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

Chapter: A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION

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Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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Appendix A—
The Infrastructure for Research on English-Language
Learners and Bilingual Education

Diane August

Carl Kaestle

This appendix presents the results of a comprehensive study of the infrastructure for research on English-language learners and bilingual education. The origins of that infrastructure are first examined. This is followed by an explanation of the approach used for this study. The third and fourth sections review the agencies involved in the research and their activities at the federal and state levels, respectively. The fifth section describes the efforts of the various foundations, and the sixth those of the national reform networks. The final section addresses the recruitment and training of researchers.

The Origins Of An Infrastructure For Research
Bilingual Education in the Nineteenth Century

From the inception of free public education in the United States through the 1960s, most schools used English as their language of instruction, offering work in other languages only as second-language instruction. However, there were exceptions. In nineteenth-century New York City, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, smaller cities in Ohio, small towns in Wisconsin, and some communities in Louisiana, New Mexico, and elsewhere, school officials approved instruction in languages other than English as a response to the educational needs of immigrant children or as a reflection of the political strength of language-minority groups (see Castellano, 1983; Schlossman, 1983a; Jones, 1973).1

1Although there is no single source that consolidates perspectives on bilingual education, valuable information can be found in Crawford (1995); Zehler et al. (1993); Baker and de Kanter (1983); Glenn (1996); and Hakuta (1986). A good historical perspective from the early phase of bilingual education can be found in a five-volume set published by the Center for Applied Linguistics (1977).

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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The arguments used to support or oppose such programs were similar to those we hear today. Opponents argued that children needed English to function well as workers and citizens in America, that immigrants would remain isolated and clannish if they did not mix thoroughly with other children in the English-language environment of the common school, and that children would remain too long in the bilingual programs provided. Advocates variously argued that bilingual programs were needed to attract and retain immigrants' children in the public schools; that bilingual education was a reasonable accommodation; and that the purpose of these programs was a transition to English, which the children would learn soon enough.

Occasionally, research in favor of bilingual education was cited. John Peasley, superintendent of Cincinnati's schools, studied achievement test scores and concluded that ''a child can study two languages at the same time and do as well in each, as he would if all his time were devoted to either language alone." And in St. Louis the head of German education persuaded William Torrey Harris, the famous superintendent of St. Louis schools, to provide classes in which German students were mixed with the other students. Harris approved a 5-year experiment comparing the mixed and segregated German-language classes. Achievement scores following the experiment suggested that "the Anglo-Americans will certainly learn more German" in the bilingual classes, while "the German Americans are not retarded in their progress by the presence of the Anglo-Americans," doing as well as those in segregated German bilingual classes (Schlossman, 1983a:156, 164). Usually, however, educators argued not from research, but from political conviction, common sense, or anecdote. Arguments were often expressed in terms such as "…rests on the soundest bases of public policy" or "as is well known." In a Milwaukee debate, both sides claimed that "expert" opinion supported their position (Schlossman, 1983a:174).

In 1837, New York City opened two German schools. These were public primary schools with German-speaking teachers, provided for German American immigrant children. The instruction was supposed to be in English, and the purpose was to prepare the children to pursue their education in the existing public schools and thus to become identified with our native population. After a year, 380 children had been admitted. The school board tried to limit attendance to a 1-year maximum, but the teacher said the children could not be prevailed upon to attend the other schools because of dissimilarity of language, dress, manners, and so on. The board compromised, but insisted that the aim was to make these children, though Germans by birth, Americans by education, which could be accomplished only by their attendance at the regular common schools.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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Critics on the board said in 1843, "When foreigners are in the habit of congregating together they retain their national customs, prejudices and feelings and are therefore not as good members of society as they would otherwise be" (Kaestle, 1973:144). The board repeatedly refused requests for similar Italian schools, and in 1850 they abolished the German schools. Yet when the New York City schools underwent a governance reform and allowed more decentralized control in the latter part of the century, some wards offered German instruction once again, illustrating the ebb and flow of foreign-language instruction in nineteenth-century public schools. In rural Wisconsin and Minnesota, where German or Norwegian immigrants sometimes constituted a majority of a town's population, local schools often had German and Norwegian teachers, and, despite state laws limiting foreign-language instruction to 1 hour, German or Norwegian often became the school vernacular.

Where the conditions were right, local schools in the nineteenth century often accommodated other languages. The extent of these practices cannot be precisely stated, but some estimates are quite substantial. Kloss (1977), for example, calculates that perhaps a million schoolchildren received some or all of their instruction in a language other than English in 1890. Some nonimmigrant politicians favored the accommodation as part of a strategy to attract immigrants, and some educators spoke positively about the outcome. The superintendent of Marathon County schools said that "if the children should first learn to express their thoughts in their mother tongue, they would later learn more of the English language in three months than they would learn, in the old way, in three years" (quoted in Schlossman, 1983a:144). In some midwestern cities with large German populations, various sorts of bilingual programs existed. William Torrey Harris argued that it was "in the interest of the entire community here that the German shall cultivate his own language while he adopts English as his general means of communication" (quoted in Schlossman, 1983a:151). Arguments of the opponents of these programs also sound familiar to the modern ear. In Milwaukee, dissenting board members argued in the 1890s that "instruction in German unnecessarily burdens these young children and retards their progress in other studies. … All means should be used to give them the best possible education in the English language, the language of their country" (quoted in Schlossman, 1983a:172).

It is not surprising that little research was conducted on the scattered bilingual programs of the period. Little research was conducted on any educational practice. State departments of education had modest staffs and budgets, and American universities had as yet established neither a tradition nor an infrastructure for research. At the state and federal levels, research consisted largely of gathering statistics that could be used in formulating education policies.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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The Early Twentieth Century

Three developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries changed the above situation: the expansion of state departments of education; the rise of research universities in the United States, with the attendant development of the social sciences; and the launching of large philanthropic foundations, many of which had an interest in education. These developments portended an increase in education research. However, by the time the necessary infrastructure was in place, the scattered, fledgling programs in bilingual education had largely ended. Use of the native language in schools went into a long period of dormancy starting with public outcries about the waves of new immigrants in the early 1900s (Jones, 1960s; Hakuta, 1986). The Dillingham Commission, set up by Congress to investigate the changing patterns of immigration, noted the low skill levels of new immigrants who had "congregated together in sections apart from native Americans and the older immigrants to such an extent that assimilation [had] been slow" (quoted in Jones, 1960:178). More pointedly, Francis Walker, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expressed his concerns: "These immigrants are beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. …Europe is allowing its slums and its most stagnant reservoirs of degraded peasantry to be drained off upon our soil" (quoted in Ayres, 1909:103). Conditions had changed dramatically from the 1800s with respect to societal attitudes toward immigrants, in part as a result of the increased number of immigrants and in part as a result of the fact that the sources of immigration had changed from northern to southern and eastern Europe. Added to the anti-immigrant feeling was the hostility to German language and culture associated with World War I. In the wake of these combined developments, many states passed laws making English the sole language of school instruction in the first two decades of the century (Liebowitz, 1980).

Thus from the 1920s on, although there was more education research in general, there was less bilingual education in practice. This is not to say, however, that there was no research on the educational needs of language-minority children or on language-minority populations more generally. As Hispanic American educators entered the mainstream of university research and educational administration, they mustered research to argue against the massive discrimination experienced by Hispanic students.

The most famous of these researchers, George Sanchez, took his doctorate at Berkeley and held positions first as a researcher for the New Mexico state department of education and later as a professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin. Continually challenging discriminatory practices, Sanchez (1934:770) wrote about the subtle problems of translation for bilingual children taking mental ability tests. He argued that the "prostitution of democratic ideals to the cause of expediency, politics, vested interests, ignorance, class and 'race' prejudice" had led to inferior, segregated schooling, while standardized mental tests rested

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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on an assumption of common culture and language. Schools "have the responsibility of supplying those experiences to the child which will make the experiences sampled by standard measures as common to him as they were to those on whom the norms of the measures were based." Like his mentor Herschel Manuel, Sanchez invested his energies in fighting the segregation of Mexican American children, not in arguing for separate bilingual programs (Schlossman, 1983b). In Forgotten People (Sanchez, 1940), he argued that New Mexico's public schools and other institutions had refused to accept and serve the needs of Mexican Americans, resulting in cultural lag and lack of opportunity to assimilate. Speaking of the teachers of Taos, Sanchez said, "Bilingualism and its problems, as a significant challenge and as an opportunity in education, is largely a closed book to them" (p. 78). "The educational policy followed in New Mexico is startling in its ineptitude," he declared (p. 33). A smattering of more general research on language minorities emanated from America's research universities from the 1920s to the 1960s, culminating in some important pieces of work, such as Fishman et al.'s influential Language Loyalty in the United States (1966). However, bilingual education was virtually absent from the policy agenda of American public schools, so the potential for research to shape policy and practice in this area remained to be seen.

The Latter Twentieth Century

Bilingual education did not significantly re-emerge until 1963, when a Ford Foundation grant set up an experimental program in Dade County, Florida, to accommodate the needs of the first wave of Cuban refugees, many of whom had intentions of returning to Cuba at the earliest opportunity (Mackey and Beebe, 1977). The goal of this program was to create fully functional bilingual students, and it enjoyed the privilege of including the elite among the Cuban refugee community and English-background students whose parents were interested in a bilingual education. The success of this program gave encouragement to the concept of bilingual education for students from less privileged backgrounds (see Hakuta, 1986).

Federal endorsement of bilingual education began in 1968 when President Johnson signed into law the Bilingual Education Act as Title VII of the Hawkins-Stafford Elementary and Secondary Education Act, authorizing funds to be made available to local school districts on a competitive basis to establish innovative programs for students of limited English proficiency. The law did not specify that these programs had to use the native language of the students, although in practice most of them did (Crawford, 1995:60, footnote 1). Funds could be used to support programs, train teachers and aides, develop and disseminate instructional materials, and encourage parent involvement in the programs. In fiscal year 1969, Congress made the first appropriation for bilingual education, $7.5 million, enough to fund just 76 projects serving 27,000 students. Congressional

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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action was followed by a flurry of activity in state legislatures and in the courts. Many states, starting with Massachusetts in 1971, enacted their own laws requiring special services, including bilingual education, for English-language learners.2

In 1974, in a class action suit filed on behalf of Chinese-background students against the San Francisco Unified School District, the Supreme Court ruled that districts offering the same instruction to English-language learners as they did to English-speaking children were in violation of the Civil Rights Act (Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563, 1974). In agreeing with the plaintiffs, they wrote:

There is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education.

Importantly, the ruling did not require bilingual education:

No specific remedy is urged upon us. Teaching English to the students of Chinese ancestry who do not speak the language is one choice. Giving instructions to this group in Chinese is another. There may be others. Petitioners ask only that the Board of Education be directed to apply its expertise to the problem and rectify the situation.

In response to this ruling, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued a set of proposed remedies (known as the Lau remedies) to be used by its Office for Civil Rights to negotiate compliance plans with school districts that did not provide special programs for English-language learners, and thus were in violation of Lau. These proposed remedies required the provision of transitional bilingual education in most instances and went beyond the literal interpretation of the Lau decision with respect to specific remedies.

The recommendations of the Lau remedies found three types of programs acceptable. We quote (excerpted in Baker and de Kanter, 1983:221):

(1)

Bilingual/Bicultural Program. A program which utilizes the student's native language (example: Navajo) and cultural factors in instructing, maintaining and further developing all the necessary skills in the student's native language and culture while introducing, maintaining, and developing all the necessary skills in the second language and culture (example: English). The end result is a student who can function, totally, in both languages and cultures.

