In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education earlier today, Grover (Russ) Whitehurst discussed the federal role in education research and why it is critical to the nation’s effort to deliver better education and future opportunities to Americans. Whitehurst testified that the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) is overdue for reauthorization and suggested four principles that should underlie the law’s reauthorization:

• If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It ― Advocates of any significant changes in the language in the bill’s language should be asked: "What evidence do you have you that the current language has had bad effects?"
   
• Independence Is Fundamental ― One of the most important advances in ESRA was to create a greater degree of independence between the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm and the department’s political leadership.
   
• The Regional Educational Lab Program (REL) Is Broken and Should be Fixed ― REL has pulled down a significant proportion of the total federal investment in education R&D with little to show of value. Whitehurst argued Congress should eliminate REL and substitute for it a research voucher program for state education departments.
   
• 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. In the U.S. Department of Education, the corresponding investment is less than 1%.

Whitehurst further argued that:

“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 policymakers 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. 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."
 
Read the testimony »

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