowly. Even 

the best curriculum in the world does not immediately raise students’ learning. Depending on the intervention, we may have to follow students for a year or several 

years, and there is nothing that we can do about the pace at which students change. 

The second thing that slows down education research is data collection. While evaluation itself is quite fast, data collection is slow. Researchers still obtain data 

through painfully slow processes, in which it is quite normal for researchers to 

spend months if not years soliciting (even begging) for data, making their way 

through layers of administrators, and getting approved in long-drawn-out processes. 

This process need not be slow at all. If schools, districts, and states keep their data 

in a standardized form, in central repositories, researchers would not be forced to 

go through this process. Researchers with strong track records could be given a 

blanket approval so that their data requests were fast-tracked. The third thing that 

slows down education is the reluctance of many educators to provide data or allow 

randomized trials on the policies in which they believe most strongly. Their reluctance is based on the fear that the research will not validate their strong prior beliefs. Although this problem is not wholly solvable, any intervention that receives 

federal funding could be required to provide data to researchers. This would not 
47 

only help to ensure that federally funded projects get evaluated well and quickly, 

it would also create a ‘‘culture’’ of evaluation that is still absent in education. 

REPRESENTATIVE VIRGINIA FOXX (R-NC)

4. During the hearing you mentioned that other countries (specifically in Europe 

and Latin America) have better administrative data sets than the United States, and 

you could therefore do better research in other countries. I think a specific example 

you cited was the Dutch school reform and choice movement. Why do other countries 

have better data sets? 

Is there something in the US prohibiting them from collecting the same data sets 

(i.e. student privacy concerns)? Please expand more on why other countries do a better job with administrative data sets. 

Most European countries and several Central and South American countries have 

much better administrative data sets than the United States. This is largely because these countries have more centralized systems of education, and the central 

education ministry requires schools and districts to upload their data in a standardized format. In the U.S., in contrast, each district has enormous control over its own 

data and reports only a tiny share to its state government: the data elements required under its state’s accountability program and under No Child Left Behind. 

While American data bases are improving as states develop longitudinal databases, 

many states have dragged their feet or succumbed to political pressure so that they 

are still far from having good data bases, let alone the comprehensive data bases 

of the aforementioned countries. The resistance to data bases comes from interest 

groups who are afraid that information will expose their lack of contribution to student learning. 

The evidence suggests that the independence of U.S. school districts is a good 

thing for their productivity and their management. If they were centrally managed 

and did not have to compete at all with one another, American school districts 

would likely produce substantially less learning than they do now. However, it does 

not promote efficiency to give each district the right to keep its data in its own way, 

measure things according to its own lights, and create its own idiosyncratic data access procedures. Such lack of standardization greatly inhibits competition and productivity because it makes comparing schools and evaluating policies very difficult. 

We have an analogous situation for firms. Although having firms that are independently managed improves competition and productivity, giving each firm the right to 

report data in a completely idiosyncratic way would not make the market better. 

It is important for investors that measures of income, for instance, are fairly standardized across firms. Since schools actually engage in a far less diverse range of activities than firms, there is no reason—except for fear of exposure—why they should 

resist standardized reporting much more than firms do. 

U.S. CONGRESS, 

Washington, DC, December 5, 2011. 

Dr. ERIC SMITH, 

20 Eastern Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21403. 

DEAR DR. SMITH: Thank you for testifying before the Subcommittee on Early 

Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education at the hearing entitled, ‘‘Education 

Research: Identifying Effective Programs to Support Students and Teachers’’ on 

Wednesday, November 16, 2011. I appreciate your participation. 

Enclosed are additional questions submitted by members of the Committee after 

the hearing. Please provide written responses no later than December 19, 2011 for 

inclusion in the final hearing record. Responses should be sent to Dan Shorts of the 

Committee staff who can be contacted at (202) 225-6558. 

Thank you again for your important contribution to the work of the Committee. 

Sincerely, 

DUNCAN D. HUNTER, Chairman, 

Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education. 