(2)

Multilingual/Multicultural Program. A program operated under the same principles as a Bilingual/Bicultural Program except that more than one language and culture, in addition to English language and culture is treated. The end

2This action by Massachusetts was followed by similar actions by Alaska and California (1972); Arizona, Illinois, New Mexico, and Texas (1973); Michigan, New York, and Rhode Island (1974); Colorado, Louisiana, New Jersey, and Wisconsin (1975); Indiana (1976); Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, and Utah (1977); and Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, and Washington (1979). California's state law was allowed to "sunset" in 1987.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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result is a student who can function, totally, in more than two languages and cultures.

(3)

Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE). A program operated in the same manner as a Bilingual/Bicultural Program, except that once the student is fully functional in the second language (English), further instruction in the native language is no longer required.

English as a second language (ESL), which the Lau remedies defined as "a structured language acquisition program designed to teach English to students whose native language is not English," was not considered appropriate "because an ESL program does not consider the affective nor cognitive development of students."3

The policy debate in the education of English-language learners in the early years of Title VII and the post-Lau period of the 1970s thus came to be defined in terms of how aggressively to pursue the use of the native language. The 1970s saw the active pursuit of bilingual and even bicultural education in both Congress and the courts and an administration eager to press for bilingualism (e.g., Gaarder, 1967). The first reauthorization in 1974 dropped the poverty criterion for eligibility and required schools to include instruction in the native language and culture. As noted earlier, many states followed suit by passing bilingual education laws that were modeled on Massachusetts law and on Lau, both of which set a specified number of students that would trigger a requirement for the provision of bilingual instruction.

Around this time a series of evaluations began, comparing different methods of instruction for English-language learners. The first major event was the release of a study by the American Institutes for Research, challenging the effectiveness of bilingual education as compared with "sink-or-swim" situations for these students (Dannoff, 1978; see also Chapters 3 and 6 in this volume). Nonetheless, during the late 1970s the federal government settled into a policy of transitional bilingual education, rejecting English immersion on the one hand and the maintenance of non-English languages on the other. Much of the subsequent politics of language instruction for English-language learners can be seen as efforts to change that policy, and much of the research of the next two decades has been generated and interpreted through this lens. Despite the government's repeated statements that the purpose of bilingual education was the transition to English, opponents saw bilingual education as a force for language pluralism the maintenance of non-English languages.

If the 1970s was a period of advancement for proponents of instruction through the native language, the 1980s was one of hurried retreat. The Lau remedies, requiring native-language instruction, were broadly used by the Office

3Elaboration and discussion of the uses of the Lau remedies can be found in Crawford (1995) and in Birman and Ginsburg (1983).

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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for Civil Rights in negotiating with local school districts, but they had never been set in regulations. They were finally proposed as regulations in 1980 during the final months of the Carter administration and prior to President Carter's electoral loss to Ronald Reagan that same year. The proposed regulations were withdrawn early the next year by the Reagan administration for being "harsh, inflexible, burdensome, unworkable, and incredibly costly…an intrusion on state and local responsibility" (Education Secretary Terrel Bell, cited in Crawford, 1995:53).

Title VII also came under stern criticism for its requirement of native-language use. President Reagan took time to depart from his prepared address to a group of mayors:

It is absolutely wrong and against American concept [sic] to have a bilingual education program that is now openly, admittedly dedicated to preserving their native language and never getting them adequate in English so they can go out into the job market (New York Times, March 3, 1981).

Secretary of Education William Bennett found much to attack in Title VII, specifically the restrictions on the proportion of funding for Special Alternative Instructional Programs, which do not use the native language. According to the Director of the Office of Bilingual Education at the time, Alicia Coro (personal communication), flexibility was needed because many school districts did not have the resources to provide native-language instruction for students from a myriad of backgrounds; ESL instruction was a more practical approach. The 1984 reauthorization had placed a cap on Special Alternative Instructional Programs of 4 percent of total program spending in Title VII. In a well-noted address in 1985, Bennett summed it up as follows:

This, then, is where we stand: After seventeen years of federal involvement, and after $1.7 billion of federal funding, we have no evidence that the children whom we sought to help—that the children who deserve our help—have benefitted. And we have the testimony of an original sponsor of the Bilingual Education Act, Congressman James Scheuer of New York, that the Bilingual Education Act's original purposes were perverted and politicized; that instead of helping students learn English, the English has been sort of thinned out and stretched out and in many cases banished into the mists and all of the courses tended to be taught in Spanish [sic]. That was not the original intent of the program (U.S. Department of Education, 1985).

Following a vigorous legislative battle in which proponents of bilingual education tried to maintain the existing cap on Special Alternative Instructional Programs, the cap was increased from 4 to 25 percent in the 1988 reauthorization (Section 7002(b)(3) of Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended in 1988).

The shift in Congress from mandating of bilingual programs to increased acceptance of English-only programs has continued to this day. In the most recent reauthorization in 1994, the 25 percent cap was retained, but with a special

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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provision for exceeding it if a grant applicant shows bilingual education to be infeasible because of the diversity of native languages or if bilingual teachers are not available despite documented efforts. At the state level, California allowed its aggressive state bilingual education law to sunset in 1987. Although no other states have allowed their bilingual education laws to lapse, these laws continue to generate controversy in state legislatures, most recently in states such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Connecticut.

With the erosion of the position of bilingual education advocates in Congress in the 1980s, as well as the decreased enforcement of Lau by the Department of Education, an important court decision emerged on the definition of what it means for a school to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional programs. In this decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals offered an interpretation of Section 1703(f) of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, which referred to appropriate action. Castaneda v. Pickard (648 F.2d 989, 1006-07, 5th Cir. 1981) is the leading case that establishes a school district's obligations. It requires that (1) the program pursued by the district be informed by an educational theory recognized as sound by some experts in the field, or at least deemed a legitimate educational strategy; (2) the program and practices actually used by the school system be reasonably calculated to implement that theory effectively; and (3) a school's program, although premised on sound educational theory and effectively implemented, produce results indicating that the language barriers confronting students are actually being overcome. Other court cases, including Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1 (576 F. Supp. at 1519) and Teresa P. v. Berkeley Unified School District (724 F. Supp. 698, 716 N.D. Cal. 1989), have dealt with requirements for serving English-language learners under the Equal Education Opportunities Act, and in their interpretation have used Castaneda as a persuasive precedent (see August and Garcia, 1988). Castaneda is notable from the perspective of this report because of the burden it places on programs that they be informed by educational theory and the evidence upon which they are based (see Chapter 6).

The final leg of the history that brings us up to date begins with the national education reform movement that was punctuated most prominently by the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education) and the 1989 Education Summit in Charlottesville. The call to arms by the nation's governors (led by then-Governor Clinton) and President Bush led to a characterization of the entire national student body, not just particular groups of students, as being at risk. There was an ensuing call for explicit education goals, standards, and accountability, generically referred to as standards-based reform (see Chapter 5), to make the United States competitive in a global economy. Standards-based reform continues to define the debate over reform to this day (McLaughlin et al. 1995).

One by-product of these political battles was to strengthen the framework of debate and analysis, which saw the education of English-language learners as a

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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contest between two alternative strategies—some use of the native language versus an English-only approach—whose coherence in practice was illusory (since they were implemented differently in each site), but whose electrical charge in politics was potent. Several influential researchers have bemoaned the inelegance, ineffectiveness, and narrowness of research conducted under such circumstances over the past 20 years and have urged the value of basic research in developing more adequate theory to underlie bilingual education programs (see, e.g., McLaughlin, 1985; Hakuta and Gould, 1987). Many other researchers, of course, have lent their talents and time to the large-scale program evaluation studies that have dominated the agenda (see Chapter 6).

The Bilingual Education Act of 1978 provided, for the first time, funds for a regular program of research on the education of English-language learners. There had been a few individual research projects on bilingual education funded by the old Office of Education and then by the National Institute of Education (NIE), which was established in 1972. But the 1978 legislation directed the Office of Bilingual Education (OBE) to lay out a 5-year plan of research. The law also required that the "Assistant Secretary of Education coordinate research activities of the National Institute of Education, with the Office of Bilingual Education, the National Center for Education Statistics, and other appropriate agencies, in order to develop a national research program for bilingual education (Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as amended 1978, Section 742(a)(3) of Title VII).

In response to this section of the law, and because OBE had no research staff at the time, while various other agencies in the Department of Education had research capacity and responsibilities, the department established a committee to coordinate research efforts on bilingual education department-wide. Named for the section of Title VII that provided the research money, the Part C Coordinating Committee envisioned a situation in which OBE would develop the capacity to fund and monitor research, but would also distribute funds to NIE for research on teaching and learning among English-language learners; to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for data collection and survey efforts; and to the Department's Office of Policy, Budget, and Evaluation (OPBE) for the evaluation of bilingual education programs. The Coordinating Committee was chaired by a representative of the Assistant Secretary for Education; some original members of the committee were Ronald Hall, Leslie Silverman, Katherine Truex, and Lois-Ellen Datta.

For the first time, then, the federal government had created an infrastructure for research on language-minority student education. This infrastructure was a set of resources and institutional arrangements—funds, personnel, and procedures—intended to engage experts in surveying, analyzing, and evaluating the experiences of English-language learners and the programs designed to meet their needs, and thereby to improve practice. Now the ingredients for research-based educational policies existed, at least in theory: bilingual education was a growing feature of local school practice, but programs had very diverse characteristics

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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 aims; bilingual education was becoming a hot debate; and the nation had at least a modest commitment to research in education. Researchers were challenged both to sort out the complexities of programs and results and to provide ammunition for the debates. In retrospect, however, the past 20 years has not been a heyday for research on this topic. Often, despite the existence of a research infrastructure, policy has been driven by the kinds of stereotypes, political preferences, and misconceptions that informed debates on bilingualism in the nineteenth century (see Hakuta, 1986). Nor did the research systematically contribute to improvements in practice, partly because of problems with the research methodology—an overreliance on large-scale evaluations and effective/nominated schools research, as well as faulty and weak mechanisms for oversight of the research enterprise.

The purpose of this appendix is to describe how that infrastructure developed, how well it has worked, and what obstacles have impeded the effective funding of research and evaluation in this field. To some extent, the infrastructure for research related to the education of English-language learners partakes of the inadequacies of education research in general (see Atkinson and Jackson, 1992; Kaestle, 1993; Dershimer, 1976; Sproull et al., 1978). The picture is further complicated by the fact that the infrastructure for education research in general, and for research on these students in particular, is being substantially restructured as we write this report. Issues related to the infrastructure and recommendations for its improvement are addressed in Chapter 10 of this report.

Approach To This Study

Our central interest is in research on children with limited English proficiency and the programs designed to meet their educational needs, including bilingual education. We are also interested, however, in research on bilingualism as a cognitive and social phenomenon and research on language minorities and their relation to American schooling. As a shorthand for this set of concerns, we use the phrases "English-language learners" and "LEP issues" (see the discussion of definitional issues in Chapter 1). When deciding whether to include a given piece of research in our purview, we sometimes included research that specified a target group, such as Asian Americans or Hispanic Americans, having a large proportion of non-native speakers of English, even if the research did not directly address language acquisition; in contrast, we did not include studies that targeted "minority," "inner-city,'' or "disadvantaged" populations unless language was the specific focus. We looked not only at basic, intermediate, and applied research that directly addressed our topics, but also at studies that looked incidentally at language, those that included language as an explanatory variable, and data collection projects that included language variables.

