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STATEMENT OF DR. JAMES GALLAGHER, DIRECTOR, FRANK PORTER GRAHAM CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

Mr. GALLAGHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I did detect a certain tinge of Gaelic in the witness list this morning. I will try and make my points brief and to the point, and not go through the actual written testimony.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Without objection, the testimony will be printed as if read at this point in the hearing.

(The statement referred to follows:)

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JAMES J. GALLAGHER, DIRECTOR, FRANK PORTER GRAHAM CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, AT CHAPEL HILL My name is James J. Gallagher and I am director of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C. My particular interest in the National Institute of Education and its goals stem from my three years of experience in the Office of Education first as Associate Commissioner of Education in charge of the programs for the Handicapped and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary in charge of Planning Research and Evaluation. These experiences have caused me to be most enthusiastic about the potential of the National Institute of Education. This enthusiasm is tempered by the many different conditions that must occur before such an organization can hope to become an effective instrument of educational reform. I hope to share with you today both my enthusiasm and some of the conditions that, I believe, will create a viable National Institute.

There are several important facts that can put the educational research and development operation in the United States into perspective:

1. The federal government is the prime contributor of resources for educational research and development. A recent survey1 indicated that over 85% of educational R & D money was provided from federal sources.

2. Support for this activity is quite recent. The Cooperative Research Act, which eventually became Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, did not reach the 10 million mark until 1964 and reached fifty million in 1966 coincident with the funding of the ESEA.

3. The percentage of funds spent on R&D relative to the total costs are one tenth that allotted in fields of health sciences, industry and defense (about 4 of 1%).

IMPACT OF RESEARCH ON EDUCATION

One of the questions often asked is, does research and development make a difference? Does education change as a result of research? The answer to that question is, Yes, but that such change rarely occurs as a result of a single study or independent of other influences operating at the same time. Rather, such change comes from an accumulation of research on a particular topic and takes place through a kind of osmosis where the ideas seep into the educational establishment through convention papers, university courses, popularized articles in the mass media, etc. Often when an educational administrator adopts a new educational practice he may not, himself, be aware that the new approach stems from research done a half decade before. Some clear examples of research impact on the educational scene could be mentioned briefly.

Studies on autocratic vs. democratic leadership patterns helped change the teacher-pupil learning atmosphere in many schools so that students now participate more actively in the learning process.

Recent studies on the nature of creativity has sensitized many schools and many teachers to the imaginative and divergent thinking processes of children and how to stimulate them.

Studies on the special problems and pliglit of black students helped to set in motion major societal changes devoted to redressing some important educational imbalances.

1 Gideonse, H. Educational research and development in the United States. U.S. Office of Education, Washington, D.C., 1969.

Thirty to forty years of research on the learning process have been utilized to develop programmed learning efforts which allow students to pace themselves and progress at their own rate more effectively.

Important longitudinal studies on gifted students have helped to dispel an array of mistaken ideas and myths concerning those children who provide a major source of future leadership for our nation.

Innovative use of media and technology with handicapped children have revealed that they can learn effectively many important skills previously denied them if we but use our own ingenuity in devising new educational methods and materials to instruct them.

CHANGING NEEDS

The entire nature of Educational Research and Development in the U.S. has been changing most rapidly, considering that the effective funding did not exist before 1966. Clearly defined trends are as follows:

1. More long range and large projects.

2. More emphasis on development rather than research.

3. More emphasis on targeted research directed to a specific objective, rather than a free marketplace of projects determined by the researchers themselves.

All of these trends will require great tact and delicate handling of the various forces in the educational community that are affected. It will require systematic planning to meet long term objectives and this, in turn, will demand full utilization of educational and scientific leaders in such planning. It is not conceivable to me that, under current Office of Education circumstances, such leadership can be provided. This is not a negative comment on the new leadership personnel in OE but is rather based on my understanding of the limitations of their situation.

PERSONNEL

One of the most important changes that a National Institute of Education will provide is a team of high level professionals that can contribute effective management and leadership to a continuing effort at educational reform. The current status of the personnel in the research program within the Office of Education does not match these responsibilities. One clear measure of practical priority is the number of supergrade positions (GS-16 and above) that is allotted to a program. Currently, the research program in the Office of Education is allotted four supergrade positions. These can be compared with fifty positions at the supergrade level in the National Science Foundation, with only 4 times the budget of OE, and eighty-nine positions at the supergrade level in the National Institutes of Health.

Good programs are designed and managed by good personnel and many of the complaints from the educational field that has been heard in the past few years have their origin in the inability of the Office of Education to match the quality of the applicant or field researcher with a similar quality in the federal staff who monitors his work.

The proposal for the National Institute places an important stress on the need for high level personnel to provide wise leadership for the major program thrusts that must come in the years immediately ahead of us.

