TO ESTABLISH A NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1971

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION

OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR,

Washington, D.C.

The Select Subcommittee on Education met at 9:45 a.m., in room 2257, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John Brademas (chairman of the Select Subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Brademas, Quie, Reid, Landgrebe, Kemp, and Peyser.

Staff members present: Jack Duncan, counsel; Martin La Vor, minority legislative associate; David Lloyd-Jones, professional staff member, and Gladys Walker, clerk.

Mr. BRADEMAS. The Select Subcommittee on Education will come to order for the purpose of further consideration of H.R. 33 and related bills to establish a National Institute of Education.

The Chair would observe, for those who were not present at our opening hearings, that the purpose of the bill under consideration is to implement the proposal of the President in his March 3, 1970, address on educational reform to establish an Institute of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, to serve as a focal point for research, demonstration, experimentation across the board in American education.

We are very pleased today to have three distinguished authorities on American education to testify further on this bill. The Chair hopes that perhaps the three witnesses would be willing to allow us to insert as if read the entire text of their statements, and perhaps if they would summarize their major points, this would enable the members of the subcommittee to put more questions to them.

We are pleased to call as our first witness Dr. Stephen K. Bailey, the chairman, Policy Institute, Syracuse University Research Corp., and a widely recognized authority on the administration of Federal education programs and, the Chair is pleased to say, an old friend. Dr. Bailey, we are very pleased to hear from you, sir.

STATEMENT OF DR. STEPHEN K. BAILEY, CHAIRMAN, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY RESEARCH CORP., AND SECRETARY-TREASURER, NATIONAL ACADEMY OF EDUCATION

Dr. BAILEY. Mr. Chairman, I will be as brief as I can. You have a prepared statement which I sent down last week. I would like to call to your attention and to the attention of the committee particularly the remarks that I have on pages 3, 4, and 5.

!

(The document referred to follows:)

PREPARED STATEMENT OF STEPHEN K. BAILEY, CHAIRMAN, POLICY INSTITUTE, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY RESEARCH CORP.

Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the committee, I am grateful for this opportunity to testify before this distinguished committee on a bill as important as H.R. 33. Faced, as you constantly are, with hundreds of bills that are modest at best in import; or with a few major bills that involve the expenditure of billions of dollars, it must be a particular delight to work on a piece of legislation such as this. H.R. 33, as I am sure this committee is well aware, can have extraordinarily beneficial effects upon the entire citizenry, especially the young, and at reasonably modest costs. And if implemented with wisdom and verve, H.R. 33 could, over time, make it possible to discover most efficient ways of purveying educational services to the American people-thereby showing down the galloping costs of schools, colleges, and universities.

The principle behind H.R. 33 is almost ridiculously simple. It is that if a man will focus his skills, reason, and humaneness upon his problems, he can markedly improve his condition.

We know what this principle has done for American agriculture. When Khrushchev visited the United States in the late 1950's, it was the miracle of American agriculture, not this country's industrial prowess, that made the deepest impression. And American agricultural productivity is in turn a product, in large measure, of the experiment stations and the county-agent system that emerged in the last decades of the 19th century, and the early decades of the 20th century. The whole land-grant philosophy of establishing agricultural institutions devoted to the discovery and dissemination of practical knowledge is perhaps the root idea undergirding H.R. 33.

Another analogous example is, of course, to be found in the field of medical research. The fact that we are a relatively healthy people in spite of the inequi ties and shortcomings of our health delivery services is a tribute to publicly and privately supported medical research over the past several decades.

As I understand H.R. 33, it calls for the establishment of a National Institute of Education that would attempt to do for the improvement of education what other similarly conceived institutions have done in the past for the improvement of agriculture and of health.

It is, of course, a fair question as to why federally-funded educational R. & D.especially under Title IV of ESEA-has not already produced more dramatic improvements in American educational practice over the past half-decade. This committee is well aware that a number of R. & D. Centers and Educational Laboratories were created under the Cooperative Research Act of 1954 and as amended by Title IV of ESEA of 1965. Furthermore, something like $30 to $40 million a year under that title have been available over the past half-decade to individual scholars or to groups of scholars, most of them university based, for educational research undertakings of their own definition.

I do not wish to denigrate the work that has been done. Some extraordinarily significant findings have emerged and we are just now beginning to see some of their practical implications.

But I would submit that the inability of federally-funded educational R & D activities to make a really significant dent on American educational practices has been due to three elemental factors:

First, the level of funding has been impossibly inadequate;

Second, the federally imposed patterns of R & D structure and funding have been the enemies of coherent research, development, and diffiusion strategies; Third, the inherent complexity of educational R & D and the diffuse (almost atomized) nature of educational governance in the United States precludes revo lutionary and universally accepted breakthroughs in short periods of time. Let me say a word or two about each of these, for it is my belief that unless the Congress and the Executive Branch, in the process of developing and implementing H.R. 33, remedy these defects, little will happen in the field of educational R & D that will make any substantial difference.