We surveyed all of the federal research agencies that fund a significant amount of research on LEP issues. We gathered background documents on these

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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agencies and, using a standard protocol, conducted interviews with 27 research administrators and others centrally involved in federal education research. We also surveyed the state education agencies for states with a population of English-language learners of 6 percent or more. That standard yielded nine states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, and Texas.4 In telephone interviews, we inquired about their research activities on this subject, using a protocol similar to the one that guided our federal agency interviews. Appendix B provides lists of those interviewed and the protocols used at the federal and state levels. Finally, we surveyed the annual reports of the philanthropic foundations that fund the most research in education, and we tabulated the grants devoted to LEP issues. Appendix C lists the research activities funded at the federal level and by the foundations. Given time and resource constraints, we were not able to assess the research and evaluation activities conducted by school districts, by university researchers working without extramural support, or by researchers who receive funds from sources other than those specified above. Nor were we able to survey and assess the role of professional associations in supporting the research enterprise.

We note that social scientists who study legislative processes and governmental agencies have constructed many theories about how political agendas are established, how laws are passed, and how agencies administer them (commonly cited examples include Kingdon, 1984, on agendas; Weiss, cited in Callahan and Jennings, 1983, on the research-to-policy nexus; and Cyert and March, 1963, for a critique of overly rational models of organizational behavior). It is not our purpose to construct new theories of this sort or to critique existing ones, except to note that the theorists' models, metaphors, and taxonomies for institutional processes are incomplete unless they also take into account human factors such as personality, ambition, and talent. The administration and conduct of research on education in general and the education of English-language learners in particular have been broadly affected by these human factors. Our interviews reflected both dimensions. Participants may not have expressed structural and bureaucratic concerns in the same terms as would theorists, but they voiced concern about the same organizational matters, such as windows of opportunity and instability of leadership. At the same time, they also testified that some successes and some failures are widely perceived as products of the talents, the personalities, and the commitments of the key players. We generally have left out of this account commentary about the participants' personalities; however, we do mention some aspects of ability as collective assets or liabilities of agencies or of the whole infrastructure when they appear to be key determinants of whether the infrastructure produces research effectively.

4We conducted interviews in eight of these nine states; we were unable to establish contact with the state director for Rhode Island.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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The Work Of Federal Research Agencies

This section reviews the history and research on LEP issues of the federal research agencies: the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs (OBEMLA), the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), the Planning and Evaluation Service (PES) within the Office of the Under Secretary of Education, other agencies within the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), and the Department of Defense.

The Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs
(OBEMLA)

This office evolved from the OBE in 1980. It administers the funds for grants to states and districts to conduct programs for English-language learners; from 1980 until 1995, it had a small research office to oversee the Title VII research funds authorized by the Bilingual Education Act. The current appropriation sharply curtails the research functions of OBEMLA. In fiscal year 1996, funds for research as well as professional development were zeroed out.5 For fiscal year 1997, the Secretary is requesting $14.3 million for Support Services (Subpart 2), of which $1.2 million would be for research and studies. Despite the recent cuts, the office has been the principal source of funds for research on LEP issues (through the bilingual education appropriation), so it requires fairly extensive attention in this chapter. To some observers, OBEMLA seems to have been the lonely advocate for research and data gathering on these issues; to others it has seemed a problem, a program agency lacking adequate staff to administer and monitor first-rate research.

The 1978 reauthorization of Title VII quadrupled the amount of money authorized for research (to $20 million), required evaluation components for all Title VII grants, and set some directions for research (Castellano, 1983).6 Congress called for efforts to discover effective models for bilingual education; to study language acquisition; to mount a longitudinal study of the effects of bilingual education; to study means of identifying eligible students; to study teacher training, as well as supply and demand; to examine inservice programs funded by

5However, the department is asking for reprogramming of funds to enable the Benchmarks study to continue. If granted, this will be the only research funded in fiscal year 1996. This is permissible because of report language in the appropriations bill allowing the department to request reprogramming of funds within the account.

6It should be noted that there is usually a discrepancy between what amount of funding is authorized and what is appropriated. For example, the amount authorized for Title VII in 1980 was $300 million, but Congress appropriated $167 million.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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Title VII; and to study the cultural characteristics of various groups that should be integrated into the bilingual/bicultural education curriculum (Liebowitz, 1980).

The Part C Coordinating Committee was now in a position to develop and implement a substantial research program and to influence the attention given to language issues by other offices in the Office of Education (Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) that conducted research. With a budget of approximately $5.28 million per year, OBE planned to support about 20 new and continuing evaluation and research studies per year (Gilbert N. Garcia, personal communication). The agency summarized the Congressional agenda under three concerns: needs assessment (how many English-language learners, bilingual teachers, resources, program types); effectiveness (what programs are best, how to evaluate programs); and management of programs (how to meet legal requirements and determine success) (Kaestle, 1992). This research agenda was focused on very practical matters, such as program surveys and needs inventories.

Beginning in late 1980, the Director of OBE chaired the Part C Coordinating Committee,7 although in practice that role was delegated to Ronald Hall, chief of the policy unit at OBE, and to OBE research analysts Gilbert N. Garcia and Dorothy Waggoner. While still chaired by the Assistant Secretary, the committee had developed a 5-year research plan for the 1978-1983 period (dated July 1979). The projects in the plan included a survey of teacher supply and demand, a study called Significant Bilingual Instructional Features, a project on the development of evaluation and data-gathering instruments, a study on the need for bilingual education in Puerto Rico, a study of parental involvement in Title VII programs, partial support for the High School and Beyond Study, and a study to devise a way of using 1980 census data to estimate the number of English-language learners in the nation. The plan also included an effort to develop and disseminate instructional models.

Garcia (personal communication) says the Part C Coordinating Committee worked well in some regards, at least in the early years. He adds that "the existence of an interagency committee to coordinate research on English-language learners and the development of a 5-year research plan were unprecedented and helped influence and advance policy." The committee enabled some high-quality research to be assigned to NIE, OPBE, and NCES through memoranda of understanding that spelled out the responsibilities of the offices managing the assigned work. Research administrators from those agencies sometimes discussed the construction of survey items for their projects in committee meetings. With Part C Coordinating Committee funds, the scope of important NCES studies, such as High School and Beyond, was expanded. Funds were used by the Census Bureau to create and apply the first census questions on language use in the United States. Garcia also points out some OBE successes in raising the

7Before 1980, the committee was chaired by the Assistant Secretary for Education.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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visibility of language research issues. Both NIE, in its annual Condition of Education, and OPBE, in its annual reports, began including sections on LEP issues in the early 1980s. OBE also produced Condition of Bilingual Education reports in 1981 and 1983, which in part reported on research findings.

Before Garcia left OBE, he began working on a second 5-year plan for research, although he himself says it suffered from the absence of a conceptual framework and a lack of leadership at the agency. Starting around this time and extending into the second 5-year period (1984-1989) were such projects as the National Longitudinal Evaluation of the Effectivemess of Services for Language Minority Limited English Proficient Students (Longitudinal Study), the Longitudinal Study of Immersion and Dual Language Instructional Programs for Language Minority Children (Immersion Study), a Teacher Language Skills Survey, research on educational technologies in bilingual education, a study of Effective Approaches to In-Service Staff Development, and a feasibility study for a possible LEP supplement to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

During this period, a policy unit for Research and Evaluation was created within OBE. However, Secretary Terrel Bell disbanded the Part C Coordinating Committee on June 14, 1984. According to an original member of the committee, John Chapman, the committee was disbanded because OBEMLA Director Jesse Soriano asserted that it was simply advisory and that he would make final decisions. This position ran counter to policy formulated by the presidential transition team in 1980, which had debated the issue of how the committee would operate when there was no longer an Assistant Secretary of Education. Their conclusion was that while the Director of OBEMLA would chair the committee, it would operate on a consensus basis; OBEMLA would not have veto authority over committee decisions (memorandum from Terrel Bell to Gary Bauer and Jesse Soriano, June 14, 1984; memorandum from Jesse Soriano to Part C Coordinating Committee principals, December 6, 1983).

The committee had accomplished some constructive work in its early days precisely because most of OBE's research money was being given to organizations such as NIE, OPBE, and NCES, so the research administrators from those offices were very willing to participate. According to Garcia, the committee was also successful because it had a research plan, and staff members got along well with each other. Even in the early days, however, there were tensions. They arose from three sources: simple competition among the agencies, different viewpoints on how English-language learners should be educated and programs evaluated, and a growing conviction among those outside OBE (particularly among officials at OPBE) that OBE did not have the experience and talent to fund and monitor first-rate research. Garcia (personal communication) adds that "things broke down" because subsequent OBE/OBEMLA directors did not understand research, OPBE wanted to prove that OBE/OBEMLA "didn't work," and OBE/OBEMLA staff had little support from bilingual education practitioners in the field. These strands of tension became intertwined in the increasingly

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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contentious relations between OBEMLA and OPBE. The subsequent director of OBEMLA's research office was Edward Fuentes, who came to OBEMLA from OPBE in 1985 and stayed until 1989. Now that OBEMLA had a research capacity (at least on paper), its officials decided that more of the research should be administered in house. This had the side-effect of exacerbating existing tensions between PES and OBEMLA. We address the issue of coordination across agencies in detail in Chapter 10, but the struggles on the Part C Coordinating Committee and subsequently between PES and OBEMLA were so fateful for OBEMLA that they must be discussed here as context.

Garcia welcomed NIE's attempts on the early Part C Coordinating Committee to delegate some research money for basic research, in contrast to the very practical concerns of Congress and OBE. He was less positive about the methodological stance of OPBE on evaluation, which he considered rigid and traditional (interview of Garcia by Kaestle, 1991, in the National Research Council [NRC] project archived at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University). When bilingual education became highly controversial in the mid-1980s, the research on its effectiveness also became controversial, and the tensions that already existed on the Part C Coordinating Committee provided the backdrop for an OBEMLA defeat at the hands of OPBE.

Soon after he arrived at OBEMLA, Fuentes concluded that there was insufficient accountability and monitoring of the projects farmed out to other agencies; too many were delayed and not producing the "deliverable" reports required in their grants. So he decided both to get tougher about monitoring tardy contractors and to begin producing Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for work to be administered within OBEMLA. With millions of dollars potentially moving from the other agencies back to studies contracted and monitored by OBEMLA, tensions mounted (interview of Fuentes by Kaestle, 1991, in the NRC project archived at the Hoover Institution; see Kaestle, 1992). For a few years, Fuentes was protected by the Director of OBEMLA, but the director changed, and around late 1988 or early 1989, Fuentes was summoned by the Deputy Under Secretary for Planning, Budget, and Evaluation, Bruce Carnes, and told that anything relating to evaluation had to be approved by OPBE and that OPBE would decide which OBEMLA-proposed projects were research or evaluation. Fuentes was also told that anything with potential policy implications had to have OPBE approval. Fuentes felt that any research has potential policy implications, and thus virtually any OBEMLA research project would have to be cleared by OPBE. As a result he resigned.

