The Bush Administration says they are committed to education policy based upon tough-minded, dispassionate research into what works and what doesn't. But the problem with research is like the problem with democracy: researchers, like voters around the world, don't always reach the conclusions they're supposed to reach.
Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education, testified last week before the House Science Committee about the science and math education component of the President's "American Competitiveness Initiative." But as long as Secretary Spellings was there, I had questions about a couple of research reports that the Department commissioned but never released.
The first report was entitled "National Evaluation of the Public Charter Schools Program." The report only became public because the New York Times made a Freedom of Information Act request for it and published two articles on the subject in
August and
November (sorry the New York Times wants to make money off of you for reading their old articles) of 2004. The researchers concluded that students in traditional public schools were actually doing better than students in public charter schools. That is emphatically contrary to administration policy, but the reason the Department gave for not releasing the report was that the report was based on bad science--flawed methodology, suspect findings, conclusions not supported by findings, who knows what. Secretary Spellings explained that they could not give the imprimatur of the Department of Education to flawed research.
Fair enough, but what were the specific criticisms, besides just that it was "bad science"? Did scholars within the Department generate memoranda or other documents describing the report's flaws? Why can't we see those documents so the researchers who prepared the report can respond to the criticisms, and so scholars in the field can evaluate the research against the criticisms? Isn't that what peer review is all about?
Secretary Spellings said she'd look into it.
The second report was entitled "Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth." That report concluded that bi-lingual education actually worked better for children for whom English was a second language than did "English only" education. If that conclusion is not contrary to official Department policy, it is certainly anathema to some on the right. The Department had also not released that report because of supposed flawed research. After a year of negotiations, however, the Department agreed to let the researchers publish the report elsewhere.
I had the same question: can we see any documents that described what the flaws in the research were, so the researchers could defend their work and scholars in their field could evaluate the research against the Department's criticisms?
Secretary Spellings again said she'd look into it.
At bottom, the question really is whether the Department is testing their policy assumptions against rigorous research or, well, fixing the research around the policy. Hasn't that question come up in other policy areas?
I'll let you know whether the Department provides the documents that I asked for so politely. The Freedom of Information Act excludes certain internal agency documents, and the Department could probably argue that the documents are not subject to FOIA under that exclusion.
But if the Democrats are in the majority next year, there's another way to get the documents. It's called a "subpoena."