Since the mid-1960s, a far-flung system of regional laboratories has served as the federal government’s bridge between research and practice in education…. Education administrators had long called on the labs for professional-development programs, management help, research reviews, and various other expert services….
Those long-standing relationships were jolted last spring, however, when the Institute of Education Sciences…. announced the results of its latest laboratory competition…. Under the new five-year contracts, the 10 regional labs received new missions, and in four cases, new operators. Their new charge is to spend more time doing… research and less time on some of the constituent services….
The stepped-up emphasis on rigorous research grows out of the institute’s campaign… to foster more education studies that are “scientifically based.”… [T]he labs also have to assume new roles to avoid duplicating the work of the federally financed network of 20 regionally based comprehensive-assistance centers….created two years ago to advise states and districts on complying with the No Child Left Behind Act ….
[T]he labs must divide their time equally among…. dissemination, research, and rapid-response projects. The last category refers to studies that can be turned around in 12 months…. The problem, some members of the regional labs’ governing boards say, is that “rapid response” hasn’t been rapid enough…. The slowdown stems in part from new requirements that applied to the new laboratory contracts, including one that all lab-produced studies had to be vetted by outside peer-review panels twice—once in the beginning to get the proposals approved and again once the studies had been completed…. [R]apid -response projects were required to be completed within a contract year. That led some labs to postpone study requests that came too late to be completed by the contract year’s end. …
Phoebe H. Cottingham, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, which oversees the lab system for the IES. “It is true that maybe in the past, for instance, more attention was paid in the labs to running seminars for teachers, but there are now many people who do professional-development services…. Now the focus is on what do we know about professional-development strategies.”
Debra Viadero, Education Week, March 14.