From this point on, the research funds for bilingual education were virtually controlled by Alan Ginsburg, head of OPBE. The reputation of OBEMLA as a weak agency for research had become entrenched in an administration that was skeptical about the value of bilingual instruction and favored the kind of evaluation studies that had come from OPBE, challenging the superiority of bilingual education in contrast to other ways of responding to English-language learners

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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(Hakuta, 1986; Meyer and Fienberg, 1992). Early in this era of research on bilingual education, OPBE had sponsored a highly publicized report by the American Institutes for Research, challenging the effectiveness of transitional bilingual education programs (Dannoff, 1978). Then, early in the first Reagan administration, OPBE staff produced a review of the evidence, arguing again that the effectiveness of bilingual education was not supported by research (Baker and de Kanter, 1981; Willig, 1981-1982; McLaughlin, 1985). Two other large-scale studies initiated by the Part C Coordinating Committee in 1982-1983 reflected the dominance of OPBE in administering Title VII funds: the National Longitudinal Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Services for Language Minority Limited English Proficient Students (Longitudinal Study) and the Longitudinal Study of Immersion and Dual Language Instructional Programs for Language Minority Children (Immersion Study). These two studies established the "horse-race" framework for research on bilingual education; their results were hotly debated but inconclusive (Burkheimer, Jr. et al., 1989; Ramirez et al., 1991; Meyer and Fienberg, 1992). (These studies are reviewed in Chapter 6).

What are the implications of this history for the research infrastructure? First, the politics of immigration and language diversity and sharply differing views of American pluralism shaped the politics of the education of English-language learners, and the politics shaped Congressional legislation, administration policy, and interagency conflict over research related to these students. Second, efforts at coordination and collaboration that look good in principle cannot survive when the politics of research are as intense as they are on this topic. Various attempts to insulate education research from politics, such as the creation of the NIE, have proved ineffective. The health institutes (and NSF, with a few exceptions) have succeeded better at this than have education agencies. In our recommendations in Chapter 10, we address what structures might best promote a program of dispassionate, basic research that could survive alongside the directly applied research and evaluation that is necessarily shaped by current policy and programs.

Most recent federally funded research on LEP issues conducted outside the OERI-funded research centers has been aimed at assessing program effectiveness. The Bilingual Education Act, as reauthorized in 1988, provided for a program of research that continued into the Bush administration, and this program fell largely under the control of OPBE. From 1988 to 1990, about $2.6 million per year was expended on research and evaluation.8 In addition to the two big comparisons of instructional techniques—the Longitudinal Study (completed in 1990) and the Immersion Study (completed in 1991)—other studies included an evaluation of Title VII evaluation assistance centers, contracted to

8Note that OBEMLA did not have the authority to give out grants, so most of the research it funded was through contracts.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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Atlantic Resources Corporation; a set of case studies on effective migrant education practices, conducted by Development Associates; a study by Westat of how Chapter 1 services impact English-language learners; the augmentation of various surveys with English-language learner samples, funded by OBEMLA (the Congressionally mandated Prospects study on the long-term effects of Chapter 1, the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 [NELS:88], the Schools and Staffing Survey conducted by NCES); and other studies (U.S. Department of Education, 1991). The full list of these projects reveals the status of Title VII research during the Bush administration: there was more evaluation than other research, and many resources were devoted to program effectiveness questions, shaped largely by OPBE and conducted primarily by contract research organizations.

It is not our task here to assess the quality of the research produced, but its uses and reputation are germane to understanding the weakness of the research infrastructure. After an expenditure of about $5 million a year, was practice influenced by research? Was there consensus on some matters that pertained to policy? To a great extent, of course, policy was argued and determined in the same mode as a century earlier—by cultural preference, political interest, and anecdote. But this was not unique to the topic of bilingual education. (On the weakness of the research-policy connection, see Weiss, cited in Callahan and Jennings, 1983; Lynn, Jr., 1978; Lindblom, 1990; and Weiss with Bucuvalas, 1980.) Nonetheless, Gilbert N. Garcia (personal communication) made a telling point when he remarked that even within OBEMLA, officials who worked in Title VII program administration were either unaware of research results produced in OBEMLA studies or unclear about their implications.

An even more discouraging conclusion was reached in 1992 by John Chapman (1992), a budget analyst in the Department of Education's Office of the Under Secretary. He determined that 91 research or evaluation studies had been funded with $47 million of Title VII money during the period 1980 to 1991, that is, approximately from the beginning of OBE's Title VII research efforts to the end of the Bush administration. He found that he could not review 40 of the 91 completed studies because no final reports remained. Most of the missing studies were smaller ones, totaling $4.7 million in support. Apparently, OBEMLA officials discarded all research files for the period 1978 to 1985—an implicit comment on their view of the value of cumulative research. Chapman reviewed 48 of the remaining 51 studies; he judged that 29 might be useful for policy formulation. Of these Chapman described 12 large-scale policy-relevant studies, 4 from each of the three supervising agencies—OBEMLA, OERI, and PES. His verdicts range from studies that were quite useful to others whose findings were severely limited by methodological flaws. If Chapman's selection of OBEMLA's four projects is itself representative, one would conclude that its attempts to mount large-scale in-house program evaluation studies had at best mixed success (see Chapter 6).

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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During the Clinton administration, OBEMLA was reorganized in conjunction with the federal government's restructuring effort. The research office was discontinued; the funding of research became a "team" effort (Eugene Garcia, personal communication, and OBEMLA's restructuring plan). As of 1993, the Office of Policy and Planning (OPP) (successor to the Office of Planning, Budget, and Evaluation in which PES was located) still had de facto control of the Title VII research funds (Campoverde, 1993).9 During the next year, there were continuing discussions about the relative prerogatives and responsibilities of OBEMLA and OPP in conducting bilingual education research. There was some sentiment in favor of reviving the Part C Coordinating Committee, but OBEMLA's incoming director, Eugene Garcia, chose instead to emphasize continuing negotiations with the Assistant Secretary for OERI and the Under Secretary of Education to restore more OBEMLA control. Thus the Part C Coordinating Committee died with the change in administration (Valena Plisko, personal communication).

Meanwhile, OBEMLA continued to administer Title VII funds for research and evaluation, despite its subordination to OPP for approval of projects. Gilbert N. Garcia, Acting Director of Research, produced a framework for Title VII research. It included extensive plans for fiscal year 1994, reviewed Title VII research completed from 1991 to 1993, and attempted to project plans for new research under the reorganized agency (G. Garcia, 1994). Completed projects are included in the lists in Appendix C. Between 1991 and 1995, virtually all of this research fell into the categories of program surveys (for example, a Descriptive Study of Content-ESL Practices), program evaluations (for example, the Evaluation of Title VII Education Personnel Training Program, the Benchmark study), and LEP supplements to major data collection projects (for example, NELS:88).

In addition, considerable funds were expended for Small Business Innovation Research and the Special Issues Analysis Center. The Small Business Innovation Research program is intended to stimulate technological innovation in the private sector, strengthen the role of small business in meeting federal research and development needs, increase the commercial application of Department of Education-supported research results, and improve the return on investment from federally funded research aimed at providing economic and social benefits to the nation. Firms with strong research capabilities in science, engineering, or educational technology are encouraged to participate. The Special Issues Analysis Center, most recently located at Development Associates, Inc., provided three types of technical support to OBEMLA: the creation of databases on Title VII local and state grantees; the provision of advice on information collection and use; and, in response to a series of task orders, the preparation of special reports

9According to Valena Plisko, the name of the office in which the Policy and Evaluation Service is located has changed over time from the Office of Planning, Budget and Evaluation (OPBE) to the Office of Policy and Planning (OPP) and is now the Office of the Under Secretary.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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(e.g., numbers and characteristics of English-language learners in the United States, use of information technology in language assessment), literature reviews (e.g., review of Department of Education-funded studies on English-language learners), and graphic materials, as well as the convening of panels of experts.

By definition, all of OBEMLA's research and evaluation deals with LEP issues. We now turn to agencies whose topical agenda is much broader. We are interested in the circumstances under which they conduct research on LEP issues and in their procedures for setting agendas and selecting and monitoring research. LEP issues may be urged upon these agencies by OBEMLA, Congress, or other external agencies; such issues may arise as the agencies address other educational questions; or LEP variables may be included incidentally in surveys or as explanatory variables in studies. The first of these agencies, OERI, is the Department of Education's main research arm. It addresses LEP issues in several ways; indeed, it has funded entire centers devoted to second-language learning, sometimes with moneys from Title VII and sometimes from its own research budget.

The Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI)

Created when the Department of Education was formed in 1980, OERI absorbed the functions of NIE, such as the research centers, in 1985. OERI has three major functions that involve research on issues pertaining to English-language learners and bilingual education: first, research conducted by the Office of Research until 1995 and now carried out by the five OERI institutes; second, surveys and analyses performed by NCES, located within OERI; and third, the research, development, and dissemination activities of the regional education laboratories, now supervised by the Office of Reform Assistance and Dissemination (ORAD). The research conducted by the Office of Research fell into two main categories: grants to create and maintain research centers and grants to carry out field-initiated proposals by individuals. The overwhelming majority of funds has gone to the centers, and the relative lack of funds to field-initiated studies is a recurring theme in discussions about the infrastructure of educational research (e.g., Atkinson and Jackson, 1992; see also Chapter 10). The same situation exists for OERI-sponsored research specifically on language issues; there has been little money for field-initiated studies, and most of the attention has been focused on research centers devoted wholly or in part to language diversity issues. For fiscal year 1997, 20 percent of OERI research funds has been allocated to field-initiated research, and 25 percent is expected to be earmarked in fiscal year 1998.

Research Funded by the OERI Research Centers

We examined the list of projects in all of OERI's research centers as of March 1995 (U.S. Department of Education, 1995). As of that date, there were 20 centers, listing approximately 277 projects. Of these, 40 projects related to

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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LEP issues. Of these 40 projects, 17 were in a single center—the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning at Santa Cruz—which was devoted mainly to such issues. The remaining 23 projects on LEP issues were scattered among 10 centers (9 centers listed no such projects) (see Appendix C for a complete list). The contrast between the research done by the OERI research centers on the one hand and Title VII research conducted by OBEMLA, PES, or NCES on the others is dramatic: the center projects, which are funded by grants (rather than contracts), are smaller, often more qualitative in methodology, more complex conceptually, and less given to surveys and quantitative analysis.

We turn now to the studies on LEP issues funded by the four successive OERI research centers that over the years have been devoted mainly to these issues, and then to the studies of the center focused on at-risk students—the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR). The former four centers were, first, from 1979 to 1984, the National Center for Bilingual Research (NCBR), located at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory; second, from 1985 to 1989, the Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR), located at UCLA; third, from 1990 to 1995, the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning (NCRCDSLL), located at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UC-Santa Cruz); and finally, the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence (CREDE), the center contract just awarded, again to UC-Santa Cruz.

The National Center for Bilingual Research (NCBR) This center grant was awarded to one of the regional laboratories established by OERI's predecessor agency, NIE. The creation of such a center had been advocated by Tomas Arciniega, a member of the National Council on Education Research (NIE's policy board) and the dean of education at California State-San Diego, who wanted to see bilingual education issues addressed at NIE. NIE had some research depth on language issues, with Michael O'Malley heading the section on language and Sylvia Scribner heading teaching and learning. Both were accomplished researchers. Others working on the RFP, either at NIE or as consultants, included Ramsey Selden, Richard Duran, Monte Penne, and Ricardo Martinez. However, the first director of the new center, Candido de Leon, was not himself a researcher, and the emphasis at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, as in all of the regional laboratories, had always been on development and technical assistance more than on research.

