2004 IPR DISTINGUISHED PUBLIC POLICY LECTURE

Wisdom of the Head, Not the Heart
IES Director recounts efforts to move education to evidence-based studies and policies

Fall 2004, Volume 26, Number 2

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst answers a question while IPR Director Fay Lomax Cook looks on.

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, first director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), spoke at IPR’s 2004 Distinguished Public Policy Lecture on April 26. He addressed the premises, principles, pragmatics, and politics of making education evidence based after more than three years on the job.

Educators and researchers in the field have been slow to embrace experiments based on random assignment to treatment and control groups. So it was not surprising that Whitehurst has encountered considerable resistance from many educators in trying to introduce the widespread use of such methods.

“We have a system that employs large numbers of both practitioners and scholars—that system is largely an evidence-free zone,” he said. “Evidence is a threat to the livelihoods of many of those who currently control and theorize about that system. But it is a friend to those that system is supposed to serve.”

Detractors argue that every child in a classroom is different, and schools are complex institutions, but Whitehurst pointed out that the same could be said of patients and hospitals. Yet medical research relies on randomized clinical trials (RCTs), in which outcomes are tested through random assignment of participants to either a particular treatment or control group. He also pointed out that RCTs are not limited to just the medical field, but are also used in thousands of studies in such diverse fields as psychology, social welfare, and agriculture.

While he does not decry the “wisdom of the heart” which seems to rule in education circles, he feels that it must be matched with appropriate empirical methods to achieve meaningful results and make progress.

Education is not “unique,” he argued. There is enough overlap between fields such as clinical psychology and health care and the field of education that “we can provide and profit from their methods and approaches, and we can learn from the history of their transformation into evidence-based endeavors,” he said.

Practically speaking, this means creating a rigorous and relevant research base and getting people to use it. As the first director of IES, Whitehurst came with a track record in research and empirical studies. Previously, he was Leading Professor of Psychology and Pediatrics and Chairman of the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Over the course of his academic career he has authored or edited five books and published more than 100 papers in his field of expertise, language and pre-reading development in children.

From left: Russ Whitehurst chats with School of Education Dean Penelope Peterson, Associate Professor David Uttal, and University of Chicago Professor Larry Hedges.

Though IES’s research budget has grown by 60 percent since 2000, historically, the federal government has not provided much funding for education research. If all other cabinet-level federal agencies kept pace with inflation in terms of their research budget and the IES budget was doubled every five years, it would still take 15 years for the IES to move out of last place, he said. This is why it is essential for IES-funded studies to produce relevant, worthwhile results, he noted. To this end, IES has designated priority funding areas such as math and science education, reading comprehension, and pre-K curricula.

One important initiative that Whitehurst has championed has been the What Works Clearinghouse (http:// whatworks.ed.gov/). This Web site seeks to provide a trusted and reliable source of information (databases and reports) on what works in education. It allows parents, teachers, and school superintendents to check whether a company’s educational product or program is measurably effective and can produce the desired results. The first studies were released this summer.

“I’m quite optimistic that the practice of evidence-based education will become routine,” he concluded. “When that happens, education across the nation will, I believe, go into a period of continuous improvement that has not been seen heretofore. And I think we will get to a point where every child who enters a school or any other educational setting has the reasonable expectation that they will get a good enough education to get them where they want to go.”

To download a complete copy of the Whitehurst Distinguished Public Policy Lecture, please go to www.northwestern.edu/ipr/events/lectures/dpplectures.html.