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Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda (1997)

Chapter: 10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE

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Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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10—
Issues Related to the
Research Infrastructure

This chapter departs from the discussion of specific research areas in Chapters 2 through 9 to examine issues related to the infrastructure within which the research is conducted. The following issues are addressed:

Issues about process

 

Agenda setting and the development of Requests for Proposals (RFPs)

 

Review of research proposals

 

Consensus development and accumulation of results

 

Dissemination

Cross-cutting issues

 

Basic versus applied research

 

The funding of research centers versus the funding of field-initiated studies

 

Lack of expertise in the agencies

 

Insufficient or incompetent inclusion of language variables in surveys

 

Need for collaboration and coordination

 

Limited availability of funds

As context for this discussion of infrastructure issues, Appendices A-C present the findings of a comprehensive study designed to consolidate for the first time information on the history, the numerous organizations and programs, and the specific activities that comprise the infrastructure for research on English-language learners and bilingual education. The information gathered in the course of that study served as the basis for the review of infrastructure issues in this

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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chapter. The reader is referred to Appendix A for an explanation of the study approach, which included extensive review of the literature and various background documents, as well as interviews with key personnel at both the federal and state levels.

Earlier chapters of this report have assessed the state of knowledge about the linguistic, cognitive, and social development of English-language learners and about the programs and teachers that educate them and data collected on them; they have also offered observations on the quality of the research. This chapter assesses the infrastructure that produced much of that research and identifies the characteristics that seem to have facilitated or inhibited good research. Our principal judgment, resting largely on the reviews included in previous chapters, is that the infrastructure has often failed to produce the high-quality and relevant research needed, this despite a great expansion of research on LEP issues in the past 15 years and the strenuous and skilled efforts of many researchers and agency officials. The effectiveness of the infrastructure has been strongly influenced by some factors we cannot hope to change, such as the politics of bilingual education. But we can recommend changes in organization, procedures, and allocation of resources that might improve the infrastructure, and changes in training that might strengthen the skills of the people within that infrastructure in the future. The final section of this chapter, then, presents a set of recommendations for addressing the issues listed above, and thereby improving the infrastructure for research on English-language learners and bilingual education.

Issues About Process

Agenda Setting and the Development of Requests for Proposals RFPs

Federal research funds for the study of education have always been very modest and unpredictable. Thus, the possibilities for rational agenda setting are constrained. Agenda setting in education research is always tentative; the major players are always changing; and the process is always vulnerable to interruption, undue haste, politics, and controversy. Even during periods when funding has been fairly level, as with the laboratories and centers, the agenda-setting process has been haphazard, sometimes mandated by Congress, sometimes left to internal agency staff, sometimes involving extensive participation by practitioners and other stakeholders, and sometimes left largely to the discretion of research center directors.

Congressional mandates relevant to agenda setting are of two sorts: substantive and procedural. An example of a substantive agenda provided by Congress is the 1978 reauthorization of the Bilingual Education Act, which specified eight areas of research to be conducted by the new Title VII: studies to determine and evaluate effective models for bilingual-bicultural programs; studies to determine language acquisition characteristics and the most effective method of teaching

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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English within the context of a bilingual-bicultural program to students who have language proficiencies other than English; a 5-year longitudinal study to measure the effect of this title on the education of students who have language proficiencies other than English; studies to determine the most effective and reliable methods of identification of students who should be entitled to services under this title; the operation of a clearinghouse on information for bilingual education, which would collect, analyze, and disseminate information about bilingual education and related programs; studies to determine the most effective methods of teaching reading to children and adults who have language proficiencies other than English; studies to determine the effectiveness of teacher training preservice and inservice programs funded under this title; and studies to determine the critical cultural characteristics of selected groups of individuals assisted under this title for purposes of teaching about culture in the program.

A National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) official reminded us that many of their studies are mandated by law. Of course, when we say that the agenda began with Congress, the question really goes back to who inserted the mandate in the bill and argued it through committees and in some cases the administration. The 1978 research agenda was fashioned by a planning committee from within the Department of Education (Rudolph Troike, personal communication).

In the case of evaluation, which is a form of research, an agency's agenda is often shaped by Congress in a piecemeal fashion. Such is the case with the Planning and Evaluation Service (PES) in the Office of the Under Secretary of Education or the evaluation group in the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Many of their studies are mandated by law or otherwise initiated from outside the agency. When an evaluation unit's mission is to serve a variety of programs, it makes little sense to talk about coherent agenda setting within the unit. PES, for example, evaluates the programs for the Office of the Under Secretary, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, and other offices. Often evaluations are specified in legislation; at other times they are requested by the agency that administers a program. In the case of the evaluation group in the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, their main task is evaluating Head Start, and various aspects of that ongoing evaluation task are specified in law.

Agenda setting is thus reactive, although some agencies are by their nature more reactive than others. Yet even these groups strive to bring some coherence to their activities. In the case of PES, one official (Valena Plisko, personal communication) said that having the recently promulgated Department of Education strategic plan has been helpful in setting an evaluation agenda. In the case of the evaluation group in the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, in 1995 they began to develop a more coherent agenda to link their various studies and build on those done in the past (Michael Lopez, personal communication). One piece that was recommended by an outside panel and not mandated was a

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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study of bilingual Head Start programs. In addition, in response to a request by the Head Start Office in the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, the National Research Council (NRC), under the auspices of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, convened a series of meetings—the Head Start Roundtable—to provide a systematic analysis of research needs relevant to the changing context Head Start faces as it moves into its fourth decade. The report issued as a result of these meetings (National Research Council, 1996) explicitly addresses issues of ethnic and cultural diversity. However, agencies' internal plans are always vulnerable to interruption as a result of outside demands and internal pressures, so previous blue-ribbon efforts of the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families have not succeeded very well.

The second form of Congressional input into agenda setting involves the establishment of required procedures for agenda setting by research agencies that receive funds. One example is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires extensive consultation with stakeholders, including adult learners with disabilities and the parents of school students with disabilities. Another example is the recent reauthorization of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) in the Goals 2000 legislation, which established the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board. This act instructed OERI to coordinate research and required the development of a National Research Priorities Plan for the Department of Education's research efforts.

While agendas may be developed internally by research agencies, the word ''agenda" is perhaps too broad here. Kingdon (1984:205) makes a distinction between agenda setting and "alternative specification," a distinction akin to that made by the military between strategies and tactics. The White House and Congress, adjudicating the relative claims of politics, principles, priorities, and public opinion, are more likely to be involved in establishing the larger agenda. In the case of the education of English-language learners, agenda setting could establish the urgency for research on these students and their education, as in the 1970s, or it could raise questions about the appropriateness of various kinds of programming and call for counter-research, as in the 1980s, or it could demote the issue to a more silent priority, as seems to be the case in the 1990s.

Sometimes the research agencies have a role in this larger agenda setting. They are often called upon to testify to Congress about their main objectives and what they recommend as major emphases (Graham, cited in Kaestle, 1992). When centers or laboratories are recompeted en masse, the agencies play a key role in proposing a new roster of research concerns to Congress or the administration. When OERI recompeted virtually all of its centers in 1989-1990, its planning process spanned 1988-1989, involving public meetings with researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Tentative agenda priorities were published for public comment. Then, under the new Assistant Secretary, Christopher Cross, a blue-ribbon panel reconsidered the priorities and confirmed them. RFPs proceeded from this agenda for the set of OERI centers that have just completed their

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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work. Similarly, in the recent recompetition for the regional laboratories, extensive public hearings were held, and public comment was sought for the recent recompetition of the centers and for the field-initiated research.

In these agenda-setting exercises, one can see the impact of the American tradition of public control in education. In the case of OERI, the client of education research is often seen as the practitioners—the teachers and administrators of schools. In the case of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, the client is more often seen as a student with disabilities or the parents of a student. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires broad constituent input into research agendas by such clients. These stakeholders are involved at the early stages, identifying strategic targets for research, according to an official (Louis Danielson, personal communication). This is a different view of the field from that which prevails in scientific agencies, which in thinking of the field think of the researchers themselves, not the clients of the research (i.e., practitioners or students).