After the first year of operation, NIE officials appointed a panel to review the center's work. The panel members were not satisfied with the first year's work and decided to change the directorship. Amado Padilla, a psychologist from UCLA with a strong research record, became the new director. The concern at NIE was to bring research on bilingual education more into contact with developments in general education research. When Padilla arrived at NCBR, many projects were in motion, and most of the staff for those projects were not experienced

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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researchers. One of the big projects was an attempt to survey and inventory English-language learners, which Padilla said took up a great deal of effort and money and yielded little knowledge. NCBR did another survey of how states were classifying English-language learners and a survey of the High School and Beyond data to see who these students were (Amado Padilla, personal communication). Unlike later centers, which recruited researchers and projects from various universities, NCBR did most of its work in house, although one project, on attitudes toward bilingual education, was contracted to David Sears at UCLA.

During the crucial first 5 years of substantial Title VII funding for research on bilingual education, then, neither OBEMLA nor NCBR was positioned to solicit, select, and monitor first-rate research on this topic. The fledgling infrastructure would not develop a strong reputation.

Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR) In 1984, a new RFP was issued for an OERI center on language research. Amado Padilla collaborated with Richard Tucker to form a center that would be located mostly at UCLA and the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C, with subcontracts to some well-known researchers at other locations. Padilla was codirector for 3 years with Russell Campbell of UCLA; when Padilla went to Stanford, the center was directed by Campbell for another year, under reduced funding. Funding was terminated at the end of the fourth year, a year earlier than originally scheduled. This center had a team of more-experienced researchers than NCBR, with research projects scattered across many school districts in the United States. Their agenda was specified in eight task statements of the RFP. The center's research mission included second-language learning by native speakers of English. About one-third of its effort was in this language majority area; of that, about half was in research and about half in professional development. The projects located at the Center for Applied Linguistics, under the direction of Tucker, included a systematic 5 percent national sample of students' participation in foreign-language instruction, the development of an assessment instrument for English oral language proficiency, professional development projects in several public school districts across the country, and a project on how to integrate language and content in science for English-language learners (Richard Tucker, personal communication). At UCLA there were several projects: Russell Campbell and Kathryn Lindholm worked on language conservation efforts (for example, among the Korean community in Los Angeles), Lindholm did a project on two-way immersion programs in the Santa Monica area, Campbell looked at a Spanish immersion program in Culver City, Ann Snow studied sheltered instruction, Concepcion Valadez developed a language assessment center for new students in the Montebello school district, and Evelyn Hatch analyzed ''scaffolding"10 in classroom

10The term "scaffolding" denotes methods to help make English more comprehensible to English-language learners by, for example, providing more context.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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discourse between teachers and English-language learners. There were also three subcontracts to other universities: at Yale, Kenji Hakuta was funded to work in the New Haven schools on the cross-language transfer of skills and the efficacy of young children as translators; Catherine Snow of Harvard worked on transfer of abilities across languages, using the distinction between contextualized and decontextualized abilities; and Richard Duran of UC-Santa Barbara had a project on reading and processing skills among adult university English-language learners (Amado Padilla and Richard Tucker, personal communication). (See Appendix C for a complete list of CLEAR projects.)

As noted above, OERI terminated CLEAR a year early, in 1989. While the center had a stronger repertoire of projects than its predecessor, elements of personality and politics came into play in this decision. OERI's Assistant Secretary, a close advisor to Secretary William Bennett, was Chester ("Checker") Finn; neither Finn nor Bennett nor Sally Kilgore, director of the Office of Research, was sympathetic to bilingual education, and they were thus skeptical of research on the subject. As President of the Center for Applied Linguistics, Tucker was in Washington and participated in several meetings to address the issues. In one case, the OERI team argued that sufficient research was being done on bilingual education by such agencies as the Army Research Institute and the Office of Naval Research; Tucker and CLEAR staff arranged to testify to a subcommittee chaired by Representative Major Owens that this research was related only tangentially to the needs of English-language learners in grades K-12. Yet despite some work that Tucker thought was first-rate and subsequently appeared in prominent journals, CLEAR closed its doors under adverse circumstances, in a tense relationship with its sponsoring agency. Bilingual education research had become as politicized as it was ever to be. With OBEMLA's research function virtually in receivership and CLEAR terminated, there was little left of the infrastructure for research on LEP issues. No center on language issues appeared on OERI's initial list of new centers. However, public commentary on the list forced the issue, and an RFP for a new center on language was developed.

National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning (NCRCDSLL) NCRCDSLL at UC Santa Cruz, the third OERI center to deal with LEP issues, began in 1991 with 18 projects. Its agenda was shaped by a framework of Vygotskyan psychology11 and ethnographic approaches to

11According to Vygotskyan theory, the developmental level of a child is identified by what the child can do alone. What the child can do with the assistance of another defines what Vygotsky calls the "zone of proximal development." Distinguishing the proximal zone from the developmental level by contrasting assisted versus unassisted performance has profound implications for educational practice. In Vygotskyan terms, teaching is good only when it "awakens and rouses to life those functions which are in a stage of maturing, which lie in the zone of proximal development" (Tharp and Gallimore, 1991).

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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classrooms and families; its project selection was influenced by the existence of a network of researchers in the University of California system called the Linguistic Minority Research Project (Barry McLaughlin, personal communication). The center's budget ranged from $.75 to 1.5 million per year according to codirector Barry McLaughlin, typical of the OERI centers of the 1980s. Most of the projects were conducted by researchers at University of California campuses; one project was in Boston, one at Arizona, and three at the Center for Applied Linguistics (see Appendix C for a list of NCRCDSLL research reports).

NCRCDSLL completed its work in 1995 and geared up to compete for the new center on language research.

Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence (CREDE) As noted earlier, under the new structure mandated in the 1994 reauthorization of OERI, the agency has five institutes, each devoted to research, development, technical assistance, and dissemination in a single, broad area of educational practice. Each of these institutes conducts programs of research through targeted RFPs, open field-initiated studies, and the establishment and monitoring of research and development centers. The National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students conducted a competition for a center on Meeting the Educational Needs of a Diverse Student Population, and this competition was won by the group at Santa Cruz. At a fiscal year 1996 budget of $3.9 million a year and similar projected amounts for the next 4 years, the new center's budget is about three times that of its Santa Cruz predecessor, though its agenda is also broader. The new center will have partners at 19 other sites, a number of them University of California and California State University campuses, studying not only English-language learners, but also other students at risk for reasons of poverty, geographic isolation, and race (Education Week, February 14, 1996). As part of its work, CREDE will conduct projects under six programmatic strands: (1) national quantitative studies will measure demographic shifts in student populations; (2) research on language-learning opportunities will highlight exemplary programmatic choices; (3) effective professional development practices for teachers, paraprofessionals, and principals will be explored; (4) the influence and interaction of family, peers, and community with regard to the education of linguistically and culturally diverse students will be explored; (5) the instruction of these students in different content areas, such as science and math, will be examined; and (6) successful school reform initiatives will be identified.

Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) This center is a collaboration of Johns Hopkins and Howard universities, with subcontracts at ten other locations. With a budget of $4.7 million a year, it is the largest OERI center ever launched, and in that sense it is the showcase for the concept of the institutes; its large budget allows it to combine basic research with extensive dissemination, training, and program development activities. Of its 47

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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projects, 7 involve language issues, including several of the subcontracts. Richard Duran at UC-Santa Barbara, Kris Gutierrez at UCLA, Judith Marquez in Houston, and Grayson Noley in Arizona are each working on some aspect of LEP or language-minority issues. One of the centerpieces of the Johns Hopkins work, the Success for All program pioneered by director Robert Slavin, now has a program designed specifically for English-language learners, both in English and in a Spanish-language version developed by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Nonetheless, the amount of CRESPAR research devoted to language minority and LEP issues is modest.

OERI Field-Initiated Studies

The Office of Research and now the new institutes have funded a modicum of field-initiated research. These studies tend to be small scale and thus usually focus on a single group or site. We surveyed the lists for fiscal years 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1994 (U.S. Department of Education, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995). In fiscal year 1990, 4 of 12 projects funded addressed English-language learners. One looked at immigrant students in San Diego, another at gifted students among Pueblo Indians, another at first-generation Mexican immigrant high school students, and another at the education of Indochinese immigrants. The budgets of these studies ranged from $54,000 to $74,000. Of the 17 projects funded in fiscal year 1991, 3 were about LEP issues: a continuation of the gifted Pueblo student study, an action research project that gathered data on all language-minority students in four school districts, and a study of science teaching in ESL programs. In fiscal year 1993, OERI funded 11 field-initiated projects, of which 1 involved LEP issues obliquely—a study of decisions about postsecondary training and success among the children of migrant farmworkers. In fiscal year 1994, 1 of 10 funded projects dealt with non-English-language issues; it was a study of the choice of language used in Mexican American homes.

Because of their small scale, these projects, like the individual work within the research centers, do not fit the framework established by some government officials that relates massive program assessments to the politics of bilingual education programs. By their very nature, such studies are diverse in their methodologies and complex. Unlike the work of PES or NCES, their focus is not on evaluation or population estimates. They have a mix of goals that makes their mission more difficult to evaluate. In addition, some of the knowledge generated has been of more interest to the researchers than to practitioners. OERI needs to find better ways of improving the quality of its small-scale research. Under the new authorization, field-initiated grants are closely tied to the institutes. This should help OERI staff monitor the quality of the research.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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Other OERI Studies

In addition to the work of the centers and the modest portfolio of field-initiated studies, OERI sponsored some research on LEP issues with Title VII funds transferred from OBEMLA. Chapman (1992) examines a selection of these in his review of the Title VII research. From 1980 to 1991, OERI administered 27 percent of Title VII research funds, or $11.2 million. Much of this money went to NCES to include language-minority and/or LEP variables in major data surveys. That operation is discussed below in the section on NCES. Other OERI projects included the large-scale Significant Bilingual Instructional Features study, contracted to the Far West Laboratory and completed in 1983. This study displayed some of the same weaknesses as OBEMLA's study of Special Alternative Instructional Programs, stemming from the fact that the programs for study were nominated from the field (Chapter 7).

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

NCES is the statistics-gathering agency for the Department of Education. Gathering statistics was the original rationale for a federal role in education, so it is a venerable tradition. School reformers from Henry Barnard (first U.S. Commissioner of Education) to the present have prefaced their proposals for change with data on how the present system operates. NCES was therefore a logical participant in the Part C Coordinating Committee on bilingual education research from its inception. By the 1970s, however, it had become apparent that the statistics operation in education was not up to the standards of such federal statistics agencies as the Census Bureau (see Chapter 9). After an NRC (1986) report and evaluation, the office was strengthened. Increased funding for NCES found favor with Republican administrations in the 1980s, and in the reauthorization of 1988 (Hawkins-Stafford Amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), the head of NCES became a commissioner with a 6-year term. NCES initiates and supervises the creation of many large data sets. Chapter 9 includes a full discussion of its activities and the limitations of its studies vis-à-vis English-language learners.

The Office of Reform Assistance and Dissemination (ORAD)

The regional education laboratories were created in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to complement the university-based research and development centers. The idea was that the centers would focus on cutting-edge research, while the laboratories would focus on dissemination, the development of materials for schools, technical assistance, and other partnerships with practice. Over the years there have usually been 10 regional laboratories, although

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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there are currently 11. From the start, the envisioned collaboration between the centers and the laboratories failed to materialize.

