Increasingly, the proposal for more research is seen almost as a hostile act. This, I think, was the way in which the President's message on educational reform was viewed in some quarters. Perhaps the best example of this process, one which members of this committee will be familiar with, was the rather sad sequence of expectation and disappointment which accompanied the Equal Educational Opportunity survey which Congress mandated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This was the second largest social science research project in history. I think it fair to assume that those who sponsored it in the Congress and the very distinguished group of scholars headed by James Coleman, who carried it out, all felt confident that the conventional wisdom about educational processes was sound and that they would so powerfully demonstrate this fact in the context of unequal educational opportunity that a major force for change would be generated. But that is exactly what did not eventuate.

Try as they would-and they tried to the point of physical and emotional exhaustion-they could find only the very slightest support for what might be described as the educational theory underlying the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1960. It just was not there. Thereafter, a group of us at Harvard formed a seminar to examine the data and methodology of what had become to be known as the Coleman report. Professor Mosteller and I have edited a volume of papers that resulted from the seminar. It will be published next winter. I would hesitate to characterize the findings of all the scholars who have contributed to our volume, but I think it fair to say that the basic thrust of our findings is that Coleman was even more right than he realized, which is to say that the conventional wisdom was even more wrong than he was forced to report.

I chose those words with care. No one involved in Coleman's analysis took any pleasure in finding how very little educational effect could be traced to traditional measures of school quality, such as pupil-teacher ratios or levels of educational expenditure. That is simply the way the work came out. It produced, incidentally, evidence. of the educational benefits of mixing poor with nonpoor children and mixing races. But, of course, the Office of Education could only be greatly disappointed. It took a lot of courage for Commissioner Allen, and now Commissioner Marland, to get back on that horse. Not to dwell on the subject, one could wish some others might show some of that same courage or might show some of the understanding, which you, Mr. Chairman, and Congressman Reid and others are doing today.

Let me invoke an old American saying, "It is not ignorance that hurts so much as knowing all of those things that ain't so." That is what has been hurting us in education. The hurt is a lot more serious than the temporary discomfort of having to give up some familiar belief. We had better get on with it. In a recent paper Kenneth Boulding described the schooling industry as a "possibly pathological section of the American economy." For 30 years now it has been getting a steadily greater proportion of our national product. Its share has more than doubled since 1940. Yet it would be hard to demonstrate that the amount of education has doubled or anything like it. Indeed, some charge-I doubt this, but it is stated-that levels of educational achievement have declined. In specific districts perhaps; but nationwide, I rather doubt that.

Professor Boulding asks that we find out whether in fact the condition of the schooling industry is pathological; is the system now functioning, or is it simply that no amount of effort can increase its output? It is his contention that very likely the major obstacle to progress "is the absence of any adequate theory regarding the nature and machinery of human learning." May I repeat that? "The absence of any adequate theory regarding the nature and machinery of human learning." He contends that "almost all we know about human learning could probably be put on a page." This in turn leads to the fatal quality of lack of cumulative additivity in education research.

After I wrote that paragraph, sir, I came on a passage from a recent paper, the distinguished scientific contribution award paper which Ella Norge Gibson published in "The American Psychologist,” and she said:

Despite decades of concern on the part of the educators and parents and proponents of homespun wisdom, we seem to know little more about how to teach reading than our great grandparents did. In fact, we do not even know why it has to be taught. Why doesn't it just grow like language?

That kind of testimony, I think, emerges from every point in the educational research spectrum. Many persons I think would share Boulding's belief, although Professor Getzels has shown that basic research in education has had important consequences in changing educational practices over the past half century or so. And rather quickly you can trace the effect of Thorndike's work in a decade in university practices and teaching. In any event, what few researchers would disagree with is Getzels' assertion that:

The plain fact is that support for educational research as a proportion of the total funds available for what the U.S. Office of Education refers to as its research function; that is. support of research and development has steadily been decreasing.