REPRESENTATIVE DUNCAN HUNTER (R-CA)

1. Given that the focus of this hearing is to examine the most effective ways of 

utilizing student research to help teachers better understand students’ instructional 

needs, it would be helpful to hear your thoughts on computer adaptive assessments. 

These assessments adjust automatically to each student’s ability level, generating 

more difficult questions if the student is answering correctly and easier ones if the 

student is answering incorrectly. In doing so, these assessments enable teachers to 
48 

pinpoint the proficiency level of each student across a range of subjects that correspond with the standards set by a state’s curriculum. 

There are a few states who have already implemented computer adaptive assessments as a tool of measuring student achievement and growth—including Oregon— 

and a number of others who are interested in following suit, given that computer 

adaptive assessments provide essential and timely data that can more accurately illustrate student placement, student growth, and instructional needs. 

Can you provide the Committee with your views on computer adaptive assessments and whether they can be of benefit to teachers, administrators, parents, and 

ultimately students? 

2. In your testimony, you talk about the fact that strict application of scientific 

research is often difficult for classroom teachers because of the dynamic nature of 

the classroom. Can you provide some examples of other types of research that are 

beneficial to districts and schools? 

Dr. Smith’s Response to Questions Submitted for the Record 

1. Computer adaptive assessments (CAA) have great potential and we should encourage the thoughtful expansion of its use. CAA can provide the opportunity to 

help teachers more accurately tailor instruction to individual students’ needs for 

both remediation and acceleration. If designed correctly, an adaptive test can also 

be somewhat diagnostic; helping the teacher or a computer program to identify a 

student’s skill deficiencies. Adaptive tests are best used as formative assessments 

that help in guiding instruction and support. The data from adaptive assessments 

should lead to a flexing of the instruction provided a student so that student will 

be able to pass summative standards based exam by the end of the year. 

2. I believe there is a need to research practices that are proving successful in 

the ‘‘real world’’ over time. For example, as a superintendent in Charlotte I learned 

a great deal by sharing strategies and performance data with other superintendents 

that had similar student populations. I learned from them what strategies were 

making a difference in learning outcomes and what strategies were not successful. 

Another example was in Florida where I served as Commissioner. During that time 

we prepared to build a data base that would correlate school performance data and 

teaching strategies. Again, our intent was to learn what conditions led to success 

and what conditions led to failure. This is not to discount more rigorous scientific 

research but I believe we can have a fuller picture by expanding our research strategies in the ‘‘real world’’. 

U.S. CONGRESS, 

Washington, DC, December 5, 2011. 

Dr. GROVER J. ‘‘RUSS’’ WHITEHURST, 

775 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036–2013. 

DEAR DR. WHITEHURST: Thank you for testifying before the Subcommittee on 

Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education at the hearing entitled, 

‘‘Education Research: Identifying Effective Programs to Support Students and 

Teachers’’ on Wednesday, November 16, 2011. I appreciate your participation. 

Enclosed are additional questions submitted by members of the Committee after 

the hearing. Please provide written responses no later than December 19, 2011 for 

inclusion in the final hearing record. Responses should be sent to Dan Shorts of the 

Committee staff who can be contacted at (202) 225-6558. 

Thank you again for your important contribution to the work of the Committee. 

Sincerely, 

DUNCAN D. HUNTER, Chairman, 

Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education. 

REPRESENTATIVE DUNCAN HUNTER (R-CA)

1. Given that the focus of this hearing is to examine the most effective ways of 

utilizing student research to help teachers better understand students’ instructional 

needs, it would be helpful to hear your thoughts on computer adaptive assessments. 

These assessments adjust automatically to each student’s ability level, generating 

more difficult questions if the student is answering correctly and easier ones if the 

student is answering incorrectly. In doing so, these assessments enable teachers to 

pinpoint the proficiency level of each student across a range of subjects that correspond with the standards set by a state’s curriculum. 
49 

There are a few states who have already implemented computer adaptive assessments as a tool of measuring student achievement and growth—including Oregon— 

and a number of others who are interested in following suit, given that computer 

adaptive assessments provide essential and timely data that can more accurately illustrate student placement, student growth, and instructional needs. 