The regional laboratories, then, are largely independent of the centers and carry on a mix of research, development, assistance, and dissemination activities within their regions (for evaluation of the laboratories, see Kaestle, 1992; Vinovskis, 1993; and Turnbull et al., 1994). Various specialties have been developed in the laboratories, depending on their leadership, their staffs, or regional needs. Until 1994, the laboratories were overseen by the Programs for the Improvement of Practice. When the five institutes were created, ORAD was also formed to oversee professional development programs, the National Diffusion Network, and other development and dissemination activities, including the regional laboratories. According to Eve Bither (personal communication), first acting director of the new office, some laboratories have ongoing projects that involve LEP issues; for example, the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory has a Border Colloquy Project attempting to develop common projects in education with Mexican educators, while the Far West Laboratory had a project examining how English-language learners are incorporated into school restructuring efforts.

In the recently completed competition, regional laboratories were required to develop special themes. Three of the funded proposals are for laboratories that will specialize in language and cultural diversity. One these will be in the Northeastern Region (serving New England, New York, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands), hosted by Brown University; another will be in the Southwestern Region, at the current Southwest Educational Development Laboratory in Austin (serving Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and New Mexico); and the third will be in the Pacific Region (serving Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, and the other Pacific islands with U.S. status), located in Honolulu (Education Week, January 10, 1996).

The Planning and Evaluation Service (PES), Office of the
Under Secretary of Education

PES provides program evaluation services and other assistance to the Under Secretary. When it was located in OPBE, it was one of the original participants in the Part C Coordinating Committee, and in that venue became locked in a struggle with OBEMLA as described earlier. The discord continues to the present. Valena Plisko (personal communication), head of PES's elementary and secondary education evaluations, says relations between PES and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, as well as other offices, are generally collaborative and effective, while relations with OBEMLA have been "mixed and at times acrimonious," partly because of personalities and partly because of confusion about OBEMLA's mission. In the end, as we have seen, PES came virtually to control OBEMLA's Title VII research budget, not only having authority to approve

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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almost all of OBEMLA's research projects, but also receiving outright the funds for many projects that PES initiated and monitored. From 1980 to 1991, PES received and monitored about half of the Title VII research funds, totaling $20.6 million (Chapman, 1992). These included the big "horse-race" evaluation studies of effective instructional program types (the Longitudinal and Immersion studies). Yet whatever the merits of PES's views of OBEMLA over the years, it is clear that PES projects on bilingual education did not escape reasonable criticism either (see Chapter 6).

PES's most recent large survey is called Prospects: The Congressionally Mandated Study of Educational Growth and Opportunity. The First Year Report on Language Minority and Limited English Proficient Students (Moss and Puma, 1995) presents descriptive information from the first 2 years of data collection (1991 and 1992) for two of the three cohorts examined in Prospects (the first and third grades), characterizing two groups of students—language-minority students and English-language learners. (See Appendix C for a list of all ongoing Title VII projects in PES.)

The future status of the relationship between PES and OBEMLA around the funding of research on English-language learners is not clear. The reauthorization of OERI calls for the Assistant Secretary, with the guidance of the new National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, to coordinate research across agencies. Secretary Riley (1995) has interpreted this to include evaluation work.

Other Agencies Within the Department of Education

The bulk of funding aimed at research on language-minority and LEP issues has to date been located in OBEMLA, PES, and OERI (including NCES). Many large program areas, such as the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, fund programs (such as Title I) that serve significant numbers of English-language learners. But these offices do not have money designated for research, and some of them (including the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education) use PES for their program evaluation. We interviewed officials at two other offices to see whether they have funded research or evaluation of LEP issues.

The Office of Migrant Education

This office reports to the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education. It administers about $300 million in programs for migrant education, mostly in formula grants to state agencies and in technical assistance. For over 10 years there were three program coordination centers, located geographically in the midst of the three main migrant streams. These centers did some descriptive research. The New York center, for example, looked at migrant dropouts. But the Office of Migrant Education has little or no money for research per se, and its

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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evaluations, funded sparsely, are done by PES. Its modest discretionary money is generally used for conferences or field-initiated program projects (Kristin Gilbert, personal communication).

Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP)

This office is within the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in the Department of Education. Unlike the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services does its own evaluation work, in consultation with PES. Within OSEP, Louis Danielson directs the Division for Innovation and Development, which has a budget of about $20 million a year. Most of that money is loosely in what Danielson calls research, though by statute the research must all be applied. The other four divisions do less research, but together they may bring the total for research and quasi-research activities up to about $50 million (Louis Danielson, personal communication).

The principal legislation governing and funding special education activities at the federal level is called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which may be slated for reauthorization in the 105th Congress. The House bill passed June 11, 1996. Included within the research program is a requirement that the secretary develop a comprehensive plan within 12 months of the bill's enactment. Research priorities within the House bill include projects that advance knowledge about teaching and learning practices and assessment techniques, instruments, and strategies, as well as the development and learning characteristics of children with disabilities; large-scale longitudinal studies; model demonstration projects to apply and test research findings; and projects that apply research and other knowledge to improve educational results by synthesizing useful research, and ensuring that it is in the appropriate format for use and available through various information sources. Both the House and Senate bills authorize level funding.

In the recent past, there has been a substantial budget for applied research special education. Louis Danielson (personal communication) explained that his division funds projects for researchers at three different levels: studies by doctoral students, studies by researchers in their initial career (first 5 years beyond doctorate), and field-initiated research by more senior researchers (grants of up to $180,000 per year). He cited several projects addressing language issues in special education (that is, dealing both with students having limited English proficiency and those having some learning disability requiring that they have an Individual Educational Plan). One such project was Promoting Literacy Through Ecobehavioral Assessment, which addressed both types of students; another examined the perceptions of parents of Hispanic children with learning disabilities; another studied parental involvement and literacy among both types of students; another focused on comprehensive instruction for these students; another studied

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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the transition from school to work for Asian American students with disabilities; and another was a dropout prevention project on Hispanic adolescents with emotional disturbances (for a complete list, see Appendix C). Most of these projects came from field-initiated competitions open to proposals on any topic dealing with special education. In the case of the dropout project, the agency held a competition focusing on that topic.

Previously, the agency held a direct competition for any projects dealing with LEP issues among children with disabilities. This competition provided funds for the selected researchers to meet twice a year; these meetings proved so useful that the researchers applied for and received a grant to continue the meetings for 2 years.

The Division for Innovation and Development also funds some policy research indirectly. For example, it funds forums and focus groups. Among these is the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, which has conducted policy research on the overrepresentation of minorities in special education programs.

It seems, then, that there is some substantial attention to LEP education research issues within the federal infrastructure for research on special education. It may also be noted as an impression of many education policy experts (including, for example, Marshall Smith, the current Under Secretary of Education) that research on special education carried out by the same agency that administers federal programs in the area has been a successful arrangement—more fruitful and less controversial than the case of OBEMLA, for whatever reasons (interview of Marshall Smith by Kaestle, 1991, in the NRC project). To the extent that this is true, the reduction of research funds within OSEP and the transfer of some authority over any future funds to OERI is a dramatic shift.

The National Science Foundation (NSF)

NSF is a federal agency governed by the National Science Board; it is not located within a department. It contains seven major units, called directorates. Six of these are in substantive areas such as engineering and the biological sciences; these directorates fund research and training in those fields. The seventh, called the Directorate on Education and Human Resources, funds research on math and science education in elementary and secondary schools. This directorate's Division on Research, Evaluation, and Communication, with a budget of about $50 million, has major action research projects, such as the Statewide Systemic Initiatives program. About $12 million goes for research and development on the uses of technology in education, $10 million for basic research on teaching and learning math and science, and $2 million per year for the new National Institute on Science Education at the University of Wisconsin. Neither the Director of the Division on Research, Evaluation, and Dissemination, Daryl Chubin, nor the codirector of the National Institute on Science Education,

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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Andrew Porter, is aware of any projects that have targeted English-language learners or dealt with language issues in math and science instruction. A search of projects in progress at NSF uncovered three that focus on English-language learners; however, only one could be considered research—a project to enhance the science education of elementary-age bilingual students (see Appendix C)

Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)

The largest federal department relating to domestic policy, DHHS sponsors many programs that encounter issues related to language minorities and the education of English-language learners. We contacted officials in two department-wide offices that deal with research and evaluation, plus the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE)

ASPE is responsible for policy analysis and advice, policy development, strategic and implementation planning, and the coordination and conduct of evaluation and policy research. As part of its overall mission, ASPE undertakes a variety of research and evaluation projects addressing issues affecting children and youth, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The office operates a small research and evaluation program that focuses primarily on crosscutting or emerging policy issues that are outside the scope of the program-focused studies conducted by the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families or other DHHS program units. Within ASPE, most studies on child and youth issues originate from the Division of Children and Youth Policy, a component of the Office of Human Services Policy.

ASPE encounters issues related to English-language learners and their families primarily as regards the health and human service areas that are the department's responsibility. In research, for example, ASPE is cosponsoring the first large-scale experimental evaluation of how child growth and development, mother-child relationships, and maternal functioning are affected by mothers' mandatory participation in welfare-to-work programs. This study—the Child Outcomes Study in the JOBS Evaluation—is cosponsored by the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families and the Department of Education. The sample in one site (Riverside, California) includes immigrant families, and the study uses a research strategy that addresses potential differences for these families. Children were aged 3-5 years when their mothers entered the study. Outcomes are assessed 2 and 5 years later using data obtained from home interviews with mothers and children, and, at 5 years, surveys of teachers. The study will provide data on developmental trajectories and outcomes in all domains, including physical health and safety, cognitive and social development, and school adjustment.

ASPE is also providing partial support to the Board on Children, Youth, and

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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Families of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine for a project examining the health and adjustment of immigrant children. The project is focusing on differential health and mental health outcomes of children from various immigrant groups, the varying trajectories that now characterize the development of immigrant children, and the delivery of services to these children and their families. It will synthesize the relevant research literature and support the secondary analysis of existing data sets.

Demonstration and Evaluation Branch, Administration for
Children, Youth, and Families

This office formulates and contracts for evaluation work, principally on Head Start. There are two projects relevant to our interests: first, a descriptive study on demographic changes in the Head Start population and how these changes will affect multilingual and multicultural practices in curriculum and service delivery; and second, a study of the characteristics of families served by the 28 Migrant Head Start programs across the country. Other studies will touch on LEP issues by examining both language variables in data collection and program descriptions in case studies of best practice. There is a survey under way of all Head Start programs that will gather information about various populations and will include case studies of 30 programs, and there is an evaluation of the Comprehensive Child Development Program, which is aimed at low-income families.

The Administration for Children, Youth, and Families also just funded four university-based Head Start research centers (National Quality Research Centers). One of the main contractors is the Education Development Center in Newton, Massachusetts. This center has a subcontract at the School of Education at Harvard University (Catherine Snow, Patton Tabors, and Lilia Bartolome) for investigations that will deal exclusively with language diversity in Head Start classrooms and its impact on teaching, parent involvement, social service delivery, and administration.

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

NIH is a constellation of 22 institutes and centers. We spoke to research officials in two of the institutes that most often fund research related to education: the National Institute for Mental Health and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

We found that a small amount of research is focused directly on the special populations in which we are interested, but that it is not a strong priority. There are some indications that NIH is becoming more interested in subpopulations; it can be hoped that language will occupy a significant place in these emerging priorities.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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National Institute for Mental Health With the help of a research administrator from the agency, we checked recent grants by the Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social Science Research Branch of the Division of Neuroscience and Behavioral Science, which funds only basic research. Of the approximately 280 projects funded in the past year, 11 had a primary focus on language (see Appendix C for a list of these projects). However, these studies focused on first-language acquisition and processing. The centers for behavioral science research funded through this branch do not address languages in a significant way (Mollie Oliveri, personal communication).