Once the broad agenda has been established, the initiative usually passes to the research agencies, in consultation with researchers in the field, to determine what sorts of studies and what specific studies should be done—what Kingdon (1984) calls the specification of alternatives. These detailed agendas can be done well or poorly, depending on the mix of procedures and personnel that constitute the infrastructure. At the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA) and other agencies, the failure to maintain an active relationship with the field, for example through the use of standing panels, is exacerbated by the lack of qualified researchers on the agency staff, sometimes resulting in poorly drafted RFPs and Grant Announcements. In cases where an agency, with the support of Congress, trusts the researchers in the field to initiate useful research without a great deal of specification from the government, agenda setting is of less importance. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides a striking contrast to education research agencies in this regard. In the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, for example, about 90 percent of the research funds are devoted to field-initiated research. There are occasional Congressional mandates and targeted requests for applications on particular topics, but for the most part the agenda is left open and is determined, in effect, by the aggregate of projects successfully proposed from the field.

Education research is in a double bind. There has been little faith (and little money) in field-initiated studies, so an agenda is needed to guide research efforts; yet the infrastructure is unstable and ineffective in building agendas. The task of creating an overarching agenda for research in the Department of Education has now fallen to OERI and the new National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board. Time will tell how successful that effort will be, but given the instability and fragmentation that have characterized the past, something of this nature is needed.

At lower levels of specification, the record has been mixed. Both insiders

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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and outsiders believe that OBEMLA's agenda-setting attempts have been weakened by politicization, lack of leadership, turnover of key personnel, and lack of a conceptual plan. As for the specification of alternatives in setting agendas for research centers devoted to LEP issues, the record is also mixed. In the opinion of Amado Padilla (personal communication), codirector of the winning proposal for the second OERI language center in 1985, the RFP was quite good. In response to the RFP, Padilla says, his planning group started brainstorming, trying to match up existing researchers and ideas with the research and development specified in the RFP. This is typical of the specification of alternatives by prospective OERI research center planning groups. They try to balance the demands of the RFP with their view of the field and its problems, plus their judgments about who does good research, plus pressures to get the work out in a relatively short time and to recognize various constituencies with an interest in the domain being studied.

In the case of the third OERI language center, the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning, its codirector believes the coherence of its proposal came from ideas that emerged in the group's proposal planning sessions, notably a Vygotskyan psychological bent and an interest in ethnographic studies of multilingual situations (Barry McLaughlin, personal communication). The group wanted to get some finished work out rapidly, according to McLaughlin, and in response to the grant announcement felt a need to include as many language groups and geographic areas as possible, a complication of working in the area of language diversity. Also, there was a great deal of emphasis on the word "national" in the center's title. They did not have the latitude to select a few things to do well; rather, they felt they were expected to conduct research representative of the whole field of practice in the education of English-language learners. As a result, they included some research already in progress, plus a relatively large number of new, small projects, resulting in a more diverse repertoire of small-scale studies than might have resulted had they felt neither of the above pressures.

Research on English-language learners and their education is an extreme case of the problems faced by education research at the federal level, and education research is an extreme case of the problems faced by most federal research agencies. In education, and on LEP issues in particular, the procedures and agencies are unstable, the funds are sparse, the agency personnel are often untrained in research, and the topics are controversial. Thus, agenda-setting efforts are ad hoc, reactive, fragmented, and political. The need is for commitment to a more stable, longer-term agenda that will survive more than the usual 2 years served by agency heads. To effect such agenda development, responsibility needs to be located at a high level within the Department of Education; moreover, participants need to distinguish among different levels of agenda setting—the basic program versus the specification of alternatives versus the selection of

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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research projects—and then determine which stakeholders are appropriately included in each.

Presumably, practitioners and politicians should have more input at the more general level of establishing overall goals for research, appropriate to the needs of the field as well as influenced by the high-pay-off areas where research is likely to make significant progress. Researchers and agency officials with deep research knowledge should have more to say about the specification of alternatives and should have exclusive discretion to judge the technical merits of individual projects. At the same time, despite the appropriateness of having different players at different levels of the agenda-setting process, the whole process should have coherence. There should be enough feedback and accountability so that the research findings relate in helpful ways to the larger agenda, and the agencies providing the funds should have an ongoing, affirmative responsibility to monitor the whole enterprise, relating research findings to the larger mission of the agenda.

Review of Research Proposals

Procedures for the review of proposals for research projects funded by the federal government differ considerably depending on the agency, on what kind of research is involved, and on whether the proposal is individually submitted or part of a center's work. Agencies that fund work largely by contract, such as PES, rely on internal staff reviews. This seems to stem from various considerations. First, there are not very many competitors for large-scale contract evaluation research, so it might be difficult to find knowledgeable outside reviewers without a conflict of interest (John Chapman, personal communication). Also, contracts are tied more closely than grants to the specifications laid down by the agency; there is less emphasis on creativity and more on technical capacity. All of these research-related activities, however, may soon be subject to new routines and standards. The National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board is currently overseeing the development of standards for the evaluation and conduct of activities carried out by OERI, including the review and selection of proposals and the monitoring of grants awarded.

The classic process of external peer review, often cited as an enviable model by leading education scholars, is exemplified by NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF). When budgets are sizable and much of the research is initiated by individual proposals from the field, as in the cases of NIH and NSF, agencies develop the capacity to maintain two features missing in Department of Education research agencies: standing panels of experts from the field and research administrators in the agency with substantial research expertise. We return to the latter in the discussion below on expertise. As for the standing panels, National Institute for Mental Health panel members have terms of 3 to 4 years, and they meet three times a year to review proposals. Their proposal rankings are expressed in a ranking system, on the basis of scientific merit. There

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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is also a national advisory council that includes both scientists and citizen members, but our source at the institute told us that the "role of the council differs across institutes," and at the National Institute for Mental Health, the council generally supports panel judgments of merit (Mary Ellen Oliveri, personal communication).

At the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the research administrator we interviewed said the peer review system is "very robust" (Norman Krasnegor, personal communication). A "highly educated and technically sophisticated group of scientists" comes to Washington three times a year to review applications. Their national advisory council looks at applications to examine policy implications or to handle appeals.

At NSF, all research grants of over $50,000 must be subjected to peer review. Some of this is done by mail, by ad hoc reviewers; some of it is done by standing panels, as at NIH.

In the Department of Education agencies that do substantial amounts of research on language issues—OERI and OBEMLA—there is no tradition of standing panels. According to some department staff (Edward Fuentes and Joseph Conaty, personal communication), competitions of the same type are infrequent in the Department of Education, and thus standing panels might not work as well as at NIH and NSF. Sometimes there has been thorough peer review that has been well regarded in the field; often the review process has gotten worse marks (Kaestle, 1992). The suspicion by some that education is a weak field in which things do not get done well cannot be adjudicated since so many other adverse conditions prevail: too little budget, too much leadership turnover, and too little proportion of the budget in field-initiated research, plus the fragmentation of competing research paradigms. With the new National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, the new research institutes, and a commitment to spending 20 percent of future funds on field-initiated research, OERI may have the opportunity to build more of a tradition of standing panels. At the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, also in the Department of Education, the research funds have been (until now) somewhat more stable; there all reviews are done by ad hoc panels of experts familiar with the particular population or disability being researched, and until now, all of these panels have been brought to Washington for face-to-face meetings. But the vulnerability of these arrangements, as with education researchers' hopes for the new OERI institutes, is abundantly clear in the present political climate.

Since most research in education, including that on LEP issues, is conducted in research centers, the processes by which projects are chosen within centers are of considerable interest; however, they are more loosely governed and variable than the processes for judging the merit of field-initiated proposals or proposals for initial funding of the centers themselves. Of course, the initial roster of projects accompanies the proposal for establishing the center, and those proposals receive intense scrutiny from the agencies and from peer reviewers. These

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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reviews are watched intensely by researchers in the field, who occasionally protest decisions and question the fairness of the selection process.

This process, however, chooses among the centers proposed; it does not in general inquire about the possible alternatives to individual projects. In any case, the process by which researchers are included in the center proposals is not an open one. It is a matter of planning groups attempting to respond to RFPs and Grant Announcements, judging what researchers are doing good work relevant to the center's mission and who is available. Often these decisions are influenced by geographical considerations and networks of acquaintances. No doubt this often results in excellent work by groups of high competence, but the process by which the funding reaches individual researchers is strikingly different from that for peer-reviewed field-initiated proposals.