First, as to levels of funding. Roger Levien in his masterful analysis of the NIE idea has noted that in 1968 total federal expenditures for educational R & D were less than 1/10th those for R & D in health and only a fifth of the amount spent for agricultural R & D (See page 36 of the December 15, 1970 draft of "National Institute of Education, Preliminary Plan for the Proposed Institute"). In the areas of educational R & D in which I have had some fairly specific involvement, the Regional Educational Laboratories, I can only comment that the

amount that has been appropriated each year for the past five years has not only dwindled, it was totally inadequate to begin with. I would remind this committee that when President Johnson wrote a letter to the Secretary of HEW, John Gardner, on July 5, 1966 on the occasion of the opening of the first ten Regional Educational Laboratories, he said in part, "The laboratories should be large and significant enterprises, equal in size and scope to the major tasks they seek to accomplish. They ought to be conceived as comparable in their way to the large-scale laboratories of the defense or the atomic energy establishments. Nothing less will do. Their missions are equally important."

Certainly at the heart of President Johnson's eloquence was his knowledge that only with substantial and sustained funds could educational R & D attract from fields other than traditional educational research the kinds of rich and diverse talents needed in concert to remedy the short-comings of our existing educational system. President Johnson's wise words were not followed. Instead the brave beginnings made by the original 20 regional laboratories were not given adequate financial nourishment. Five labs were killed in 1969. Four more are being killed this year.

May I make the strongest possible plea that NIE not become another International Education Act-that you do everything possible to convince the relevant members of the appropriations committees of the Congress to appropriate a minimum of $250 million for NIE the very first year. In my estimation this amount should rise each year thereafter until some kind of parity is reached with expenditures for R & D in the field of health.

Second, the federally funded educational R & D activities of the past few years have in my estimation, lacked adequate focus and continuity. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake to have created a Bureau of Research in the U.S. Office of Education during the reorganization of 1965. This bureau never had the clout of either hierarchical status or of S & E budgets to impose any meaningful coordination upon the research functions of the other line-operating bureaus of the Office. And whatever the original reasons for setting up relatively autonomous structures for the Regional Educational Laboratories, the realities of decremental budgeting meant that an inadequately supported bureau of research in USOE had to assume the melancholy task of second-guessing regional laboratory decisions and priorities--making a mockery out of "regional control". The final blow to efficient R & D management was the unpredictability of year-by-year congressional funding-both as to amounts and as to timing.

My belief is that the NIE structure as proposed in H.R. 33, and as explicated by Roger Levien, would overcome all of the above problems except for those associated with Congressional appropriations. On the latter, I can only plead with you and with your colleagues to adopt for educational R & D some of the multi-year and no-year funding arrangements that have proved so successful in the budgets of AEC, NASA, and DOD.

Finally, let me say a word about the complexity of educational R & D, and the need for Congressional faith and patience. I once worked on the Hill as an AA to a Senator. I know a little about the political need for "show and tell". I referred earlier to agriculture and to medicine. Difficult and complex as these fields are, they are relatively simple compared to the field of education. And they were given federal funds for decades before any dramatic breakthroughs occurred.

American education is going through pains of growth and adjustment that are almost seismic in effect. For generations schools were sorting devices even more than they were educating devices. Restless and non-bookish kids were expected to drop out so that the virtually insatiable demand of our economy for unskilled labor could be satisfied.

Today, alas, if one is unskilled he is likely to be unemployed. We are trying to give advance instruction to types that in previous generations would have been working on the railroad at age 15. High schools and colleges used to be for the elite of the middle and upper classes. Today a high school diploma is a virtual necessity for everyone, and some kind of post-secondary education is becoming essential for an increasing majority.

In the face of all this, we are coming to such sobering conclusions as the fact that we simply do not know how to teach poor kids. We really do not know why Johnny can't read: is it because of his mother's diet during the pre-natal period; is it because of inadequate parental play in the early months of life; is it because of "cultural deprivations" in the home-whatever that slippery term means; is it because of the self-fulfilling prophecies of teachers who believed that Johnny was stupid; is it because of poor instruction; is it because of a

low self-image reinforced by failure in terms of middle class grading norms; is it because of some ineffable combination of all of these factors?

And today, if a single teacher in a ghetto school is able to demonstrate that she can succeed in spite of all these questions, how can what she has, or what she is, be bottled for shipment to the tens of thousands of other schools in this country?

I use this as an example only. To solve the reading problem in this nation may take twenty years of R & D with steady and sufficient funds paid out to interdisciplinary teams made up of biochemists, brain physiologists, nutritionists, psychologists, media experts, engineers, "Fuller-brush"-type salesmen, economists, political scientists, school administrators, and teachers.

One of the great functions of NIE could be to organize and to fund such teams. But this will happen only if the steadfastness of Congressional support is assured over a long period of time.