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development The results were similar at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This institute supports four centers on learning disabilities, training grants, individual field-initiated research grants, and a clearinghouse. The official we interviewed could not identify any projects dealing with language diversity. We located some, however, through a computer search of federally funded research. These included a study of language and literacy in bilingual children (Oller, in progress) and a study that examines the development of phonetic categories in bilingual children (Flege, in progress) (see Appendix C).

Department of Defense

The main research agencies funded by the Department of Defense are the Army Research Institute, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Human Resources Laboratory. The armed forces helped pioneer methods for teaching second languages to native speakers of English after World War II. They also do some work on learning problems of limited-English-proficient recruits to the services' training programs. In addition, they fund quite a bit of research, both basic and applied, on linguistics and literacy in English. They do not, it seems, conduct much research that is relevant to the educational needs of language-minority students and English-language learners in elementary and secondary schools (Ray Perez, personal communication).

Conclusion

Federally funded research on language-minority issues and the education of English-language learners has, understandably, been centered in the Department of Education. It would be helpful in the future if language variables and language issues were considered more often in research conducted by other federal agencies, whether the primary focus is on reading, other cognitive processes, the delivery of social services, teaching techniques in math and science, or other topics of interest to the government. Furthermore, while the main task of designing

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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the research agenda and conducting the research on the education of English-language learners falls appropriately to the Department of Education, it cannot do the job alone. Funds for research in the Department of Education have always been modest compared with those of other departments, and its infrastructure for research is not as effective as that in other departments. These two features interact: the relative paucity of funds and the relative ineffectiveness of research infrastructure create a vicious circle of low respect, low support, and modest results.

The Work Of State Education Agencies12

During January 1996, we conducted interviews with state education agency (SEA) officials who are responsible for bilingual education or other programs for language-minority students or English-language learners in eight states. As noted earlier, we chose the eight states that had an English-language learner population of 6 percent or more: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, New Mexico, New York, and Texas. (A ninth state, Rhode Island, met the threshold, but we were unable to connect with an interview respondent there.) The interviewer asked an official in each state to identify current and recent SEA research, entities that support the research, information services, and training grants on language-minority students or English-language learners or on bilingual education. The interviewer also asked about promising practices and obstacles in the sponsorship and future directions of research on these topics. Most respondents were state coordinators or directors of bilingual education (see Appendix B). The state respondents were assured that their states would not be identified by name; therefore, the identities of the states are masked in Appendix B, where the individual responses are detailed.

The questions were sent to the interviewees in advance of the interview. Interviewees were advised that information was sought not only on SEA-supported research in which the primary focus was English-language learners or language-minority children or bilingual education, but also on research where these children were a subpopulation by virtue of the design of the data collection; findings for this subpopulation may or may not currently be reported separately. Research was defined broadly (basic, applied, demonstrations, evaluations, and surveys).

For each question, we provide here a summary of the responses across the eight states.

Question 1: Does your SEA fund research on LEP and bilingual students, including basic research, applied research, demonstrations, evaluations, or survey research? Please elaborate on research funded in the past

12This section draws heavily on a report prepared for the committee by Lana Muraskin of the SMB Economic Research Organization, whose excellent research assistance we acknowledge.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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five years and amounts of funding, if available, as well as identifying the administrative units within the SEA that fund this research.

SEAs engage in a limited amount of direct research on LEP or bilingual education issues, but many maintain student-level databases that could be used to conduct analyses. States also prescribe local evaluation requirements for state-funded programs. At present, the main direct research activities include the following:

Conducting annual (or other repeated) censuses of school districts that obtain descriptive information on counts of English-language learners by various background and programmatic variables. These data are sometimes published by district or in aggregated form.

Analyzing data from state assessment programs to determine the performance of English-language learners in relation to the performance of other students (or by LEP program or designation). A number of states maintain individual student record systems that provide background and performance data, although little is known about the quality of these data. The performance data are generally drawn from performance on English-language tests. Only a few states conduct testing in Spanish or another language.

Designing and monitoring local evaluations of funded bilingual or other programs for language-minority students and English-language learners. States play a role in monitoring and evaluating Title VII programs. They also prescribe evaluation requirements for state-funded programs, monitor implementation, and provide technical assistance. State requirements appear to be similar to those of Title VII.

Designing teacher certification exams. In the course of developing language proficiency and other certification exams, SEAs identify and study the skills teachers need and the links between exams and performance. They also perform various research tasks associated with test development. Most of this work is done on a contractual basis.

Question 2: Does your SEA support centers, laboratories, or other entities that conduct research in the above areas? Please elaborate.

Development of teacher training programs appears to be the main research and development activity supported by SEAs in centers, laboratories, or other entities. Interestingly, curriculum development was not often mentioned as an activity of centers. In addition, it should be noted that there are other sources of state support for research on language-minority students and English-language learners—primarily state agencies that support faculty and researchers at universities. SEAs also make contributions to the federal regional educational laboratories, although they may not always be aware of specific research on English-language learners being conducted by these laboratories.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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Question 3: Does your SEA support information services or training grants for scholars who work on the education of LEP and bilingual students? Please elaborate.

With a few exceptions, SEAs do not directly support information services or scholarly training of researchers who study these issues. It should be noted, however, that basic support of state university and college systems also supports the research activities of graduate students and faculty. As already noted, there are, in addition, university-based centers in several of these states that specialize in research on language-minority students and English-language learners.

Question 4: How does your agency decide what kinds of research to support, as well as which particular projects to fund?

Some respondents had a difficult time identifying the primary influences on decision making about research. In general, board of education and legislative mandates appear to play an important role. In addition, data requirements of state aid formulas are instrumental in data collections in some states (counts are needed to distribute funds). Title VII requirements and state traditions about what kinds of information and evaluation activities must accompany a grant award also appear important in establishing the planning and evaluation requirements for district-level programs that accept state aid. A few states noted that relatively new state standards for English-language learner performance are also having an effect on research priorities. The responses are notable for what they did not say as well as what they did. None of the respondents saw themselves as having a major role in decision making on research.

Question 5: What is your perception of promising state efforts in the sponsorship and conduct of research on these students?

The movement toward greater accountability for educational outcomes seems to be the major development setting the direction for research on English-language learners. Respondents in several states noted that these students are now being included in state assessment programs (sometimes with tests in native languages) and that state-wide standards for their performance are being established. This development promises to increase attention to tests and other measures for assessing the performance of these students, as well as to research that examines the best approaches and programs for improving performance.

Question 6: What is your perception of obstacles at the state level in the sponsorship and conduct of research on these students?

Lack of resources is clearly a strong theme among the responses, but other

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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important obstacles to research were noted. Several states mentioned lack of staff; this generally means numbers, but it also means people with the technical and research skills necessary for the task. Some SEAs have offices of research (or the assessment office serves that purpose), but issues of English-language learners and bilingual education need to be state priorities for these offices to focus their resources on those issues.

Data quality is also a concern in some states. SEAs are often dependent on districts to supply both student-level and aggregated data. There are sometimes problems in the quality of those data, both evaluation data from projects and data from regular state-wide data collections. Resources for following up with districts are critically important when data quality is an issue.

Finally, SEAs are administrative entities, but they are administered by or experience oversight from elected officials or their appointees. The responses to the question about the locus of decision making for research make clear that these political influences are important in deciding what research gets done. As a result, research questions may be narrowly framed or may reflect a hidden (or not so hidden) political agenda.

In sum, SEAs do not conduct a great deal of research on English-language learners and their programs because SEAs do not conduct a great deal of research on any subject. But to varying degrees, they do assess the academic achievement of English-language learners, gather data on program and student characteristics, and evaluate programs. The data they muster could be useful to researchers funded from other sources, and some level of coordination would be desirable. The relationship between these data sources and federally funded research efforts might fruitfully be a topic of discussion for the federal Department of Education Advisory Committee on Research on English-language Learners recommended in Chapter 10.

The Work Of Foundations

We constructed a list of foundations that gave substantial support to education research in 1989, based on a review of funding sources for education research prepared by the National Academy of Education (Kirst and Ravitch, 1991) (see Table A-1).

We obtained copies of the 1994 annual reports of all of the foundations shown in Table A-1. We then compiled lists of the projects they funded that appeared to deal with language-minority, LEP, or bilingual education issues.13 We made these judgments on the basis of project descriptions, and categorized the projects as either research or nonresearch and as either explicitly about LEP

13We acknowledge the research assistance of Joshua Rubin of the University of Chicago on this section.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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TABLE A-1 Foundations Supporting Education Research

Foundation

Total grants, 1994 or 1995 (millions of dollars; compiled from annual reports)

Rank among foundations, on education research (from Kirst and Ravitch, 1991)

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

735.9

4

Ford Foundation

285.7

12

Pew Charitable Trusts

172.8

3

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

119.5

7

Lilly Endowment

98.3

5

David and Lucile Packard Foundation

62.7

--

Exxon Education Foundation

53.8

2

Carnegie Corporation of New York

53.2

6

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

39.3

8

James S. McDonnell Foundation

21.8

11

Spencer Foundation

13.0

1

NOTE: The Clark Foundation was ninth in support of education research in 1989, and The Rockefeller Foundation was tenth. We did not receive their annual reports and so did not include them in this survey.

issues or implicitly or indirectly so. Some projects required guessing since some annual reports are more specific than others. Our aim was simply to determine what sorts of projects the foundations supported in our area of interest and how robust the roster of those projects is, not to assess the relative commitments of the foundations to these issues. The complete list of relevant projects, by foundation, is found in Appendix C; here we summarize and give examples for each foundation.14

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

The MacArthur Foundation provided funds for this report, which is, of course, both explicitly about research and explicitly about LEP education issues. The foundation's 1994 annual report showed it to be active in language projects and engaged with language-minority groups. Those projects that might implicitly involve English-language learners and that include some research are a small grant to Hispanic Human Resources of West Palm Beach, Florida, for a socioeconomic

14It should be noted that many of these foundations provided support for the project that produced this report, including The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Spencer Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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 the Hispanic community, and a very large grant to Youth Guidance of Chicago to assess the Comer project schools in that city. Other grants related to these issues went to the U.S. Committee for Refugees in Washington, D.C., to protect the rights of refugees in the United States by monitoring, among other things, public education; to a Chicago group for developing leadership among high school parents in a largely Hispanic area; to a Los Angeles group for developing leadership among Latino men and women; and to a school board in Florida for developing a conflict resolution program in English, Spanish, and Creole. As a result of current planning, however, the foundation has shifted its focus to professional development and is unlikely to fund future research in this area.

Ford Foundation

The annual report of the Ford Foundation gives no information about projects themselves, only the amount of funding and the names of the organizations receiving it. Among the grantees most clearly associated with LEP language issues were the Multicultural Education and Training Advocacy Project, the National Community College Hispanic Council, the National Coalition of Advocates for Students, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Although the information is imprecise, the grant amounts are sizable. Some research-related activities might be generated by these grants, even though they seem to be addressed to groups that provide services and advocacy rather than research, as is typical of foundation funding on education issues.

Pew Charitable Trusts

The Pew Charitable Trusts funded a number of action projects that addressed language-minority or LEP issues in education. Some of these directly addressed education, such as the grant to Accion Comunal Latino Americana of Norristown, Pennsylvania, to provide supplementary education to low-income Latino children, and the grant to the New England Board of Higher Education to increase the number of Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans in the teaching professions. Other Pew grants seemed likely to be concerned more incidentally with language, such as the grant to California Tomorrow of San Francisco for the dissemination of the Education for a Diverse Society Project.