Consensus Development and the Accumulation of Results

It is widely charged that education research seldom adds up to much, that it is too equivocal to inform practice. Some people argue that in social science research, results are necessarily "messier" than in the physical and biological sciences. Nonetheless, education researchers have, for the most part, not done a good job of accumulating evidence and building upon past research. Emerson Elliott (cited in Kaestle, 1992:15), the recently retired Commissioner of Statistics at NCES, came to the National Institute of Education (NIE) in 1972 after working on health issues at the Office of Management and Budget. At the health institutes, he said, "there was a strong sense that there was science, and that it was cumulating to something." Education research was "discredited'' by the lack of such a conviction. One center director said that when he sent off his final report to NIE, "I don't think they even opened the boxes" (Amado Padilla, personal communication).

This situation has not universally characterized LEP-related research. During 1990-1992, OBEMLA funded three symposia. The first, in September 1990, focused on topics including demographics, issues of method and pedagogy, language teaching and learning, early childhood education issues, assessment, and LEP exceptional issues (see OBEMLA, 1990). The second symposium (September 1991) addressed evaluation and measurement issues (see OBEMLA, 1992). The third (August 1992) addressed middle and high school issues (see OBEMLA, 1993). Compendia of the research papers were published and widely distributed. But instances of such synthesizing activities are outweighed in the historical record by complaints of inattention to results. There are two related problems: one is whether the agencies do anything with the research they have funded (read it, understand it, critique it, synthesize it, disseminate it); the second is whether researchers in the field have a sense of evidence being amassed, of new directions and questions coming from completed research, and of relatively secure knowledge accumulating. No doubt there is some of this cumulative process in education

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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research, including work on LEP issues. Nonetheless, the frequent complaints about ignored reports and lack of synthesis are symptomatic of the weak infrastructure of education research in general and of research on English-language learners in particular. The politicization of the issues and rapid turnover of leadership in the research agencies exacerbate the problem of building a cumulative knowledge base.

Key figures in the agencies and the centers are very aware of this problem, and there has been much discussion of it in the past few years. The Center for Research on the Education of Children Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) holds an annual symposium at the American Association for Education Research to take stock of results, and they periodically produce a volume of papers that reviews research from their center and elsewhere on a particular topic. In addition, they began a peer-reviewed journal in 1996 called the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, which is now published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (Robert Slavin, personal communication). And Judith Anderson (personal communication), former acting director of the At-Risk Institute, which funds CRESPAR, says they are developing institute-wide guidelines for the synthesis and dissemination of research. The Administration for Children, Youth, and Families is conducting a review of past work in preparation for the production of a more coherent research agenda for the future (Michael Lopez, personal communication). At NCES, Edith McArthur (personal communication) reports, they have branched out from their now traditional annual reports, The Condition of Education and The Digest of Educational Statistics, to include special reports on focused topics such as urban youth, the education of Hispanic students, and high school dropouts. There is also a set of reports to various audiences for each large data set they produce. Eugene Garcia (personal communication), until recently the head of OBEMLA, reminded our interviewer that the Department of Education cosponsored the NRC effort that produced this report, which itself was a form of literature review, consensus development, and agenda building.

The successful proposal for the new Southwest Educational Development Laboratory displays the capacity of the current research infrastructure to inform new projects of past results. It proposed convening experts in the field before designing applied research on bilingual programs. It also proposed keeping abreast of research and program developments through journals, conferences, and electronic communication, looking to research agencies such as the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning (now the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence) and the Center for Applied Linguistics as sources of new knowledge and synthesis of ongoing research (Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 1995).

While the above efforts can yield an ongoing, informal sense of what has been learned and what research is needed, there are more formal procedures for exploring and stating consensus in complex areas of research. The procedures often cited come from NIH. Our source at the National Institute of Child Health

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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and Human Development explained that there is a special office in NIH responsible for conferences on consensus formation. It is "a very elaborate process that takes several years" (Norman Krasnegor, personal communication). Experts confer, examining the literature in a given area and exploring and debating the levels of certainty about research findings according to an established procedure. Both Christopher Cross (cited in Kaestle, 1992), as Assistant Secretary of OERI, and Joseph Conaty (personal communication), as Director of Research in OERI, have recommended the NIH model for education research. Conaty commissioned some papers in preparation for a budget request to pursue consensus development on the health institutes model. However, as he said, "if you have no discretionary money, you can't do consensus panels," and he never got funding specifically for the purpose, despite repeated requests.

Dissemination

If there are two issues that make education researchers and research administrators grimace, it is coordination of research efforts and dissemination of results—not because they do not want to do these things, but because no one seems to have clear answers about effective ways of doing them. We speak to the coordination issue below; here we look at the dissemination issue.

The issue of dissemination will not go away. The old linear model of research and development—some people do research, others develop materials from it, and others distribute it and train practitioners how to use it—is regularly criticized. Over the past two decades, pressures have mounted to involve practitioners in the agenda setting and conduct of research and to have researchers involved in thinking about links to practice from the start of their work. For better or worse (worse, we think), governments support very little basic research on language-minority issues and bilingualism. Most research, therefore, is intended from the start to reach some conclusions directly relevant to policy and practice—whether case studies of best practices or statistical studies of large programs, evaluation work, or data gathering about relevant populations and their experiences.

Making the links takes more than good intentions and more than traditional dissemination modes; it takes imagination, high priority, and resources. Imagine, for example, how many education research agencies would have the resources to adopt the approach of the health institutes. Mary Ellen Oliveri of the National Institute of Mental Health (personal communication) reports that the health institutes concentrate much more on basic research than do the education agencies, so their dissemination efforts are generally through traditional academic venues—journals and conferences. But when special reports are needed for policy purposes, they typically are based on the deliberations of large numbers of outside scientists (Mary Ellen Oliveri, personal communication). Similarly, Norman Krasnegor of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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(personal communication) reports that because his agency sponsors only basic research, the audience "is the scientific community"; but when they decided they needed to get scientific findings on dyslexia out to the public, they went through their rigorous consensus process and then held a big conference, attended by first lady Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala.

Perhaps the new centers funded through the OERI institute structure can carry on some of these more aggressive dissemination activities, with budgets three to five times those of previous OERI centers. The director of CRESPAR, the first of these new centers, says they are "quite fanatical" about dissemination; their dissemination staff is larger than their research staff. The task is daunting, nonetheless. Richard Tucker (personal communication), who worked at the Center for Language Education and Research, points out that even if one focused at the level of state education agencies, they are set up very differently in different states, and they respond to different regulations about bilingual education. One has to know the people, the politics, the problems, and the procedures to disseminate research results that will matter. "You don't reach each of the 50 states in the same way. … There are so many multiple audiences, and the cost of getting to them is so high."

Nonetheless, some innovative dissemination overtures are being made in OERI. The new Office of Reform Assistance and Dissemination (ORAD) is responsible for developing a dissemination system for the entire department. They expect to establish extensive review processes for identifying promising and exemplary programs, practices, and products. One early effort has been a collaboration with NSF on brochures for parents published by OERI on Helping Your Child Learn; some of these have Spanish-language versions (Eve Bither, personal communication). The National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning developed a newsletter with a mailing list of 3,000-4,000 people, mostly teachers. They also developed practitioner reports, as well as some videotapes. Gilbert N. Garcia (personal communication) reports that OERI staff, through the cooperative agreement, are working closely with the new Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence to ensure that there is adequate dissemination of the studies the center staff are conducting. Valena Plisko at PES (personal communication) says they have "idea books" on various topics, such as school-wide projects in Title I or how to engage parents in Title VII programs. She fears these innovative dissemination efforts will be cut when the budget shrinks and hopes that the new comprehensive technical assistance centers can pick up some of these dissemination activities. The National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, funded by OBEMLA, is also charged with providing educators with information about exemplary practices and research, in conjunction with the Education Resources Information Center Clearinghouse on Urban Education and the University of California's Linguistic Minority Research Institute (see the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education home page on the Internet at http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/).

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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It is not within our purview to review the work of the regional multifunctional resource centers operated by OBEMLA from 1984 to 1995, but their mission, in the course of providing technical assistance to bilingual/multicultural school programs, was to keep practitioners in touch with the latest best research. As a result of the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the work of the multifunctional resource centers, as well as other ESEA centers (such as the Title 1 technical assistance centers), was taken over by 15 comprehensive regional assistance centers. The latter centers were funded to help states, school districts, schools, tribes, community-based organizations, and other grant recipients with the administration, integration, and implementation of programs funded under the Improving America's Schools Act. More specifically, they are to provide comprehensive training and technical assistance to improve teaching and learning in a manner that supports local reform efforts. In addition, as previously mentioned, three new regional laboratories are focused on culture and language.