And you, Mr. Chairman, have made this very same point very forcefully. The shame of this is that it is occurring at just the moment when educational research is going through a quantum change in levels of methodological sophistication. And it is also very much widening the range of disciplines which are involved. In the Office of Education itself, we have seen work of great quality being done by men such as Alexander Mood, Joseph Froomkin, and John Evans, and by the energetic and creative group headed by George Mayeske. We have seen research leadership of great distinction such as that of Dr. Gallagher, who will be speaking to you later this morning. And this does not exhaust the list. The history of science records many moments when persons working in a particular field have been seized with the sense that they were on the verge of major breakthrough in their understanding of a subject they were investigating.

I don't know if anyone has tried to keep score, but one's impression is that this hunch is repeatedly validated, and there is just such a feeling in the world of education research at this time. Perhaps I should say the field of cognitive development, for that is probably the more advanced. A leading practitioner said to me 2 years ago, "If we don't get it within a decade, we are not at all the people we think we are." By "it," he meant something more than a new technique for reinforcing attention spans. He meant a validated theory of learning.

But if this is to happen, such men need help from Government. They need support of the kind a National Institute of Education would provide; that is to say, sustained and systematic provision of resources so that as much as possible a coherent research strategy is followed. The work involved can be utterly abstruse or painfully immediate and practical. We will have to experiment with actual educational systems as, for example, the proposal for voucher system, associated with my colleagues David Cohen and Christopher Jencks, which would introduce incentives and measures of performance into the teaching and learning situation.

Above all, what education research and education need from public men and those who comment on them is a measure of fortitude in face of disappointment. This is, of course, the central theme of my remarks this morning, and I would like to elaborate somewhat, Mr. Chairman.

Some of you may recall that the first domestic message which President Nixon sent to the Congress on February 19, 1969, concerned problems of poverty. In that message he drew attention to the great importance of early childhood experience in shaping subsequent achievement. These are years when children typically are not in school, years in which no very great social concern for the child is manifest. The President proposed this. He proposed a national commitment to the first 5 years of life. Specifically, he wished to establish an Office of Child Development in HEW, but generally to push forward on this front, exploiting the extraordinarily impressive findings of recent years as to the importance of these early years.

I quote his message, the first message the President sent to the Congress on domestic issue:

In recent years enormous advances have been made in understanding of human development. We have learned that intelligence is not fixed at birth, but is largely formed by environmental influences of the early formative years. It develops rapidly at first and then more slowly; as much of that development takes place in the first 4 years as in the next 13. We have learned further that environment has its greatest impact on the development of intelligence when that development is proceeding most rapidly-that is, in those earliest years.

This means that many of the problems of poverty are traceable directly to early childhood experience-and that if we are to make genuine long-range progress, we must focus our efforts much more than heretofore on those few years which may determine how far, throughout his later life, the child can reach.

The message also announced that he would transfer a number of OEO programs from the Executive Office of the President to regular departments of the Government on the grounds that these programs, once experimental, had now been worked to the point where they could be described as organizational and ought to be located in line with the organizational theory of how OEO would operate. The early drafts of this message included Headstart in this category of operation. It was being transferred to HEW, where in any event, if my recollection holds, the major proportion of preschool funds were already located. Before the message was sent, however, word came to the White House from OEO that the preliminary findings of a major evaluation of the impact of Headstart carried out by Westinghouse Learning Corp. and Ohio University were disappointing. The pattern of earlier small-scale studies seemed confirmed: Headstart was not having much effect on educational achievement.

The reaction in the White House to this news was, I believe, under the circumstances reasonable. The designation of Headstart was

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changed from "operational" to "experimental." All that would be shown, the message in effect stated, telegraphing the blow, is that we have got to try harder. Let me quote the specific passage:

Head Start is still experimental. Its effects are simply not known--save of course where medical care and similar services are involved. The results of a major national evaluation of the program will be available this spring. It must be said, however, that preliminary reports on this study confirm what many have feared: the long-term effect of Head Start appears to be extremely weak. This must not discourage us. To the contrary, it only demonstrates the immense contribution the Head Start program has made simply by having raised to prominence on the national agenda the fact-known for some time, but never widely recognized-that the children of the poor mostly arrive at school age seriously deficient in the ability to profit from formal education, and already significantly behind their contemporaries. It also has been made abundantly clear that our schools as they now exist are unable to overcome this deficiency. In this context the Head Start Follow-Through Program already delegated to HEW by OEO assumes an even greater importance.