GOVERNMENTAL AMNESIA

While there are some parallels to be drawn between the current National Institutes of Health and the proposed National Institute of Education there are some important differences as well and these differences need to be recognized when management and organizational plans are being made for the NIE. The National Institutes of Health are still generally committed to a policy of major support for basic research, for the seeking of knowledge for its own sake, with trust in the eventual usefulness of such knowledge to solve important health problems.

The directions in educational research and development have clearly been in the direction of more development. More than one out of every two dollars are now spent in OE is spent on educational development, as opposed to research. While research is the quest for new knowledge; development is the planned production of materials or programs for use in educational settings, with different management needs.

The management of a pure research program often consists primarily of getting good consultants to help make decisions on whether the proposed research has scientific merit or not. Decisions on development clearly are made in terms of agency priorities and here we have not yet devised a good management procedure to assure that the educational consumers (the administrator and educators), as well as producers, will have some say as to the products that will be generated. The consumer must play a key role at all levels of policy development.

Since development costs run about ten times that of the usual research projects, decisions as to what to support in this domain are crucial to the effectiveness or noneffectiveness of the total program effort. The decision-making that has taken place has been a blend of the old method of making decisions on research projects (peer approval) and agency decisions that have contributed to the single more pressing issue in R&D today-the problem of governmental amnesia.

The National Institute of Education must, if it is to be a success, meet this problem of governmental amnesia about past priorities.

The history of government priorities is that they will change about every two or three years, often coincident to the major changeover of leadership staff in an agency such as the Office of Education. But major research and development efforts in education often take from five to ten years to complete. This means that by the time the R&D effort is in full swing, it has lost its priority position and is in great danger of having funds drastically cut back and its effort blunted in favor of the new priority, whereupon the whole depressing sequence starts all over again.

If the National Institute of Education can establish some degree of protection that will allow major priority programs (assuming pehaps 20% of the total budget) to complete a five year cycle, the money and personnel resources will be much more satisfactorily spent. Once there has been a commitment to a priority, and strong quality control standards applied in selection of recipients, then the program should be allowed to run its course without a semiannual threat of dismemberment or major cut in budget that causes them to reprogram all of their plans and activities. This requires a degree of self control in both the Executive branch and Legislative appropriation committees to follow through on past commitments. But the present practice of pulling the plants up by the roots to see how it is growing every six months has caused great dissention and disillusionment among those committed to educational research and development in the country.

We must be wise enough to understand that not every project will be a success. It is not in the nature of research and development in any field to be always significant or important. Not every rocket followed a true course in the space program nor does every vaccine extract turn out to be a life saving one. There are many failures and disappointments awaiting those who step from the familiar ground of status quo education to the frontiers of knowledge or practice. It is the excitement and uncertainty of discovery that is attractive to those who work in this 20th Century frontier. The risks are great enough and don't need to be compounded by inconsistent government policy.

COST

We now have garnered enough experience in the field of educational research and development to provide some rough per unit costs of major projected efforts. If we can clearly state our R&D objectives, we should be able to make some judgment as to approximate cost. Table 1 on page 8 gives some estimates as to what one could expect to buy with additional sums of money and how long it should take before expected delivery. A major national curriculum project which attempts to reconstruct major elements of the existing program such as a new mathematics program or a new social studies curriculum or a new curriculum to meet special needs of disadvantaged students would cost about 10-15M dollars. This is what such efforts have cost in the past and these sums are uncorrected for inflation.

Sesame Street costs have run 8 million dollars for their first series and promise to run a good deal more for their second effort now in progress. A major effort at National Assessment now underway for about five years, and still having four years to run for initial data collection across ten areas, will cost about 35-40 million dollars.

One of my most serious concerns about the National Institute of Education is the danger that it would be established with the usual enthusiastic rhetoric but with

resources that would not even approach what is needed to do the tasks assigned it. After two or three years we could then expect to hear the noises of disappointment growing louder and a feeling would be abroad that one more noble attempt has failed. I believe that the seeds for potential failure are contained in that Table on costs, plus a set of objectives that runs wildly beyond what is appropriated. TABLE 1.-ESTIMATED COST FOR EDUCATIONAL INNOVATIONS

Type of innovation

Cost (in millions)

Delivery

time (years)

Major curriculum projects (such as BSCS, new mathematics, etc.)..

New innovations in media and technology (such as "Sesame Street," computer assisted instruction

New efforts at assessment-accountability (national assessment program, Belmont project)..

Experimental schools.

5

Major studies in financial reform..

3-5

Training 100 senior researchers...

4-5

1 Estimates provided from National Center for Educational Research and Development, Office of Education. $5,000,000 each.

How much can 25 million buy? That is the question. Let us say that our objective is to improve urban education. One major curriculum effort and one major innovative effort in the use of mass media would be about all we could afford for that price tag. This means that we would not be able to spend additional money on R&D in vocational education programs or early education or the special problems of the deaf or mentally retarded or higher education reform or new models for rural education.