Perhaps victory in the effort to achieve good dissemination of education research results will be declared when the word "dissemination" disappears. At the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Louis Danielson (personal communication) reports, "We've stopped using the word 'dissemination' because it sounds like such a top-down approach." They favor the word '''communicate' because it suggests a conversation." It would seem from our interviews that improvements in what has traditionally been called dissemination will involve more resources, further reversals of the linear assumptions about research and development, and experimentation with new electronic technologies.

Cross-Cutting Issues

Despite our concluding point about dissemination (that it ought not to be considered the last step in a linear process), we have described the research infrastructure as a group of processes in a sequence from agenda setting to dissemination. There are, however, several issues that cut across these processes. These include basic versus applied research, the funding of research centers versus the funding of field-initiated studies, lack of expertise in the agencies, insufficient or incompetent inclusion of language variables in surveys, the need for collaboration and coordination, and limited availability of funds.

Basic Versus Applied Research

The control of education in the United States is shared by local and state authorities; moreover, everyone feels qualified to debate education issues because everyone has gone to school and had some educational experiences that were more effective than others. This situation makes education very different as

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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a field for federally funded research as compared with medicine, defense, or even poverty. Not only has this situation produced an infrastructure that involves substantial participation by stakeholders in agenda setting, but it has also created pressures for more applied and less basic research. In research on the education of English-language learners, this pressure has been exacerbated by the politicization of issues of practice: whether and how much native language should be used in the instruction of these students. This in turn has led to an emphasis on "horse-race" research on the effectiveness of program types, as discussed earlier.

At another level of politicization, the two-party system often divides the federal government on issues related to the education of English-language learners. Under these conditions of party politics, especially in recent decades when the two major parties have had well-defined and contrasting positions on education, funds for research tend to get very specifically earmarked, leaving little to discretion, little to field-initiated research, and indeed little room for the funding of basic research. This further distinguishes education from fields such as health and defense: while political parties often stipulate how research monies are to be spent in the treatment of disease or military training, the amount of political influence involved in shaping the research of these institutions is small relative to the magnitude of the total research programs, thus leaving more room for basic research and more latitude for professional judgment in the research agenda-setting process.

In a democracy, there is much to be said for public involvement in agenda setting for education research. However, it is doubtful that the field of education will ever attain the cumulative knowledge base and the reputation for dependable knowledge enjoyed by research in many other areas without more funding for basic research. The Army Research Institute, for example, operates under a model of seven levels of research, moving gradually from the basic level (for example, exploring theoretical perspectives), through intermediate stages (such as a pilot application in experimental settings), to testing in a natural environment, and finally to more applied research and development (Ray Perez, personal communication). In education research, the early stages are truncated; there are researchers doing some basic research in education, of course, but they are funded more often by foundations or universities than by government, and their work is not generally linked to a planned program of experimentation and application in the field.

Various critics and observers have called for more basic research at NIE and OERI over the years, but the realities of the research infrastructure militate against this.1 And the vicious circle of low funds leading to unimpressive results tends to

1 For a recommendation in favor of basic research, see Kiesler and Turner (1977), and the NIE advisory council's endorsement of that recommendation, see National Council on Educational Research (1978). The history of this critique and a renewed argument for basic research are found in Vinovskis (1993, 1995).

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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perpetuate the situation. While all research at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is defined as basic, all research conducted by the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services is required to be applied. The dilemma for education research can be seen in statements by the current Assistant Secretary for OERI, Sharon Robinson (personal communication), who wants OERI's research to be "cutting edge" and "courageous," but also client driven, not researcher driven. Left to themselves, researchers might not produce a great deal of "cutting edge" and "courageous'' research, but without some funds for researcher-driven inquiry, the field will lack basic research as compared with other fields.

The Funding of Research Centers Versus the
Funding of Field-Initiated Studies

A parallel but distinct issue is the optimum balance between research funds devoted to university-based research and development centers and those devoted to field-initiated research proposed by individuals or teams on particular topics. In these two categories (leaving aside large-scale evaluation contracts, which belong to neither category), most research funds in education have gone to centers.

Very few researchers think the past balance has been the optimum one. The overwhelming preference for research funds earmarked for laboratories and centers has resulted from the political situation mentioned above, causing the majority in Congress to specify how funds should be spent when the White House is controlled by the other party. Also, the centers and laboratories have political constituencies because they are local institutions, and they have lobbied effectively to maintain their lion's share. There is not much of a political constituency for field-initiated research; however, most disinterested parties agree that in terms of gaining the best blend of diverse research from the best people, more field-initiated studies would be desirable. No other field has as great an imbalance in this regard as education research. Of course, if the funds were there, the research agencies would need staff with expertise in research to administer the programs, and they would need strong panels of researchers to advise on the development of RFPs and Grant Announcements and to rate the proposals. Although both OBEMLA and OERI have had small programs of field-initiated studies over the past few decades, many researchers (and many education research administrators in Washington) believe these efforts are understaffed and have weak traditions of peer review panels.

High-quality field-initiated research work also depends on having a corps of active, well-trained researchers in the field. This dimension is difficult to estimate with any precision, but some leaders in the field of LEP research believe the corps is weak, a problem to which we shall return below.

Under the recent reauthorization of OERI, 20 percent of all funds in the five

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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new research and development institutes is mandated for field-initiated studies. This set-aside will increase to 25 percent by fiscal year 1998. As a result there will be a substantial increase in the amount of money going to researchers on LEP issues outside of the research centers. This in itself provides an occasion for rethinking the related issues: first, establishing panels to organize and judge the competitions; second, locating and hiring relevant experts within the department to staff that process; and third, determining whether there are researchers in the field sufficient in number and talent to provide enough fruitful proposals. If the answer on the latter point is no, OERI and OBEMLA might consider whether the government should do more to develop the corps of researchers. One model that bears on the question of field-initiated studies is found in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Louis Danielson (personal communication) reports that about two-thirds of the office's $20 million annual research budget is allocated to field-initiated studies, but the funds are divided among dissertation grants, grants to people in their first 5 postdoctoral years, and grants to senior researchers. Thus, the agency is not only supporting the production of research on a competitive basis, but also helping to attract and retain able people in the research corps. The Spencer Foundation is also investing heavily in the effort to train and support young scholars for education research, but Spencer cannot be expected to accomplish alone the creation of the next generation of education researchers.

Lack of Expertise in the Agencies

Knowledgeable critics both within and outside the education research agencies bemoan the erosion of staff who are substantive experts in research areas, such as existed in the early NIE and exist today in NIH, the Defense institutes, and elsewhere. This complaint was repeated in our interviews. One center director complained about his monitor's lack of knowledge of the field; another, an institute administrator, complained that only four people on the institute's staff have the capacity to manage research well. As the new institutes' budgets stabilize and as their acting directors are replaced with directors, attention will have to be given to the expertise of research administration staff if the research infrastructure is to improve. This issue arises again in our discussion of the next cross-cutting issue.

Insufficient or Incompetent Inclusion of Language Variables in Surveys

Throughout its existence, OBEMLA has attempted to persuade other agencies, particularly NCES, to include more language variables in surveys and data collection projects and has commonly paid the extra funds required when the agency agreed. As noted earlier, such data have sometimes been collected incompetently, rendering the results useless. The agency that does the most survey

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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work, NCES, has little expertise in the subtleties of dealing with language variables. When experts are called in, it is sometimes too late to change the definition of variables or the collection of data. NCES is not oblivious to the issues, of course, but its recent performance on language variables is not consistent with its generally high reputation as a statistical agency.

The problems, to be sure, are very difficult. Definitions of limited English proficiency differ from state to state, and efforts to standardize have not yet taken hold (see Chapter 9). Earlier surveys did not carefully distinguish English-language learners from all language-minority students, some of whom speak fluent English (see the discussion on terminology in Chapter 1). When an assessment requires testing the subjects' cognitive abilities, practices of different schools in excluding English-language learners vary widely, and the development of Spanish-language alternatives proves difficult because of scaling problems. It is possible that NCES could profit from the experience of survey researchers working on international assessments, where efforts to compare results across languages have surmounted some problems of scaling. Inclusion of English-language learners in assessments of academic achievement is a major issue for NCES since they administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Thus they may put more emphasis on this issue than on the inclusion of descriptive language variables in the big longitudinal data sets that are becoming very important in research on students' schooling experience and school success (e.g., Jeanne Griffith, personal communication).