Can you provide the Committee with your views on computer adaptive assessments and whether they can be of benefit to teachers, administrators, parents, and 

ultimately students? 

2. How can the purpose and operation of the national research and development 

centers, the RELs, and comprehensive centers be improved upon? Are these entities 

actually serving regional and local needs and assisting states, school districts, 

schools, and teachers to improve student achievement? 

3. The Institution of Education Sciences is responsible for evaluating federal programs for their impact on improving student achievement. However, the Office of 

Management and Budget (OMB), the Department’s Office of Planning, Evaluation, 

and Policy, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and private entities also 

evaluate federal programs for their effectiveness. Is the current system working? 

Are each of these agencies using the same metrics in evaluating programs? Which 

agency is in the best position to evaluate federal programs? 

Dr. Whitehurst’s Response to Questions Submitted for the Record 

CHAIRMAN HUNTER

Computer adaptive assessment has already been incorporated into psychometrically advanced assessment programs, including those carried out by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. For example, the 

Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies, which follow a large sample of children 

through school, carry out all of their student achievement assessments using adaptive technologies. Adaptive testing shortens test times, allows children to get more 

questions that probe their understanding (rather than a lot of questions that are 

too easy or too hard), and requires the development of assessment scales that are 

more likely than traditional assessments to be aligned from grade to grade. The 

timeline for feedback to educators from computer adaptive testing is orders of magnitude shorter than the timeline for obtaining results from paper and pencil tests. 

Finally, the costs of computer adaptive testing when spread over a few years to amortize start-up investments in technology are lower than the costs of traditional testing. The federal government, in my view, should not stand in the way of the use 

of computer adaptive testing as it has done through the Department’s interpretations of NCLB assessment requirements. And to the extent that discretionary funds 

are available, Congress should consider providing money to states to advance the 

use of this technology. 

As I indicated in my testimony, the RELs are not working well in that much of 

the work they produce is of little relevance to the needs of those responsible for 

schools in their regions. This has been the case for 40 years. My recommendation 

is that in lieu of authorizing RELs Congress should provide a voucher to state departments of education that could be used specifically to purchase data analytic 

services that use statewide longitudinal databases to address questions of immediate importance to decisions about education policy at the state level or among numerous school districts within the state. These analytic services could be obtained 

from any of a number of entities, including the existing RELs, that pass muster 

with the Institute of Education Sciences in terms of the quality of their research 

services. IES should retain a review function with respect to the analyses that are 

commissioned with the research vouchers to make sure than the conclusions 

reached are justified by the methods deployed. 

The national research and development centers serve an important function in 

providing for concentrated team-based research on education topics of national interest. However, it is a mistake, in my view, for Congress to dictate the topics on 

which the R&D centers should focus through authorization language per the current 

version of ESRA or the amounts that should be carved out for R&D centers vs. regular competitive grants per appropriations language. The director and professional 

staff of the Institute of Education Sciences with the advice and consent of the National Board for Education Sciences is in the best position to know when there is 

both need and capacity in the field for an R&D center on a particular topic. In its 

efforts to comply with Congressional intent, IES frequently has held competitions 

for R&D centers on particular topics that generated only a few applications and 
50 

none of quality. This would not have happened if the hands of IES had not been 

tied on R&D centers through authorizing or appropriation language. 

Comprehensive centers are not part of ESRA and are not administered by IES, 

although frequently the contractor for a regional comprehensive center is the same 

as the contractor for the regional REL. The comprehensive centers are part of a 

patchwork of technical assistance providers that various offices of the Department 

contract with though a variety of program accounts. In my view the technical assistance entities that are funded through ED, including the comp centers, provide services of uncertain quality that are rarely driven by customer demand. Similar to my 

recommendation with regard to the RELs, I suggest that Congress consider shifting 

to a mechanism in which some portion of program funds that are appropriated pursuant to ESEA, IDEA, Perkins, and other big budget programs is reserved for use 

by state departments of education to purchase technical assistance for implementation of the federal education programs. The Department could be authorized to create a list of contractors who have demonstrated the capability of carrying out technical assistance on particular topics. 