Now, one might have thought this reasonable behavior. But there were those who thought it was in some way-I grope for the word: Duplicitous? Disingenuous? Dishonest? Something as strong as that. One of the Nation's leading newspapers repeatedly suggested in its editorial columns, not only at the time, but as much as a year later, that the White House had somehow deliberately called attention to this dubious document.

The facts are simple. The White House was not even aware of the existence of the evaluation which had been commissioned under the previous administration. The preliminary findings were brought to our attention by a professional employee of OEO who thought we ought to know. The President's reaction was to argue that inquiry in this field was all the more urgent if it turned out that something we had put such hopes into was not quite working out.

Why did this respectable journal continue to question the integrity of the administration in this matter? I think I can answer this. We were dealing with the subject of failure, and there is none so painful in American life. Education traditionally has dealt with success and failure. The purpose of schooling was not just to instruct young persons, but also to some extent to sort them out into those who were bright and those not so bright. This is the process we associate with certification. There have always been big differences, not between groups in

these matters.

My colleague David Cohen has shown that the school achievement. of European immigrant groups was closely correlated to their degree of urbanization. Northern Italians performed better than southern Italians, and so forth. Jews scored highest in urbanization and highest in educational achievement. This would confirm work which Nathan Glazer and I have done on immigrant groups, but does not exhaust the number of phenomena to be explained.

How to explain the extraordinary achievement of immigrants from China and Japan? As I am not under oath, Mr. Chairman, I would venture that 50 to 75 percent of the intellectual energy being generated in the United States today comes from these three small groups: Jews, Japanese, and Chinese. Mind, I did not say moral energy or political, or economic. Other groups are not so fortunate. An occasional Greek gets a Rhodes scholarship. An occasional Irishman becomes a Fulbright fellow.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Dr. Moynihan, if you would allow the Chair to intervene, I would like to observe that two-thirds of the Rhodes scholars in the House are Greeks; the other third is the Speaker. And the Chair would also like to observe in commenting on that Irish Fulbright fellow that the majority leader of the House is Irish and that 66% percent of the three whips of the House, given the appointments of Mr. O'Neill, Mr. McFall, and your humble servant, are Irish. So I don't know what that says for the Greeks and the Irish, but I am grateful for the observation.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. It says that the smart ones go into politics.

For the moment, educational achievement is rather unevenly distributed in America. No one likes much to talk about this inasmuch as educational achievement is so important to our "credentials society." Uneven distribution of such credentials is equivalent of uneven distribution of wealth in an earlier era and is just as sensitive a subject. To repeat, this matter will take fortitude in public officials. Yet I would plead that you do so.

One of the achievements of democracy, although it seems not regarded as such today, is this system of grading and sorting individuals so young persons of talent born to modest or lowly circumstances can be recognized for their worth. It provides a means for young persons of high social status to demonstrate that they have inherited brains as well as money, if that is the case. I do not doubt that this system is crude, and often cruel, and measures only a limited number of things. But it measures valid things, by and large. To do away with such systems of accreditation may seem like an egalitarian act, but it would be the opposite. We would be back in a world where social connections and privilege would count for more than any of us would like. If what you know doesn't count in the competitions of life, who you know will determine the outcome. This, to conclude, is what is at issue in the establishment of a National Institute of Education. We must master the art of education to the point that achievement is more or less evenly distributed among the different groups in our society and not too enor mously varied within such groups. Not just equality of educational opportunity, although your bill, Mr. Chairman, very properly described that as the primary purpose of the Institute. But something like parity of educational outcomes is what we must achieve.

At this time the belief is widely held that the educational system can produce this outcome. It can't. At least that would be my reading of the present state of knowledge and resources. But the belief that it can is so deeply held that, when it does not, the repeated conclusion is that something of great value has been deliberately withheld. I do not know a more fateful formula for social unrest.

I repeat. The purpose of a National Institute of Education is to develop the art and science of education to the point that equality of educational opportunity results in a satisfactory equivalence of educational achievement. We have coming up a decade in which school enrollments will rise hardly at all. This means we will have resources of time and money in which to address ourselves to that far more difficult task. More difficult, that is, than simply building classrooms to accommodate the latest baby boom. We have the research skill and commitment. What remains, Mr. Chairman, is to summon the political will. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.