Aside from the question of whether agencies have the expertise to include language variables in their studies, some agencies remain relatively indifferent to the issue. The head of the evaluation group at the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families expressed the opinion that English-language learners are a small subpopulation in Head Start, and that issues related to their education are specific to them as a group and thus relatively unimportant to the general Head Start population (Michael Lopez, personal communication). However, estimates suggest that 20 percent of the children enrolled in Head Start nation-wide speak a language other than English (Jeanne Griffith, personal communication).

Efforts simply to persuade diverse agencies to pay more attention to language variables will probably have relatively little impact, despite OBEMLA's early successes in increasing the visibility of English-language learner experiences. There are disincentives: the variables are conceptually messy, so the job is difficult and consequently expensive; furthermore, the whole subject is politically controversial. As a result, there has been a general attitude in the past to "leave it to OBEMLA." Yet continuing to rely on OBEMLA is probably not a viable solution, for two reasons. First, having OBEMLA convince other agencies to include language variables as paid add-ons is obviously only a short-run solution designed to raise the visibility of the issues. Second, OBEMLA's capacity and budget for research have continually been vulnerable. The solution to this

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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problem on a longer-term basis is connected to solving the more general problem of interagency collaboration on LEP research, to which we now turn.

Need for Collaboration and Coordination

Collaboration across research agencies is a well-known issue in Washington. It is a rational notion that goes against the grain of several agency realities: different schedules, different priorities, different approaches, too little time, and competition for budget.2 Coordination activities in the federal research world are of three types. First, there are informal, ad hoc arrangements initiated by mid-level research administrators that grow out of initiatives by higher-level officials and/or routine reporting and evaluation requirements. Examples include coordination between the Departments of Labor and Education in school-to-work data collection, and consultation between the Department of Education and the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop summary information on state education policy and common data definitions (Jeffrey Rodomar, personal communication). Second, there are mandated, secretarial-level commissions that command agency attention, report, and go out of business, such as the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology, initiated by the White House and chaired by the Secretary of Energy, which examined science and math education (Office of Science and Technology Policy, 1991). Third, there are attempts by agency heads to coordinate research on a more systematic, ongoing basis. The chief example here, central to our interests (and discussed in detail in Appendix A), is the Part C Coordinating Committee empaneled more or less continuously from 1978 (through the Education Amendments of 1978) until 1984 (through the reauthorization of Title VII) in an attempt to coordinate research and evaluation work conducted with funds from ESEA Title VII. Its record is a mix of success and failure that tells much of the tale of federally sponsored research on LEP issues. Despite the turf battles and antagonism between PES and OBEMLA, various officials we interviewed in both agencies supported the committee's existence, thought it had done some good and necessary work, and supported its recent abortive revival.

Whatever the fate of the Part C Coordinating Committee, several factors are pressing research administrators in the Department of Education toward more coordination. Recent legislation established the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board and gave OERI a coordinating role on research across the department. It also called for a strategic plan for the department (which one PES official said was already helping to guide her agency's priorities) and for standards to guide the conduct and rate the quality of education research.

2On the general problem, see Atkinson and Jackson (1992); on the need for coordination in federal data-gathering activities, see Norwood (1995).

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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It is impossible to tell at this point what institutional shape these coordinating efforts will take in the next few years. Whatever that shape is, it will strongly affect the future development of an infrastructure for research on language-minority and bilingual education issues.

Limited Availability of Funds

The three Department of Defense services—Army, Air Force, and Navy—that deal with issues of human potential have laboratories that conduct research on education and training. Together these laboratories expend approximately $90 million annually. Recently, research center staff supported by the Department of Defense were criticized for flying personnel first class, matching employees' contributions to charities, and throwing office parties with federal funds, among other abuses (American Educational Research Association, 1996). It is difficult for education researchers to imagine budgets of that magnitude or to think about the kinds of problems that arise from having too much money. When the reauthorization of OERI was being discussed in 1993, writers advocating an institute structure with better-funded research centers, as well as more field-initiated research, pointed out what a small proportion of the money in education is invested in research. An NRC report (Atkinson and Jackson, 1992) notes that in fiscal year 1991, federal expenditures for education research and development were one-third of those for research and development in agriculture and transportation and only 4 percent of those for research and development in health. Moreover, this low investment in education research and development was not a function of total national expenditures for each activity. Federal education research was just 0.1 percent of total national expenditures for education, whereas federal transportation research was almost 0.6 percent of total national expenditures on transportation, federal agriculture research was 1.0 percent of total national expenditures on agriculture, and federal health research was 1.3 percent of total national expenditures on health care. In fiscal year 1995, the total research and development budget for defense was $35.3 billion, while that for education was $174 million (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1996). In bilingual education, the Title VII funds for research have been reduced from approximately $6 million in 1981 to zero funding in 1996 (although a small amount of money will be available to continue the Benchmarks study).

Concluding Comments

The solutions to many of the problems with the infrastructure for research in education, and especially for research on LEP issues, would cost money. In our recent interviews, research officials from OBEMLA, NCES, and other agencies said that the limited amount of funding available is a major constraint to improving research on language-minority and bilingual education issues. To include

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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more language variables and insert language issues in more studies would be expensive, as would rebuilding the agencies' research expertise and supporting centers and institutes. More federal money could easily be justified for research on English-language learners.

Federally sponsored research on English-language learners and bilingual education is at a crossroads. The institutional arrangements are being radically altered, with hopes for new coherence and improved quality centering on the institute structure, OERI's coordinating role, and the development of department-wide standards and priorities. Like all reorganizations, this one is disruptive. But it has the potential to improve upon the old arrangements, which were often competitive and sometimes hostile. More important, the funding will be more ample in some ways (at OERI at least) if a budget is put in place that honors commitments to the new institutes as well as the mandated 20 percent level of funding for field-initiated studies. If these features—institute budgets and the field-initiated studies set-aside—survive the budget process (and it is important to the future of research in this area that they do), it will be equally important that the work thus funded be done well. In our recommendations we suggest some ways to improve the infrastructure supporting such research. It should be noted that however tempting, the committee is not proposing a major overhaul in the infrastructure because we feel it would be unrealistic. Rather, we propose less dramatic changes in a number of areas that we believe can combine to improve the overall quality of research on English-language learners and bilingual education.

Infrastructure Needs

Our recommendations for meeting the needs of the infrastructure for research on English-language learners and bilingual education fall into two broad categories: infrastructure needs regarding federally funded research on LEP issues, and roles for state education agencies and foundations.

Infrastructure Needs Regarding Federally Funded Research on
LEP Issues

Infrastructure needs at the federal level relate to coordination of research, interagency staff collaboration, the relationship of research agencies to the field, the inclusion of minority language and LEP variables and expansion of language concerns in research agency programs, integration of the work of the regional laboratories into the research program, substantive research expertise within the agencies, the accumulation and dissemination of research and data, the next generation of researchers, and cultural versus structural change.

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Coordination of Research

10-1. The Assistant Secretary for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), in consultation with the Executive Director of the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, the Director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs (OBEMLA), the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and the Director of the Planning and Evaluation Service (PES), should request that the Secretary of Education appoint a Department of Education Advisory Committee on Research on English-language Learners. This committee should comprise the Assistant Secretary for OERI; the Executive Director of the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board; the Director of OBEMLA; the Commissioner of NCES; the Director of PES; and eight members from outside the government—four academic researchers and four practicing educators, all experts specializing in LEP issues. Department of Education personnel involved in administering grants on minority language and LEP issues should serve as advisors, as necessary. The nongovernmental members of the committee should have fixed terms of not less than 4 years.

The purpose of the committee would be to oversee and make recommendations in the following areas:

Agenda setting on language-minority and LEP research, evaluation, and data-gathering activities of the federal government, with an emphasis on including English-language learners in studies, as well as promoting fruitful studies that specifically target these students as subjects.

The implementation of such agendas, including the balance of the research funds across agencies and across the different types of research settings (centers, laboratories, field-initiated research, and targeted Request for Proposals (RFP) research programs).