One of the most constructive areas of questioning that this committee might wish to pursue with future witnesses might well be the cost estimates that they would put beside their objectives for the NIE. It is all very well and good to wish to reform the elementary school program, introduce new preschool programs, provide new curriculum for community colleges, and new systems for computer assisted instruction and so on. But all of these efforts carry expensive price tags and we must first decide, are we going to finance this operation in such a way that there will be reasonable confidence that such tasks as we set for it will be carried out?

If the new Office of Management and Budget operates in a similar fashion to the old Bureau of the Budget, which I viewed with restrained affection, it can wave its cape and all of a sudden one hundred million dollars will appear in the National Institute of Education budget. Only those in Washington will know that it is merely a transfer of existing funds in the Office of Education budget to a new budget line with no actual new money committed at all. It would be a cruel hoax to suggest that that hundred million dollars could be used for these new objectives. A large proportion of that money will be continuation of past research activities that must be continued or else the government will again be quite properly accused of more broken promises and commitments.

It would be a great surprise to me if more than 20 million of that total figure would be really available to meet some of these new ambitious objectives. Rather than suggest a particular figure for an increase, let me suggest that we place a price tag on the proposed activities of just one of the 15 suggested program elements for the new Institute-Improving Education of the Disadvantaged, presented in the excellent planning document produced by Roger Levien. The suggested program includes basic studies on causes of educational disadvantage, curriculum projects, major programs in early childhood, experimental schools, new measuring instruments and transmittal of research. A crude estimate of costs would be 125 million for that one objective. Cost for the 14 other objectives would be worth calculating on a more systematic fashion that I have been able to do.

DELIVERY SYSTEM

One of my continuing concerns which includes both the current bill and the administration plans (as shown through the Levien report) is the limited attention paid to the delivery of finished product or discoveries to the educational consumer, to the administrator, the teacher and the student. Putting it very prag matically, if we developed an excellent reading curriculum in Phoenix how can

we get it to Minneapolis or if there is a fine mathematics program in Los Angeles how can we get that to Winston-Salem or Peoria. This is no educational transportation system.

What we wish to transport is not just information but complex systems of behavior where the teacher will have to interact sequentially with students and so the communication that makes a difference will involve demonstration and training. Previous limited efforts at transmitting new discoveries or new programs have been tried through the establishment of demonstration centers that illustrate the new program in action; through the design of special centers such as the Special Education Instructional Materials Network; through the establishment of Regional Educational Laboratories. All of these experiences come back with similar messages.

1. We consistently underestimate the complexity of the change process in education.

2. Program change, when it takes place, usually occurs because a personal relationship has been established by the person selling change and the educational customer.

3. Unless systematic channels of communication involving personal contact are established, the changes will be difficult to maintain, even if started.

4. It is hard to find those elements in the new programs that are so rewarding that they will overcome the fears and anxieties raised by departing the educational status quo.

Yet without a specific plan for how to deliver the products of the educational research and development efforts we will continue to have a huge chasm between educational innovation and educational implementation. One of my strongest recommendations therefore would be to have the planning for a National Institute of Education become intimately involved in the search for, and demonstrations of, a modern educational communication system, and to budget for it. The cost of this transportation system to build regular communication between the developer and the consumer is likely to be very large, and there is nothing in current budgeting that shows a recognition for this crucial problem. The National Center for Educational Communications in the Office of Education currently carries a budget of less than ten million dollars, enough perhaps to run an information dissemination system such as ERIC, but not to stimulate major innovations in the transportation of new practices. State departments of education and even regional service centers may have to become involved in such a total program. My concern is not that we have an answer that no one is listening to, but rather that too few persons seem to understand that failure to come to grips with this issue will cause much of the other efforts in NIE to be less than totally efficient.

We all realize that a single Institute with a $200M budget is not going to, by itself, reform the 65 billion dollar disconnected enterprise we call American education. It can be, though, an important catalyst to start many needed changes. I applaud the efforts of this committee to stimulate a new and necessary chapter in American educational reform.

Mr. GALLAGHER. I applaud this committee's effort to get wide-ranging testimony on this bill. Instead of going into the many different aspects of it I would like to concentrate on three things.

One is that as the research operation is currently designed, the Government is compulsively required to break its promises to people. Second, that there is insufficient understanding about the cost factors which are involved in educational research.

Third, the matter of delivery systems which has been brought up. What is important is: How do you get new ideas in the classroom.

I would like to focus on these three points. There are a certain number of facts that are worth recalling. One is that the Federal Government is the prime, and perhaps the only, major supporter of educational research and development in this country. Some 85 to 90 percent of the funds spent on educational research and development are spent from the Federal Government. If the Federal Government doesn't provide the funds in the current situations, these funds are not available.