Guest Post: A Better Prescription for Fixing Federal Higher Education Research

By Jon H. Oberg

Reauthorization of the Education Sciences Reform Act, the legislation that governs the federal government’s education research efforts, is three years overdue. On the chance that the current Congress will take up the reauthorization, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) recently offered a set of recommendations for lawmakers to consider.

The trade association provides some sound advice, particularly in urging Congress not to scrap the whole enterprise and start over, as lawmakers have done twice before without achieving the results they were seeking. The approach the association recommends, however, is too steeped in trying to resolve past battles than in addressing the real problems that have plagued the government’s education research efforts: political interference and, at least in the case of its higher education work, inappropriate entanglements with higher education lobbying associations and industries.

To many in higher education, ESRA is a dimly lit corner of federal education law. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is well known, but the other entities authorized by ESRA are more obscure: the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), in which NCES is housed, along with the National Center for Education Research (NCER) and the National Center for Education Evaluation (NCEE). Although the Institute and its centers are components of the Department of Education, the IES director is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to a six-year term overlapping presidential election cycles. The work of the Institute and its centers is, by statute, to be independent of policy and political interference. 

In the upcoming reauthorization, Congress must review the performance of the Institute, which it created in 2002, organizational in-fighting due to the fact that the NCES commissioner is also a presidential appointee, and the perennial struggle for independence from the Education Department and the administration in power. Especially with regard to higher education, Congress must take note that IES has been ineffectual and plagued by dissension with its NCES component. The Institute has not been able to assert its independence or establish necessary credibility as a higher education research and evaluation organization, even as federal spending on higher education has ballooned, scandals have erupted, and America has slipped from its once vaunted position of leading the world in higher education.  

The American Educational Research Association is correct in wanting a fix so as to prevent the heavy hand of the IES director from interfering with the legitimate functions of the national centers and their employees. But AERA is too constrained in how to go about this. It sees the problem as a power struggle between NCES and the IES front office, and wants to solve it merely by retaining the NCES commissioner's status as a presidential appointee and requiring the Institute’s director to be a "statistician,” presumably more friendly to the statistics center. This appears to be a reaction to the Bush Administration's 2008 draft ESRA reauthorization, which sought to demote the NCES commissioner. 

The problem with AERA's approach to IES reorganization is that it only heightens the rivalry with the statistics center, and it downplays the importance of the research and evaluation centers, which should be the heart and soul of the Institute. AERA actually hurts its cause when it calls for restoring NCES "to function at the high level achieved prior to the current [2002] legislation." In reality, NCES is doing better work now than it did before IES was created.

When I came to OERI (the Institute’s predecessor) in 2001 and participated in my first "adjudication" of an NCES postsecondary study, I found the room full of lobbyists, one of whom asked, "May we write the conclusions this way?" Whereupon the next day's press release from her lobby group touted its political positions as being based on NCES findings. Many NCES postsecondary studies at the time went beyond statistical compilations and ventured causal conclusions based on correlations and speculation. When others in the Education Department complained about NCES misspecifications and methodological lapses, their supervisors would get phone calls from NCES suggesting that the complainers would be well advised to not to object, lest the supervisors themselves have to answer for interfering. At one adjudication I witnessed a new departmental hire (from a respected research firm) thoroughly discredit an NCES postsecondary study on methodological grounds; NCES published it anyway and the employee was never heard from again at an adjudication. 

In 2002, an NCES study caught the wrath of prominent higher education researchers in the university-based peer-review community, who were upset with its faulty methodology. More than once I heard from outside contractors who said they did not need business from NCES if they were told in advance what their conclusions would be. This surely cannot be the "high level" of functioning that AERA wants to see restored. 

As for the National Centers for Education Research and Education Evaluation, a review of the legislative history of their creation helps to explain the current state of the two organizations in regard to higher education.

In February 2002, six members of the House Subcommittee on Education Reform, along with Education and the Workforce Committee chairman (now House Speaker) John Boehner (R-OH), introduced the Education Sciences Reform Act legislation with considerable input from the Bush Administration. 

The bill placed NCES firmly under the authority of the IES director and gave NCES statistics-collecting and dissemination responsibility only, not research and evaluation. This may have been related to the tumult in NCES studies, but there were larger reasons as well. Huge amounts of federal money were at stake -- in the tens of billions -- but Congress was accustomed to hearing from advocates for more money, not from any constituency that questioned how the massive student loan and grant programs really work. The bill's research and evaluation responsibilities, assigned to NCER and NCEE, dealt only with elementary and secondary education, pointedly leaving out higher education. Needless to say, there were no protests from the industries associated with higher education, or from the major higher education trade associations.