Solicitation of an appropriate balance of advice about research issues from research experts in the field, educators, and agency staff.

The uses of completed research, with focus on relationships among centers, laboratories, state education agencies, professional associations, and others involved in dissemination of the research results; the quality, modes, and extent of dissemination; and issues of synthesis and consensus development.

Among the committee's activities would be the following:

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Monitoring and reporting to the Department of Education, Congress, and the public on research activities that bear on English-language learners.

Developing policy recommendations on the conditions under which inclusion of English-language learners in studies would be mandatory for reasons of scientific integrity (see recommendation 10-4 below).

Convening conferences and other activities to highlight important advances in knowledge that can be gained through research involving these students.

Recommending priorities for funding to the Assistant Secretary for OERI and the Executive Director of the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board for inclusion in the department's Research Priorities Plan (see recommendation 10-4).

Our review of the research indicated that English-language learners are not incorporated into many studies that purport to be about all students. This is especially true outside the Department of Education, but even within the department there has been an absence of general commitment; OBEMLA was expected to pay for studies to include English-language learners in order to improve the accuracy of estimates of the entire student universe. In cases where a significant investment of research resources has been focused on these students, as in the case of the OERI Center for Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning at Santa Cruz, there has ben no systematic connection between OBEMLA's interests in policy and practice and the basic research orientation of OERI. Thus, there has been a lack of coherence in the funding of research on English-language learners within the Department of Education.

A serious coordination effort is needed, and it must address two distinct problems. The first is that raised above of the inclusion of English-language learners in research that purports to be about all students. This is the responsibility of all agencies that fund research on school-age children, whether in the Department of Education or not. If the mission of an agency such as NCES is to collect national statistics on education, the accuracy of the information is compromised when English-language learners are not included. If the mission is to discover the bases of human development and learning, as in the case of OERI's new Centers on Achievement in School Mathematics and Science and Improving Student Learning and Achievement in English, or the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, then it falls within that mission to ask how the presence of English-language learners might impact research findings. The second problem is the need to target resources deliberately and well toward understanding issues that are specifically about English-language learners. Responsibility for this domain of work most naturally rests with agencies whose mission is the study and advancement of these students' education and development.

For coordination to be appealing within a bureaucratic structure, the benefits must be emphasized. For those who fund research on all students, the obvious

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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natural incentive is scientific accuracy. This is particularly true for research conducted in areas that recruit samples from subpopulations in which English-language learners are represented in large proportions: low-income samples, preschool and early elementary grade samples, urban samples, and samples from certain geographical regions. Another natural incentive for coordination for researchers whose work is on all students is that the inclusion of English-language learners might provide an opportunity to expand and possibly test their theories with a different population. In addressing literacy, Chapter 3 notes that researchers have typically avoided working with English-language learners even when second-language learners might be an ideal test case sample among whom basic questions about reading can be asked. In discussing content area learning, in particular the question of multiple representations of knowledge, Chapter 3 also highlights the value of testing these ideas with English-language learner samples.

For those who are interested in the development of English-language learners per se, the natural incentive for coordination lies in the potential for bringing rich theory about the larger population to bear on their particular concerns, settings, and conceptualization of issues. As Chapter 2 points out, the field of second-language acquisition has drawn considerable benefits, both theoretically and methodologically, from major developments in the study of child language acquisition. In turn, theories of second-language acquisition have played a prominent role in models of bilingual education, such as the California Case Studies discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. In the absence of rich theory, research within program offices, such as OBEMLA and PES, will be narrowly defined by programmatic categories (see Chapter 6). Given the highly political nature of bilingual education, there should be a strong incentive for agencies such as OBEMLA and PES to seek grounding for their work in the context of larger domains of research on language acquisition.

The best mechanism available for the coordination of research on LEP issues is the authority and responsibility of the Assistant Secretary for OERI, who, "with the advice and assistance" of the new National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, is charged to work with other assistant secretaries to "improve the coordination of education research, development and dissemination" (Educational Research, Development, Dissemination, and Improvement Act of 1994, Section 921(c)). Secretary of Education Riley (1995) added evaluation research to this understanding, noting that "we also intend to strengthen our efforts to coordinate our evaluation plans with our research and data collection activities."

In the conduct of research on LEP issues, as in education research more generally, research administrators have changed frequently over the past 20 years. Research agendas have been unstable and infrequently consulted. No single group has effectively overseen the relationships among different agencies in conducting research on language-minority and LEP issues. Moreover, no one has

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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been responsible for assessing, synthesizing, and disseminating results across different research programs and building consensus concerning future research endeavors. Therefore, there has been little sense of cumulative accomplishment or the building of a knowledge base.

Interagency Staff Collaboration

10-2. The Department of Education should establish and encourage an informal discussion group on coordination of LEP research. Representatives who are charged with administering research on language issues within the Department of Education should confer and establish such a group which would meet periodically on issues of common concern. They should seek the participation of research staff from agencies outside of the Department of Education who deal with research on education and children, and they should ensure the participation of department staff who oversee the three new regional education laboratories that have language themes, as well as staff who oversee the new technical assistance centers.

A lack of collaboration is a common frustration in Washington. Frequently, agency personnel say that although it sounds like a good idea, it does not work because, among other things, agencies have different timetables, agendas, and budgets; no one has the time; and the effort is always delegated to low-level staff. Yet there are many examples of useful collaboration and coordination of research efforts across agency lines. The Part C Coordinating Committee sometimes operated effectively, but its effectiveness was compromised by competition for funds, by the politics of bilingual education, and by negative opinions about the research qualifications of some agency personnel. In the long run, federal research agencies in the field of education need to build internal research expertise because collaboration can be only as good as the collaborators. In the short run, however, the need for collaboration can be addressed by replacing the Part C Coordinating Committee with an interagency discussion group such as that proposed here. The above-recommended Department of Education Advisory Committee on Research on English-language Learners would provide high visibility and overarching oversight responsibility. But there are also examples of effective collaboration initiated by program staff on an informal basis because they wanted to do a better job by conferring with colleagues working on similar problems.

Relationship of Research Agencies to the Field:
Peer Review and Standing Panels

10-3. The National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board is currently conducting a comprehensive examination of OERI's system of peer

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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review. This is an essential activity to address the issue of research quality and help revitalize peer review as something much more than a bureaucratic instrument. The premise should be that peer review is a major vehicle of communication between funders and the field, a process through which principles about research priorities and technical quality of research are clearly articulated and applied to proposals. The current effort by the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board needs to be augmented by two additional efforts. One would involve examining the uses of peer review throughout the Department of Education, not just within OERI; such an expansion would be within the board's authority for advising on research activities throughout the department. The other additional effort would address the issue of how to ensure expertise on English-language learner issues throughout the peer review process; this effort could be undertaken by the above-recommended Department of Education Advisory Committee on Research on English-language Learners.

Many education researchers and agency personnel have mentioned with envy the use of standing panels of expert researchers to judge and rank proposals for research funds in more stable and higher-prestige agencies. The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are often noted as models. To adopt these models, however, would not be simple. First, representatives of those agencies point out the abiding problems in peer review, no matter how well executed, such as the balance between the expertise of ad hoc panels on focused topics and the stability and sense of ownership promoted by standing panels, and the dilemma of how and when to seek advice on social utility and other nontechnical criteria from nonresearchers.3 Second, education research (and LEP research more particularly) suffers from special problems in trying to develop more effective peer review. The status of its research and its researchers is low, so there may not be unanimity on the need for rigorous peer review on technical grounds. Furthermore, education researchers suffer from an inability to agree on a common research paradigm. Education is a field of practice, and it enlists research efforts from people of very different disciplinary training and different philosophical perspectives; yet it elicits strong emotions, social commitments, and value judgments. This is perhaps inevitable, perhaps healthy in some regards, but it makes effective peer review more difficult. (See the discussion of these problems in Chapters 3 and 7.) Given the fragmented nature of education research paradigms (see Donmoyer, 1996), effective peer review must involve a very careful and balanced selection of panel members.

The need for effective peer review was strongly emphasized in the reauthorization

3In 1994, the General Accounting Office issued a report on peer review in the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled Peer Review: Reforms Needed to Ensure Fairness in Federal Agency Grant Selection. See also E. Elliott's briefing paper for National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board consultants (Elliott, 1996).

