Washington — The first director of the Education Department’s research division, the Institute of Education Sciences, is stepping down today after six years in office, and in a report he sharply criticized its meager budgets.
The institute’s third and final biennial report, timed to the departure of the director, Grover J. Whitehurst, also describes what the agency has accomplished and where it stands.
Mr. Whitehurst has already made clear his support for a computerized system for tracking the progress of college students and graduates. The proposed “unit-record system,” strongly opposed by private colleges, is seen by Mr. Whitehurst and others in the administration as a way of keeping college focused on their most important duties, including preparing students for the workplace.
His report today is a more general call for educational research. Its two main conclusions: First, the creation of the institute, in 2002, has resulted in “much more” knowledge about what educational approaches work best. Second, Mr. Whitehurst said, “our level of ignorance dwarfs our understanding by orders of magnitude.”
Most of the institute’s research focuses on elementary and secondary education, though much of it is carried out by experts at American colleges. That research, however, totaled only $231-million in 2008, or less than one-half of 1 percent of the Education Department’s discretionary budget of $59.2-billion, Mr. Whitehurst said. By comparison, he said, the Department of Health and Human Services spends 42 percent of its discretionary budget on research.
And as another example, he noted that the Broad Foundation recently gave $44-million for a single research laboratory at Harvard University that will focus on education innovation. If the Institute of Education Sciences made a similar-size investment, Mr. Whitehurst said, ”it would cripple its ability to support the field of education research as a whole.”
“The nation,” Mr. Whitehurst said before heading off to his new job as director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, “should not have to depend on private philanthropy to fund this critical work.” —Paul Basken
