His facts about funding, shifts in political priorities, changing personnel, and so forth may be correct, but as a researcher he fails to picture the impact of such funding on the educational research enterprise in this country. We will not argue that all such research studies have been of high quality, but the questions investigated, methods used to investigate those questions, and what we know about schooling have expanded. Unfortunately, our gain in knowledge is not often apparent. The problem is that an individual study contributes only a small piece of information, from a particular perspective, about some phenomenon. Similarly, the combined studies from a research center can contribute only several related studies.
Resources are too limited to do more.
Nevertheless, we would argue that we know a lot more about learning, current schooling practices, and so forth, than was known a quarter century ago. For example, our understanding of how children learn to add and subtract whole numbers is today quite different from what it was in the past. Federal funds from NIE, NSF, and OERI have supported work for over 20 years that has produced a consensus on a framework, instructional materials, staff development, comparative data with traditional approaches, and longitudinal data for both student development and teacher change. Second, the political assumption that basic research findings can directly change educational practice needs to be challenged. Good research produces only reliable knowledge.