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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of OERI in 1994, and some of these concerns are being addressed for the department as a whole by the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, which has developed and approved standards for peer review. Several principles are important for quality control across all topics of education research. Scholars from outside the department should participate in the review of proposals; in the building of consensus regarding what is known and what areas of investigation are most promising; in determining what combination of methodologies is best suited to the tasks defined; and in the developing Requests for Proposals, particularly ensuring that they set clear criteria for quality.

In addition, some aspects of peer review relate specifically to research on LEP issues. First, the need to include English-language learners in research whenever doing so would affect the scientific quality of the inferences drawn implies the value of having an expert on LEP issues on any peer review committee dealing with large-scale research on students in general. Second, the need to investigate English-language learners within a larger theoretical framework implies the value of including expert researchers on the larger contextual and conceptual issues (for example, literacy development or learning in content areas), along with those on English-language learners per se.

Research agencies in the Department of Education have infrequently used standing panels. More often they have used ad hoc raters, sometimes with face-to-face meetings and sometimes not. There are exceptions; NCES has standing panels for its survey projects. But the practice has been spotty over the years in the department. The result has been less expertise to support decision making in the agencies, less-supportive relationships from the research community, and less contact between agency specialists and researchers on a collegial basis. Some researchers in the LEP area believe that some poor-quality research has resulted from ineffective peer review. They believe there have been problems with the composition of review panels, with respect to both the mix of department staff and outside experts and the mix of researchers and nonresearchers. In addition, some have suggested that funding of projects through centers sometimes shields poor-quality projects from rigorous review.

Inclusion of Language-Minority and LEP Variables and
Expansion of Language Concerns in Agency Research Programs

10-4. Coordinating committees should encourage research agencies to include LEP variables in data gathering and to conduct research focused specifically on English-language learners. The two groups recommended above—the standing advisory committee and the informal discussion group—should encourage increased attention to language issues in surveys and other data gathering. They should also encourage increased attention to language issues as a substantive focus in research, not only that sponsored by the department, but also that sponsored by agencies outside of the department that deal with

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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childhood and education. In doing so, they should distinguish among three different and desirable forms of inclusion:

The incorporation of English-language learners into studies from which they are now excluded in order to obtain better population estimates. Adaptations of assessment instruments and procedures might be required to ensure inclusion.

The disaggregation of data by LEP status, where possible and appropriate, in reporting and analyzing the data. This might help in understanding English-language learners in particular or in illuminating the status and experiences of students generally in some way. Oversampling might be necessary for such disaggregation.

In funding of education research more generally, a requirement in Requests for Proposals to include English-language learners as subjects in research on a wide variety of topics where the language dimensions may earlier have been ignored. Perhaps necessary at some point would be a systematic inquiry by Congress into the extent of exclusion of English-language learners from federally funded research, followed by Congressional action if the situation should warrant. This action might include incentives for more work in this area.

For some years there has been an attitude, reflected in the research infrastructure on English-language learner and bilingual education concerns, that agencies would leave those concerns to OBEMLA. One reason for this reluctance to initiate research and data gathering on English-language learners is that the inclusion of complex language variables in studies is expensive and difficult. Another is that the subject matter is politically controversial. Thus OBEMLA long had the role of persuading other agencies to incorporate language variables in their survey work and of providing the funds for doing so from the Title VII budget. This helped raise the visibility of language issues, but was not a good long-term solution. Too often the language component was added late in the process or with too little expertise, so the items added were not defined in useful ways.

The demography of language diversity in this country suggests that students' language abilities and histories will continue to be important variables for us to understand in studying education, and as noted above, studies that exclude part of the population from participation because of language are skewed scientifically. Therefore, it is important for agencies to develop the expertise and the incentives needed to include language variables routinely and competently in their education research.

It is also true that agencies outside of the Department of Education, such as the National Science Foundation and the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, that deal with education issues seldom focus on the language diversity of students. It is important that they be persuaded to give more agenda priority to such issues.

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Integration of the Work of the Regional Laboratories into the Research
Program

10-5. The above-recommended Advisory Committee on Research on English-language Learners should ensure that staff from the three new regional laboratories specializing in language diversity participate in the department's research coordination activities. The directors of these laboratories should work with each other, with the above-recommended advisory committee, and with the above-recommended informal discussion group to ensure regular communication and collaboration, from the setting of agendas to the synthesis and dissemination of research.

Historically, the regional laboratories have operated more or less independently of the research and development centers. This has led to recurring complaints about fuzziness in the differentiation of the missions of the two groups. Two features of the present situation deepen our concern for the importance of integrating the work of the laboratories into an overarching agenda and collaborative network. First, three of the newly contracted regional laboratories have specialized missions involving English-language learner and multicultural issues, so there is a new opportunity for expanded and coordinated research work in these areas. Second, however, the laboratories are supervised by the Office of Reform Assistance and Dissemination (ORAD), not by the same institute that supervises the new Center for Meeting the Educational Needs of a Diverse Student Population.

Substantive Research Expertise Within the Agencies

10-6. Agencies in the Department of Education that have substantial responsibility for research on language-minority and LEP issues, such as OBEMLA, PES, and OERI (including the institutes, NCES, and ORAD), should allocate resources to train current staff and recruit staff with solid research experience so that there is substantive research expertise on English-language learners within the agencies. Agencies with incidental but important contact with such issues should find means to get the consultative expertise they need in a timely fashion.

10-7. The same key agencies should budget and implement internal senior research fellowships for scholars with expertise in LEP issues for periods of 6 to 12 months. These scholars would be involved in the ongoing research funding issues of the agency while engaging in some research of their own.

As noted earlier, many researchers and agency personnel bemoan the lack of research specialists within the agencies, both in general and specifically with regard to language-minority and LEP issues. We emphasize the OBEMLA's research staff and procedures need to be strengthened if it is to play a role in research management. There is currently little faith in the office's research

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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capacity, a judgment that the committee unhappily shares. If the institute structure of OERI is to thrive, the institute staff must have more depth in the areas each institute covers. Typically, one person is given all responsibilities regarding English-language learners for a given office. Offices need more staff capacity to address complex language issues. One way to accomplish this would be through the employment of excepted personnel. Another would be through the Society for Research in Child Development Executive Branch Fellowships program. A third would be through training of existing staff on LEP issues, or conversely, training of OBEMLA staff on research issues.

Accumulation and Dissemination of Research and Data

10-8. The National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board should charge the new Department of Education Advisory Committee on Research on English-language Learners with the development of a comprehensive system for integrating the review and synthesis of new knowledge into the dissemination and agenda-setting processes for LEP research. The committee could, for example, hold periodic meetings to assess the state of knowledge; it could adopt and sponsor consensus exercises such as those employed by the National Institutes of Health; and it could hold annual research symposia, as OBEMLA has done in the past. Through the board, the committee could consult the educators who use research results to develop priorities for the further accumulation of needed knowledge. The committee might also consider supporting the establishment of one or more additional juried research journals, with attention to achieving the most neutral or catholic stance on methodological and policy issues. But most important, the committee, working under the board, must be the locus of a coherent process of knowledge accumulation, from the genesis of research in agenda setting to the dual problematic processes arising from the conduct of good research: developing consensus on new knowledge and relating is to practice.

Research is cumulative enterprise that depends on a tradition giving impetus to new studies. The usual process by which new knowledge is reviewed and archived is the publication of research findings in peer-reviewed journals; but in the field of language-minority and LEP issues, the political nature of the field has distorted even that process. The Bilingual Research Journal, published by the National Association for Bilingual Education, and READ Perspectives, published by Research in English Acquisition and Development, Inc., both maintain editorial review boards of credible researchers. Yet each is eyed with suspicion by the other political camp, and many serious scholars are discouraged from submitting their work to such publications. Potential contributors may believe that judgments on their work depend on political orientation, as well as on the disciplinary orientation of the reviewers.

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Moreover, many studies, particularly those funded through government contracts, never appear in the standard venues of publication and dissemination. Thus, the insertion of such work in the accumulating knowledge base—the process of archiving and reflecting upon the results—is left to the authors themselves, the funding agency, or the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. Many of the investigators in charge of these studies do not work in a setting where publications are rewarded; thus relying on them to archive and disseminate on their own initiative is not effective. The agencies, to put it simply, have a very poor record of accumulating, synthesizing, reflecting upon, and disseminating research results from the studies they have funded, on LEP issues in particular and on educational research in general. The National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, funded by OBEMLA, is charged with being a broker between research and practice, providing information on effective practice to the field. As a part of the Department of Education's technical assistance and information network, the clearinghouse should continue to play a role in solving this problem, but it is not integrated into any coherent system for planning, evaluating, and disseminating research results.