There are two important distinctions that are relevant to answering this question. 

The first is between evaluations of impact vs. implementation. Impact evaluations 

address the question of whether a program has a causal effect on the outcomes it 

is intended to influence. For example, an impact evaluation of Reading First would 

ask whether the reading achievement of participants in the program is accelerated 

compared to similar students who are not participants. An implementation evaluation, in contrast, would ask whether the funds for the program were expended as 

dictated by legislation and regulation. For example, were Reading First funds deployed to provide professional development for teachers as required in NCLB? 

The second distinction is between primary evaluations that are carried out by 

through the collection and analysis of original data, e.g., assessments of students 

carried out by the evaluation contractor vs. secondary evaluations that are based 

on summarizing and providing recommendations and conclusions based on a synthesis of results from previously published studies and other data sources. 

OMB and GAO do not carry out impact evaluations and rarely engage in primary 

evaluations. Rather they summarize what is known from primary data collections 

and from simple investigatory techniques such as engaging in interrogatories of program participants or program implementers. 

The Department’s Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development 

(OPEPD) has limited itself in recent years to implementation evaluations that are 

based on primary data collection and quick turn-around secondary evaluations that 

are of high relevance to the Secretary. OPEPD does not presently carry out impact 

evaluations, although it used to and nothing in statute prevents it from doing so. 

Private entities sometimes carry out impact evaluations of federal programs but 

these are typically conducted years after the program has been implemented and 

are based on available administrative data, e.g., existing school records, rather than 

primary data collection that is designed ahead of time to answer a range of planned 

questions. Thus the type of impact evaluation of a federal program that might be 

carried out, for example, by a university-based economist would only very rarely 

have the timeliness or the depth and breadth to answer questions that are important to Congress and the administration in decisions about program authorization 

and funding. 

Presently, only the Institute of Education Sciences carries out large scale impact 

evaluations of federal programs. None of the other entities listed in the question 

overlaps with IES in this function. This is a critical function that is being carried 

out well by IES. 

Presently, only IES and OPEPD carry out large scale primary implementation 

evaluations. OPEPD has generally carried out its implementation studies well, but 

that are significant inefficiencies in having two separate divisions of the Department 

involved in evaluating a single program. For example, program implementers may 

be required to answer a similar set of questions and respond to duplicative data requests from IES and OPEPD. Some of these problems of overlap cannot be solved 

by better coordination between IES and OPEPD because the activities are funded 

by different contracts that are awarded on different timetables to different contractors. Further, there is always a legitimate concern about whether an office, OPEPD, 

that develops policy for and with the Secretary and that has no independence from 

the Secretary should be charged with evaluating whether programs the Secretary 

is charged with implementing are being carried out as intended in statute. For these 

reasons, it is my recommendation that IES be given the sole authority by Congress 

to carry out impact and implementation evaluations that are either required or permitted in program legislation. This has been the historical drift both within legislation and in the division of responsibilities between IES and OPEPD as administra-
51 

tively determined by the Department. It would be wise to cement this division of 

labor legislatively, in my view. In doing so Congress should designate funds specifically for evaluation purposes rather than setting aside a percentage of funds in program authorizations to be used for ‘‘national activities, including evaluation.’’ The 

latter language is problematic in that it creates a competition between IES and the 

Department’s program offices for funds from the same pot, and it empowers the Secretary to throttle funds for evaluation activities that might expose performance 

issues with programs with which the administration is identified politically. In my 

view, all education programs with an annual price tag above a threshold of $20 million should be subject to an implementation and impact evaluation before they are 

reauthorized. These evaluations should be carried out by IES with funds specifically 

targeted to that purpose by Congress. 

[Whereupon, at 11:27 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

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