American education needs to change to better prepare our young people for a very different future than the one faced by every other earlier generation. The greatest barrier to that needed change is a lack of insight and investment into the research and development needed to guide that change. Almost every other sector of our economy invests heavily in the research and development needed to drive their enterprise forward. Think of the massive research and development efforts in medicine and health care. We see constant reminders of the public and private funding and infrastructure needed to investigate better ways to improve our health. When is the last time you were asked, or even heard about, an effort to contribute funding for educational research and development! As I mentioned in the “Framing Comments” section of this blog, Federal expenditures for research and development in education in 2017 were two-tenths of one percent (0.2%) of the total United States R&D budget. Defense got 193 times more with 38%. Health and Human Services, where the medical research to save our lives originates, got 27% of the Federal R&D expenditures. The problem is even more basic than lack of funding. In the United States, we often lack understanding of what good research would look like, and we almost never pair it with the kind of development that we see in medicine, manufacturing, agriculture, finance, or almost all areas of human enterprise that surround us today. For educators, research is almost always just the evaluation of some education practice. This leads to an often well intended, but often random trial and error approach. There are relatively few examples where research leads to the development of a new practice. This often means that practitioners, academics, or sometimes politicians, introduce a practice or policy with the belief that it will be of value, but without any research findings that might indicate success. This leads us to consume time and energy as we chase those perceived solutions.
New practices and products emerge in other enterprises when there is a marriage between scientific research and careful development. Extensive research to find solutions to specific problems leads to potentially new pharmaceuticals for medicine or new materials for manufacturing or agriculture and then, as an extension of that research, products are developed and tested. In education, we usually have only the “testing” part of that process.
I don’t mean to dismiss some research and development efforts that may come from a few of our larger universities that have the capacity to provide leadership in education research. But for the most part, the research largely fueled by random dissertations in higher education has not moved the enterprise forward.
The answer to this research and development dilemma is not the responsibility of single teachers or school districts. It probably is not realistic for states to unilaterally solve this problem. This is one case – and one of very few cases – where a national solution is needed. This is an area where we need strong national leadership to support education, rather than attempt to regulate it. There needs to be something akin to the National Institutes of Health – but devoted to education and human learning. There must be a national function that works with the education community and others to set and manage the agenda for education research and coordinate private and public partnerships toward promising solutions. There would be much greater opportunities to fund this kind of comprehensive and coordinated approach to improving education.
It always seems as though local education efforts need more funding, and there is always a cry for the Feds to provide more dollars to support local operations. But it would be preferable for any increases in federal funding to be directed toward intelligent national research and development, rather than toward school operations. Federal funding for operations often comes with too many cumbersome “strings” attached. I will include more specifics in future posts.