Ideally, the building of a successful cumulative knowledge base can result only from a dynamic and coherent process that establishes priorities, funds projects, selects researchers, monitors research, coordinates work sponsored by different agencies, reviews and synthesizes results, disseminates new knowledge, and establishes new priorities. That this will not happen by itself in the infrastructure as currently configured is obvious from past performance. Resources are thin, and this challenging task is not anyone's clear-cut responsibility.

The Next Generation of Researchers

10-9. Research agencies should devote a substantial portion of their funds for research on minority-language and LEP issues to doctoral dissertation competitions and postdoctoral fellowships.

10-10. Congress should restore substantial funding of Title VII fellowships for doctoral training,4 but allocate the grants to individuals studying LEP issues in any graduate department, rather than to those in programs in bilingual education per se.

Although we do not have systematic data on the issue, there is considerable concern among senior researchers and agency officials that insufficient talent exists at present, or in training, to accomplish the needed research in the

4Funding for the Title VII fellowships was discontinued in the fiscal year 1996 budget, but through a reprogramming request, funding has been continued for current fellows only. The budget for fiscal year 1997 also did not appropriate funds for fellowships, and a reprogramming request is under review.

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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language-minority and LEP areas. Through its work in doctoral training, dissertation support, and postdoctoral fellowships, the Spencer Foundation recognizes insufficient research talent as a general problem in education research. Its efforts have been crucial to attracting talented young people to work in education research, and some of them have worked on bilingual education and language-minority issues. Furthermore, in states with large language-minority populations, such as California, support programs (e.g., the Language Minority Research Institute) and training programs (e.g., that at the University of California at Santa Barbara) have helped to train and support researchers working on these issues. But federal research agencies, and others as well, also need to give attention to the problem of the future of the research corps. And the issue has special urgency for research relating to LEP issues because the area is politically charged, which may deter talented researchers from choosing it as a focus of their studies.

Models for the needed support abound. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, for example, divides its considerable field-initiated studies funds among doctoral dissertation support, postdoctoral fellowships, and senior research grants, and various institutes of the National Institutes of Health support training programs. Title VII fellowships are a special case. They have been the major source of funding to develop research talent in bilingual education. Although the purpose of the fellowship program is to develop faculty for teacher training programs, the attainment of a doctorate, a teaching position at a university, and tenure at a university necessarily involves Title VII recipients in the conduct and use of research on LEP issues, and many of the active researchers in this area have been recipients of Title VII fellowships. On the other hand, Title VII fellowships tend to be restricted to students in schools of education and within these schools to students in bilingual/bicultural training programs. Many researchers in bilingual education received their degrees in educational areas outside of bilingual education and in disciplinary fields outside of schools of education, such as psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. Those researchers typically do not have access to Title VII fellowships. It might be more judicious and productive to award fellowships on an individual basis rather than to institutions, so that a broader range of students can have access to such support.

Cultural Versus Structural Change

10-11. All parties involved in developing the infrastructure for research on LEP issues should be aware that part of the problem is the need to escape a past history of interagency competition and mutual suspicion. The infrastructure is composed of attitudes as well as institutions.

The previous recommendations require resources, recruiting, and new institutional arrangements. But they are largely structural; if they are to work well, they must be accompanied by changing attitudes. When research budgets are

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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low, issues are politically charged, agendas are volatile, leadership is constantly changing, and leaders believe they must continually reinvent their agencies, a vicious circle of low morale, low expertise, low performance, and low respect infuses the federal education research enterprise, and where good work is done in the agencies, it is done under great stress and without much reward. It is inevitable and understandable that under such circumstances, competitive and defensive attitudes are common. Even if new resources are forthcoming and new structures mandated, it will take an act of collective will to build effective collaboration across federal research agencies and between those agencies and their two ''fields"—the field of educators who need to be involved in the agenda formulation, the conduct, and the uses of the research, as well as the academic field of researchers who work on LEP issues.

Roles for State Education Agencies and Foundations
Infrastructure Needs Regarding State Education Agencies

10-12. States should place some emphasis on the concerns expressed in recommendation 10-4 above—to include English-language learners in data gathering, to disaggregate the data by language status where possible in reporting, and more generally to be alert to the potential enrichment of research designs by attending to language issues. Specifically, states should collaborate with experts in institutions of higher education and district and school staff to learn more about the following areas:

The incorporation of English-language learners into state assessment programs. Issues to be addressed would include how to decide which students get which assessments, as well as the development of alternative assessments for students unable to take the standard ones.

The development of standard procedures for determining the English and native-language proficiency of English-language learners, best program placements, and the point at which these students should be exited from special programming.

The development and evaluation of various theoretically driven models of instruction.

The development of curricula that would enable English-language learners to meet high standards.

The development and evaluation of teacher education programs and certification examinations for mainstream teachers who work with English-language learners and for teachers who work in English as a second language and bilingual education programs.

10-13. The Department of Education should consider providing financial support for some of these collaborative activities.

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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10-14. State universities in states with large numbers of English-language learners should consider establishing research and technical assistance programs to support faculty and students with interest in these issues. The University of California's Linguistic Minority Research Institute is an example of a state-wide research support network for language-minority and LEP issues.

Some states with large English-language learner populations are very conscious of the educational issues surrounding such students. Others, perhaps with smaller but growing numbers of English-language learners, are less active in gathering data and developing programs for these students. Our survey disclosed that even in the states with the highest concentrations of English-language learners, little research on LEP issues is conducted under the auspices of the state departments of education. However, there is a great deal of potential here for contribution to the research effort, because states conduct program evaluation and assessment of students and school-level performance, and they collect descriptive information on schools, teachers, and students.

Infrastructure Needs Regarding Research Support from Foundations

10-15. Foundations concerned with education research and reform should encourage grantees, where appropriate, to place some emphasis on the concerns expressed in recommendation 10-4 above—to include English-language learners in data gathering, to disaggregate the data by language status where possible in reporting, and more generally to be alert to the potential enrichment and generalizability of research designs by attending to language issues.

10-16. Foundations can facilitate a more coherent research agenda on LEP issues by setting up and supporting communication—ongoing networks or conferences—among people who do not otherwise work together. The work that led to this report is the kind of reflection and synthesis that can result from such support.

Foundations have the independence and the resources to be catalysts for research, brokers for tough-minded stock taking, and sponsors of research synthesis and agenda setting (as in the case of the present report, which was funded by a combination of foundation and federal funds). The Spencer Foundation's central role in sponsoring basic and applied research, as well as in supporting the recruitment and training of the next generation of education researchers, has been discussed above. With this notable exception, foundations interested in education tend to emphasize action, reform, and the development of effective educational programs, not research per se. However, because research on learning and its contexts is often intertwined with such activities, these foundations can foster excellent research and at the same time press researchers to relate their work to the world of practice. In our informal survey of the foundations most interested

Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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in education, we did not find as robust an interest in language issues as we had hoped. Perhaps this report may inspire shifts of emphasis in some agendas or suggest ways in which foundation-sponsored work can address language-minority and LEP issues without much additional cost.

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Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Page 337
Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Page 339
Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Suggested Citation:"10 ISSUES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE." Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. 1997. Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/5286.
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Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda Get This Book
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How do we effectively teach children from homes in which a language other than English is spoken?

In Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children, a committee of experts focuses on this central question, striving toward the construction of a strong and credible knowledge base to inform the activities of those who educate children as well as those who fund and conduct research.

The book reviews a broad range of studies—from basic ones on language, literacy, and learning to others in educational settings. The committee proposes a research agenda that responds to issues of policy and practice yet maintains scientific integrity.

This comprehensive volume provides perspective on the history of bilingual education in the United States; summarizes relevant research on development of a second language, literacy, and content knowledge; reviews past evaluation studies; explores what we know about effective schools and classrooms for these children; examines research on the education of teachers of culturally and linguistically diverse students; critically reviews the system for the collection of education statistics as it relates to this student population; and recommends changes in the infrastructure that supports research on these students.

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