in the effort. In sum, assembling the right group is a finely nuanced task. Ultimately, the long-term viability of standing panels or other mechanisms for peer review in scientific education research will depend on sustained attention to building the capacity of the field itself (see Design Principle 6 below).

We have focused thus far on the issues of peers and peer review from the perspective of a federal agency. However, the responsibility to assemble high-quality panels in the short term and to enhance the profession in the long term does not rest solely with the federal government. Indeed, we believe the community of researchers plays the most critical role in making peer review work. It is the professional responsibility of scientists to participate in efforts that promote scientific collaboration, consultation, and critique. A federal agency is a natural place to engage in that work. The future of the field—and the federal agency that supports it—will depend in no small part on finding new ways to harness the scholarly potential of its diverse perspectives.

A federal education research agency must be designed to prevent inappropriate political criteria from entering into the agency’s agenda for research, its choice of research studies, its selection of grantees, and its scientific norms. Ensuring that political interference is minimal will foster a scientific culture, protect the scientific process, and prevent research from being sacrificed to the policy passions and practice fads of the day. While we are agnostic about where in the federal government an education research agency should reside, it must have a large degree of independence from partisan politics from both the executive and legislative branches of government.

We want to be clear that buffering the agency from politics in the U.S. system cannot, and should not, be total. However desirable the autonomy of the agency might be from a scientific perspective, its research agenda must be responsive to the needs of decision makers in education. Although research should not be driven only by the needs of the moment—say, school-based management one year, charter schools the next, standards and