Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:

The phrase "scientifically-based research" appears 111 times in the No Child Left Behind Act. It is there with good reason. If teachers, schools, and states are going to be held accountable for raising student achievement, they need the tools that will allow them to identify and utilize effective practices and programs. The only tried and true tool for generating cumulative advances in knowledge and practice is the scientific method. The application of the scientific method to physical and biological phenomena has transformed human experience in fields as disparate as medicine, agriculture, transportation, and communication. While the social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences are still in their infancy, they too have begun to exert a powerful influence on practice in fields such as welfare, criminology, clinical psychology, and developmental disabilities.

The Education Sciences Reform Act, passed unanimously in both houses of Congress and signed into law four months ago by the President, is based on the premise that education, like the other fields I have mentioned, can be transformed by the scientific method. I firmly believe that it can, and more quickly than most would think. To do so will require focused, strategic, persistent, well-managed investments in research programs that address the problems faced by education practitioners and policy-makers.

The budget of the Institute of Education Sciences is small. For FY 2003 the research and dissemination account of $139.1 million and the statistics account of $89.4 are together less than one half of one percent of the $50.2 billion discretionary budget of the U.S. Department of Education. In response to the need for more funding for education research of high quality and relevance, the President has proposed a healthy increase for research and statistics for FY 2004. The research and dissemination account would rise to $185 million, and the statistics account would rise to $95 million. We need these increases and will use them in ways that are very likely to pay back the taxpayer's investment many times over.

Education Research and Dissemination

Of our $185 million request for education research and dissemination, approximately $165 million would support research projects, with the remaining $20 million supporting the efficient dissemination of information to a broad audience that includes policy makers, educators, researchers, and parents. We will be using funds in 2004 to continue a number of existing initiatives as well as to launch new programs. Rather than trying to describe each of our planned and existing research programs in the limited space available, I will highlight those that I believe can convey the overall direction of the Institute's activities.

One effort begun in 2002 that will continue in 2004 is our research program on Reading Comprehension. It aims to develop understanding of the factors that interfere with children's ability to extract meaning from written text, and to develop interventions to enable children to better comprehend what they read. Imagine a child who is a struggling reader working through a reading assignment with an adult along side. The adult helps the child with definitions and explanations of any words or concepts the child can't understand. The adult is attentive, knowledgeable, constantly available, and acutely tuned to the child's current level of skill and need for assistance. Children who are struggling with reading comprehension need this type of help, but it is a romantic vision in the context of the typical education setting with a single teacher working with a class of 25 students. To address the challenge of providing individualized instruction in reading comprehension, one of our grantees, located at the University of Colorado, is developing a computer-based interactive tutor that will both provide the level of detailed, personalized interaction necessary to help novice readers learn new vocabulary and understand increasingly complex text, and at the same time, provide assessment information to their classroom teachers.

Another research program in its second year focuses on the evaluation of preschool curricula. Programs like Head Start and Reading First are among the many that provide approximately $23 billion in federal and state funds for child care and preschool education. There is every reason to believe that the nature of the curriculum that children experience in their preschool classrooms is critical in preparing them for school. Yet, there isn't any clear evidence on which of the ever-expanding list of available preschool curricula work best in preparing children for school. Thus we are investing $23 billion without a clear understanding of what results are being achieved. The preschool curriculum evaluation project is systematically investigating the effectiveness of different widely available preschool curriculum in terms of their effects on children's school readiness and on children's progress through school.

Another existing research program, this one begun prior to my tenure in the Department, is the Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI), supported jointly by the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The purpose of this program is to support research that investigates the effectiveness of educational interventions in reading, mathematics, and the sciences as they are brought to scale across a large number of schools and with diverse student populations. One IERI project of considerable interest is being conducted by researchers at the University of Texas Health Center. To investigate the effects on student achievement of ongoing, classroom-based assessment, over 2000 teachers are using hand-held computers to perform actual student assessments and receive diagnostic results in real time in the classroom. The hypothesis is that by providing teachers with a ready, accurate, and accessible source of information on student progress, teachers will be able to tailor their instruction to meet the needs of individual students.

We are launching several new research initiatives in 2003 that we plan to continue in 2004. These include the research program on Teacher Quality, which aims to identify effective strategies for improving the preparation of classroom teachers and the instructional strategies they use. The focus of the 2003 competition will be professional development for teaching first grade reading and sixth grade mathematics. These are both subject areas and grades in which student achievement is far less than it should be, in which teachers are generally acknowledged to need additional skills, and in which the best ways to provide the needed professional development are unclear. An example of the type of issue that we expect to address under this initiative is whether school systems with many inexperienced teachers and substantial staff turnover require a different form of professional development for teachers than systems with an experienced and stable workforce.