Let me close by asking what happens if NIE or something like it is not created and adequately funded over time? All of us can make some predictions. We will not get the poor out of poverty; we will continue to spend increasing billions of dollars a year of the taxpayers money for inflated educational costs without any real change in the quality of educational output. We will have consigned millions of human beings to underutilized or totally inutile lives.

Some years ago H. G. Wells summed up the entire issue. In an obscure novel called The New Machiavelli, Wells had this to say, "If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve problems on a much richer and broader scale than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys."

BIOGRAPHY OF STEPHEN KEMP BAILEY

Stephen K. Bailey is Chairman of the Policy Institute of the Syracuse University Research Corporation and Maxwell Professor of Political Science in the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse Uni versity. Dr. Bailey was formerly Dean of the Maxwell School. He was a Rhodes Scholar from 1937 to 1939 and received both a B.A. and an M.A. from Oxford University. He also holds an M.A. and Ph. D. from Harvard University. Before joining the Maxwell School in 1959 as Professor of Political Science, Dean Bailey served on the faculties of Hiram College, Wesleyan University, and Princeton University. At Princeton he was William Church Osborn Professor of Public Af fairs and Director of the Graduate Program in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has also been a Fulbright Lecturer in American Government at Oxford University.

Dr. Bailey is currently Secretary-Treasurer of the National Academy of Education and is a past President of the American Society for Public Administration, and a past Vice-President of the American Political Science Association.

Dr. Bailey is also active in public affairs. He is currently a member of the Board of Regents of the State of New York and Chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Educational Laboratories (Department of HEW). In 1964 he was a member of the Presidential Task Force on Government Reorganization, and in 1965 he headed the U.S. Bureau of the Budget Task Force on Intergovernmental Program Coordination. He has served as a Staff Associate to Task Force No. 1 on the Presidency by the First Hoover Commission. Later he became Director of Task Force No. 1 on the Executive branch for the Connecticut Commission on State Government Organization. Dr. Bailey was Chairman of the Connecticut Democratic State Platform Committee in 1950 and in 1951 became Administrative Assistant to Senator William Benton of Connecticut. He was elected Mayor of Middletown, Connecticut in 1952.

Dr. Bailey is the author of many books and articles on politics, government, and education including Congress Makes a Law, 1950, winner of the Woodrow Wilson prize of the American Political Science Association; The New Congress, 1966. His most recent book (co-authored by Edith K. Mosher is ESEA: The Office of Education Administers a Law, 1968. Among his articles and monographs are, "The Condition of Our National Political Parties," 1959; "Ethics and the Politician," 1960; and "The Office of Education and The Education Act of 1965." 1966. He is coauthor of Congress at Work, 1952; Government in America, 1957; Schoolmen and Politics, 1962; and The Problems and Promises of American Democracy, 1965.

Dr. BAILEY. Essentially what I tried to do in the testimony is to review why it is that educational R. & D. has not produced more specific and dramatic results and to compare it in the sense with what has gone on in the field of agricultural experimentations for 100 years and in the field of health research for a number of decades.

I tried to suggest that, looking back over the past half decade, there have been three major problems in the education R. & D. field as I have observed it.

First, the level of funding has been impossibly inadequate for the laboratories and R. & D. centers and for sponsored research under the Cooperative Research Act of 1954.

Second, the way in which research and development in education is structured in the Federal Government has been very cumbersome, and the funding patterns of Congress have been so unpredictable and intermittent, that it has been very difficult to make sense out of the program. Third, the complexity of educational R. & D. and the diffused and atomized nature of educational governance in the United States makes it very difficult even if you had dramatic breakthroughs in educational research findings to get new practices diffused and adopted by the 17,000 school districts and 150,000 schools in this country.

In short, I am pleading that this committee take seriously what has hampered the development of educational R. & D. to date, and to push through the creation of the NIE-for a new level of funding, a new kind of structure, and a new emphasis upon diffusion of educational innovations.

On the funding side, I can only say that this kind of bill, which I think could be extraordinarily important to the entire society, really is not going to get anywhere unless the Congress and President are willing to start at a level of something like a quarter of a billion dollars a year.

I have spent, as you know, some time as Chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Educational Laboratories for HEW, and year after year I saw the original inadequate amount of money for the laboratories dwindle each year.

That, combined with the unpredictability of the funding, meant that the work done in the laboratories, and there has been some very exciting work done in the laboratories, simply has not been able to pay off in terms of dramatic educational results.

If anybody tried to calculate a way to destroying the morale of research institutions, it would be hard to think of a better way to do it than the way in which R. & D. centers and laboratories have been handled in the last 6 years.

Mr. Chariman, I think that is enough for a beginning. You have my paper before you. I will be glad to respond to any questions I

can.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, Dr. Bailey. Last week on the first day of hearings, Dr. James Gallagher who was in charge of research in education in HEW for a time, suggested that a good deal of quality research in education already exists and that what is required is more attention to the dissemination of the results of that research. This was somewhat at odds with the earlier testimony of Dr. Moynihan, who had suggested that we don't know enough about the learning process and he did not put as much attention to the question of dissemination.