The House approved the bill at the end of April 2002. When the legislation reached the Senate, several higher education researchers approached me privately and asked for help in drafting amendments (I had previously worked in the Education Department’s Office of Legislation) to put higher education research and evaluation into the bill. I assisted by suggesting several provisions that required the centers to pay as much attention to the programs administered under the Higher Education Act as those authorized under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Senate accepted the amendments and they made it into the final bill, which President Bush signed into law in October 2002.

If the administration had abided by the law, new research and evaluation would have been undertaken to determine the effectiveness of the federal student aid programs, including the guaranteed student loan program, Pell Grants, and the campus-based programs. Policy would have increasingly been informed by research, rather than the big-money politics of higher education and the growing influence over American higher education exercised by the big-board players on Wall Street.  

Had such studies been conducted independently by researchers at NCER and NCEE, perhaps it would not have come as such a surprise to the nation that student loan debt has now surpassed credit card debt in total, and that too many borrowers' prospects have been dimmed or destroyed by student loan program excesses and failures. It surely would have been helpful this budget-cutting year to know where Pell Grants are effective and should be increased, and where they are ineffective and can safely be cut, and whether programs like the now-defunct Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnership (LEAP) program and Perkins Loans should be ended or cannibalized to keep others going.  

No such work was undertaken. This is not surprising considering that when the new commissioner of NCEE was welcomed at an IES reception in 2003 and asked about higher education, she replied, perplexed, "I'm told were not doing anything on higher education."  (Update after eight years: with the exception of one inherited evaluation, NCEE has neither completed nor contemplated any higher education program evaluations.)  Although NCER, where I worked until 2005, was required by law to make postsecondary education a research priority, it took three years before a postsecondary grant competition was held.

NCES, however, was not so quiescent, as its postsecondary statistics-gathering function could not be so easily played down. Benefiting from new blood and fresh ideas, it began to salvage its reputation by advocating for better information through its web site to help students and families navigate the price of college. It also took on the daunting challenge of reworking its basic surveys and databases. 

The efforts -- imperfect but promising -- foundered on political pressure from above. More than once, the NCES commissioner was told to back away from proposals that lobbying groups opposed, or lose his job. The IES director, a hapless go-between who was caught in a hopeless position, left the post without firmly establishing independence in higher education matters as envisioned in ESRA. If ever there had been a time for the Institute to assert itself, it was at this time, when the credibility of IES's detractors was at a low point – with revelations of corruption in student financial aid offices around the country and, at the Education Department, financial penalties for a top political appointee and felony charges against another for conflicts of interest with higher education related industries.

If Congress moves forward with reauthorization of ESRA, it should not adopt AERA's weak recommendations on IES reorganization. A better way to proceed would be to make IES a housekeeping operation and provide presidential appointments for each of the three commissioners at NCES, NCER, and NCEE. (If there is objection to presidential appointment inflation, merge NCER and NCEE to keep the appointment number at two.) Congress should give the centers the independence they need and subject them to sunshine so the public, including outside researchers, can weigh in on the issues. This arrangement will allow the centers to do their duties under the law but also create a check and balance system so that disputes under the Education Sciences Reform Act are more likely to be settled openly and by scientific investigation, not by money and politics. 

Congress, however, must heed AERA's call for adequate appropriations so the centers can do their work. This includes staffing with researchers who know their fields thoroughly and are committed to rigorous, independent inquiry, come what may. A failure to provide the resources needed would signal that Congress is not ultimately serious about getting taxpayer value for federal higher education spending, and is resigned to watching American higher education continue its decline, especially with regard to access and success for the low-income.  

A strong ESRA reauthorization is not a fanciful wish on my part, but the expression of a continuing commitment and effort to make higher education research and evaluation at the Department of Education credible for the good of American higher education. It can be done.

Jon H. Oberg is a former state government official, college association president, and U.S. Senate staff member. In retirement from the U.S. Department of Education since 2005, he has worked with the Department of Justice and the Department of Education on public finance issues to settle false claims and return funds to the U.S. Treasury. He previously wrote in Higher Ed Watch about the shortcomings of the most recent GI Bill. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Higher Ed Watch or the New America Foundation.