Another new initiative for 2003 is the research program in Mathematics Education. Children in the United States are graduating from high school with math skills that place us near the bottom of all nations that participate in international assessments. The research program on Mathematics Education will identify interventions and approaches in mathematics education that result in improving mathematics achievement for all students. One focus of the program is to identify schools or districts that are succeeding in mathematics with children from minority and low-income backgrounds, and there are many such schools scattered across the nation, and then to determine how the approaches used in these successful schools and districts can be replicated in low-performing schools.

Another new program for 2003, in Social and Character Development, will develop and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions designed to promote positive social and character development, increase positive behaviors, and reduce antisocial behaviors. Research shows that most types of antisocial behavior (e.g., aggression, bullying, violence) are already evident by third grade. Thus the Character and Social Development program will focus on school-wide interventions in elementary school that aim to build important positive skills, such as self-regulation, conflict resolution, and social problem solving, and that incorporate specific methods for handling problem behavior.

Within our $19.8 million budget request for dissemination activities, I want to draw your attention to the ground-breaking What Works Clearinghouse. Unlike the situation in fields such as medicine, there is no single place for policy makers, practitioners, and parents to turn for information on what works in education. Virtually all education products, curricula, and approaches are advertised as based on research, but few are. The What Works Clearinghouse, launched in 2002, has specified clear and rigorous methodological standards for demonstrations of program effectiveness in education. It is now embarking on the ongoing task of examining the degree to which programs and products, within subject areas, have been shown to be effective under those standards. The first Clearinghouse reviews on topics such as reading and math curriculum, dropout prevention programs, and programs to reduce violence and misbehavior in the schools will be available later this year. We expect the Clearinghouse to become the principal source of valid information on effective educational practice. The 2004 budget includes an increase to speed the inclusion of additional topics in the coverage of the Clearinghouse.

I would like to draw your attention to a new program that we have proposed for 2004 that is particularly important. We have requested $15 million to launch a pre- and post-doctoral training program in the education sciences. There are significant capacity issues within the education research community. Many schools of education are not providing rigorous research training for doctoral students. While such training is often provided elsewhere in universities, e.g., psychology and economics departments, these training programs are seldom focused on topics in education, and students are pointed towards other careers and research topics. As a result, there are simply not enough well trained researchers in the pipeline to fulfill the need for high quality research, statistics, and evaluation work of the type that the Institute is funding. This initiative will fund interdisciplinary research training programs focused on topics in education at major universities. Grants will go to institutions that can put together a program across departments such as psychology, political science, economics, and epidemiology that will provide intensive training in education research and statistics. Pre-doctoral students will graduate within a traditional discipline, e.g., economics, but will receive a certificate in educational sciences, and will be expected to conduct dissertations on education topics. Post-doctoral training grants will allow experienced scientists in non-education fields to spend a year retraining to conduct education research.

Education Statistics

We are requesting $95 million for fiscal year 2004 spending for education statistics. This is the level of funding needed to maintain the ongoing program of statistics that has evolved over the past decade in response to legislation and the particular needs of data providers, data users, and education researchers. The statistics programs provide general statistics about trends in education and provide data to monitor education reform and progress and to inform the Department's research agenda. The costs of particular data collection programs fluctuate from year to year as data are collected, analyzed, and reported, but our budget request does not include funds to initiate any new data programs. The requested increase of approximately $6 million is needed to meet the costs of an extensive program of international studies and indicator projects.

Assessment

Our budget includes $96 million for assessment. These funds support the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the work of the National Assessment Governing Board, which is responsible for formulating policy for the Assessment. The No Child Left Behind Act made a number of changes in the National Assessment, principal among them the requirement to conduct biennial state assessments in reading and mathematics in grades 4 and 8. In addition, states are no longer required to support the costs of in-state administration of the tests; the federal government now defrays those costs. The National Assessment Governing Board requires an increase in 2004 in order to meet its new responsibilities.

The Need

There is a hunger among education decision makers for good information on what works and what doesn't. With the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind, educators are much more reluctant than they used to be to roll the dice and hope for the best. A superintendent of a large school district contacted me not long ago to ask if there was research that would help him select an elementary school math curriculum. He had just taken over as superintendent, and there was a lot riding on his curriculum decisions, both for him and for the children in the district. I had to tell him that there was no rigorous research on the efficacy of widely available elementary mathematics curricula, and that about all I could offer him was my opinion. The Director of the nation's Institute of Education Sciences should have something better than an opinion to offer on critical issues of teaching and learning in the schools. We in Washington cannot in good conscience require state and local education agencies that are receiving federal funds to use scientifically based research as a basis for program selection and then not provide that research to them. The President's budget request for the Institute of Education Sciences will allow us to provide education practitioners with the research findings they need to ground their decisions and practices in strong evidence of what works.

Conclusion

Thank you for this opportunity to discuss support for education research, statistics, and dissemination in the President's 2004 budget. My colleagues and I will be happy to respond to any question you may have.

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