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Mellon Foundation gave a number of grants for research on language issues. Several grants were given to Michigan State University, The Johns Hopkins University, and San Diego State University for research on the adaptation of the children of recent immigrants; another, to Leadership Education for

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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Asian Pacifics, Inc., was for policy research on Asian Pacific immigrants. Program grants included five sizable awards (to California State University at Long Beach, California Tomorrow, the Center for Applied Linguistics, the Intercultural Development Research Association, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County), all for programs on immigrant education. A large program grant to Teachers College of Columbia University supported work with suburban school districts in demographic transition. Two grants to Brown University supported school superintendents in their work with English-language learners.

David and Lucile Packard Foundation

The Packard Foundation did not fund any research per se on language issues, but did support a number of education programs relating to language. They gave modest-sized grants to Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Santa Cruz County for bilingual after-school tutoring; to the Self-Reliance Foundation of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to develop Spanish-language radio programs about family planning and women's reproductive rights; to the Sequoia Union School District of Redwood City, California, for immigrant education programs; and to others. They also awarded a large grant to Stanford University to improve translation services in health care settings for non-English-speaking Americans.

Carnegie Corporation of New York

Carnegie Corporation of New York supported this report. Two of the foundation's grants programs—Education and Healthy Development of Children and Youth, and Special Projects—provided significant support for research programs, model development, policy linkage, and community-organizing projects that benefit language-minority children, youth, and families. For example, the corporation provided support for research on effective parenting education and school reform models targeting Latino families, for legal advocacy to secure language-minority citizens' rights to equitable educational opportunity, for policy linkage activities that provide research-based analyses of language issues to federal and state lawmakers, and for voter education and outreach to strengthen the participation of Latino and Asian Americans in the democratic process.

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

The Hewlett Foundation provided four grants related directly or indirectly to language issues in education, though not for research. Among these were support to the Ravenswood City School District to purchase native-language library materials, to Arizona State University to sponsor a conference on minority opportunities programs, to California Tomorrow for its Education for a Diverse Society

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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project, and to Morgan Hill Unified School District for a diversity training program.

Spencer Foundation

The Spencer Foundation devotes virtually its entire grants budget to education research. Thus, although its total grants budget is smaller than that of many other foundations, Spencer is the largest supporter of education research among all the foundations, and its work is of great importance to the future of the education research enterprise. Among its projects relating to LEP issues in its 1994-1995 annual report were a grant to Marcia Farr to study literacy practices among Mexican immigrant families; a grant to Robert Fullwinder to study multicultural education as moral education; a grant to Sara Harkness and Charles Super to study parental ethnotheories, cultural practices, and the transition to school; a grant to Lucinda Pease-Alvarez and Kenji Hakuta to study language maintenance and shift in early adolescence; a grant to Alejandro Portes to study the adaptation process of second-generation immigrants; and a grant to Sandra Schecter and Robert Bayley to study family language environment and bilingual development. Through its Small Grants Program, a grant was made to Irene-Anna Diakidoy and Stella Vosniadov to study Lakota/Dakota children's knowledge acquisition in astronomy. Spencer postdoctoral fellowship awards last year included one to Judith Moschkovich to study the construction of mathematical meaning in bilingual conversations, and Spencer dissertation fellowships went to Cynthia Brock to explore a second-language learner's opportunities for literacy learning in a mainstream classroom and to Jane Herman to study cross-linguistic transfer among bilingual kindergartners learning to read.

Other Foundations

This survey was informal. We did not find projects that were obviously about LEP education issues in the most recent available annual report of the Lilly Endowment, the Exxon Education Foundation, or the James S. McDonnell Foundation, although each of those foundations may have supported many research projects or action programs on other education issues, as they have in the past.

Summary

There is a substantial amount of support flowing from the philanthropic foundations to projects aimed at language-minority, LEP, or bilingual education issues. Not very much of this support is for research, as is true of the foundations' general stance toward a world full of problems needing solutions. In our recommendations in Chapter 10, we suggest that the foundations, like the government, should be mindful of opportunities to include language variables and issues

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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 projects while continuing to emphasize applications to practice. Furthermore, we urge the foundations to support synthesis or networking activities that might foster the improvement of research and policy on such issues.

National Reform Networks

Since the mid-1980s, thousands of efforts have been launched to reform or restructure U.S. schools. Perhaps a dozen of these efforts have expanded to form networks that have gained national prominence and are frequently reported or cited in research, professional, or popular outlets. For the most part, these networks are not research oriented, but many have begun conducting evaluations of their projects. Moreover, most of these projects do not specifically target English-language learners. But since English-language learners have become an increasingly prominent component of the school population, many of these projects have, at a minimum, implicitly had to address the needs and issues of these students in local contexts.

There is enormous variability in the manner and the degree to which these projects have responded to the presence of language-minority students in U.S. schools. At one extreme is Success for All, a project based at The Johns Hopkins University and headed by Robert Slavin. Success for All did not begin as a program for English-language learners; it began in inner-city Baltimore with largely African American schools. However, it has been implemented in a small number of schools with substantial language-minority populations. The program has maintained its essential characteristics, but it has also been explicitly adapted for English-language learners. There are in fact two adaptations—an ESL adaptation for students who receive all instruction in English, regardless of their primary language, and a Spanish bilingual adaptation for students in a Spanish primary-language program. Success for All's unusually systematic evaluations indicate that both adaptations are highly effective in promoting higher levels of reading achievement among English-language learners in project schools.

A roughly analogous effort by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is under way. The board has been working to develop standards and assessments for certifying highly qualified teachers; eventually, teacher certification will be available in more than 30 areas. One of those areas is ''English as a new language," and certification will be available to any teacher who wishes to be board certified for teaching in ESL or bilingual contexts. Employing the general framework used to develop certifications in other areas of teaching, the board will offer certification for teachers of English-language learners by September 1998. In addition, although minimal, standards for dealing with these students are included in the standards for all other areas of certification.

In contrast to Success for All and the efforts of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, some programs make no adaptations for or simply have not included English-language learners in their activities. For example,

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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the National Paideia Center is based on the explicit assumption that the program "works with all students" and that there is no need to differentiate for specific groups. The Core Knowledge Foundation is similar in that it, too, promotes a common, core curriculum for all students, although it encourages schools to devote half of their curriculum to topics and skills deemed relevant and meaningful locally. In both cases, there is a rejection of the differentiation of educational treatment by language or cultural group membership. Project Zero has done no work with English-language learners.

More typically, however, reform efforts reviewed here attempt to deal with LEP issues through a subtle and complex interplay between the framework of the overall program and the particulars and exigencies of local contexts. Thus, Accelerated Schools, the Center for Educational Renewal, the Coalition of Essential Schools, Effective Schools, New American Schools Corporation, and the School Development Program have for the most part well-articulated core philosophies and principles. But they believe in the need to adapt curriculum, instruction, and other aspects of student experiences and school operations to the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the student population. How schools do this is left largely up to them, but the assumption is that local sites will attempt to synthesize the core principles of the network or project they have joined with the instructional and curricular features required by their student populations.

For the most part, these projects have not examined their effects on English-language learner outcomes; in many cases, they have not examined effects on student outcomes at all. Although conceptually the idea of "general principles locally adapted to English-language learner populations" makes great intuitive sense, generally these projects have yet to demonstrate the viability of this idea empirically. To this end, we would encourage projects to disaggregate outcome data by LEP status in order to compare the performance of English-language learners with that of other students. Moreover, we would encourage them to field test and evaluate adaptations of their programs for these students.

Recruitment and Training of Researchers

As noted in the discussion of recommendations 10-9 and 10-10 in Chapter 10, there is considerable concern among senior researchers and agency officials that insufficient talent exists at present, or in training, to accomplish the research that is needed on language-minority and LEP issues. Recognizing the problem of insufficient research talent across the whole field of education research, the Spencer Foundation has supported doctoral training, dissertation fellowships, postdoctoral fellowships, and small grants on a large scale (see Patrick, 1991, on the Spencer postdoctoral fellowship program). Those 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. Since 1992, five dissertation fellowships, one postdoctoral fellowship, and seven small

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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grants15 have been awarded for research on English-language learners and related language-minority concerns (from a total of approximately 135 such grants per year during the period).16 In states with large language minority populations, support programs such as the Language Minority Research Institute of the University of California have helped train and support researchers working on these issues.

At the federal level, the Title VII fellowships, provided in various reauthorizations of the Bilingual Education Act, have been the major source of funding for the development of research talent in bilingual education. Between fiscal years 1979 and 1987, a total of 1,721 fellows participated in the fellowship program; another 316 participated between 1990 and 1991. Of the fellows participating between 1979 and 1987, 1,432 were pursuing a doctoral degree, 104 were postmaster's students, and 185 were enrolled at the master's degree level. Although the purpose of the fellowship program is to develop faculty for teacher training programs in bilingual education, not all recipients have followed this course. Even so, all Title VII recipients have necessarily been involved in the conduct and uses of research on LEP issues, and in some cases the attainment of a doctorate and the acquisition of a teaching position (27 percent of those studied) or university administrative position (8 percent of those studied) and receipt of tenure at a university. Thus 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. Some notable researchers who work on LEP issues received their degrees in disciplinary fields outside of schools of education, such as psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. However, these researchers typically do not have access to Title VII fellowships. The 1996 appropriation provided no funds for Title VII fellowships, but the Department of Education reprogrammed $1.1 million to cover continuation grants to 100 fellows.

As we emphasize in Chapter 10, we believe federal research agencies need to give more attention to the problem of the future of the research corps for LEP issues. The concern has special urgency for research relating to LEP issues because the area is politically charged, and this may deter talented researchers from choosing it as a focus of their studies. Numerous models for the needed support exist. 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. Various National Institutes of Health institutes support training programs. We urge more opportunities of this sort in our recommendations in Chapter 10.

Among those highly qualified and rigorously trained researchers needed to

15The small grants are heavily used by pretenured faculty.

16The topics are listed in the annual reports of the Spencer Foundation.

Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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conduct research on LEP issues, we would hope that a substantial number would represent minority groups. This is a separate issue from the quality of the research corps as a whole; we raise it because of the role-model potential of minority scholars and, more important, the experience, insights, and networks they can bring to the enterprise. Although there are a large number of minority scholars and/or scholars from language-minority backgrounds currently doing work on LEP issues, senior people in the field need to nurture such participation among the younger potential scholars (see Padilla, 1994). Note that of the 13 Spencer awards for dissertations, postdoctoral fellowships, and small grants for work on LEP and related issues since 1992, 6 were awarded to minority scholars, a larger proportion than is usually the case.

Some notion of the potential pool of minority scholars can be gleaned from the annual reports on minority group members in higher education published by the American Council on Education. Figures for doctorates received in education are imperfect indicators of the pool because, as noted above, researchers on LEP and related issues are often trained in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, or other departments. Conversely, very large numbers of education doctorates are awarded to candidates headed for practice, such as school administrators, and among those trained for research careers, only a small minority will work on LEP issues. However, the broad parameters of minorities receiving the doctorate in education are as follows: of the 5842 U.S. citizens receiving a doctorate in education in 1994, 36 (.62 percent) were Native American, 80 (1.37 percent) were Asian American, and 225 (3 percent) were Hispanic American (Carter and Wilson, 1996). It is among these small groups and the equally small numbers of minorities in related disciplines that we must look for future minority scholars on LEP issues.

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Suggested Citation:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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:"A THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH ON ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION." 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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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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