Research news and Comment: Design Competitions: A Proposal for a New Federal Role in Educational Research and Development

F decades, policymakers have complained that the federal education research and development enterprise has had too little impact on the practice of education (see, for example, Vinovskis, 1993). With a few notable exceptions, this perception is, I believe, largely correct. Federally funded educational R&D has done a good job of producing information to inform educational practice, but has created few well-validated programs or practices that have entered widespread use. The limited direct influence of federal educational R&D, compared to that of, say, research in medicine, physics, and chemistry can certainly be ascribed in part to the far more limited federal investment in educational R&D, coupled with federal policies opposing investment in curriculum development dating back to the Nixon administration and a conservative backlash against such values-laden curricula as "Man: A Course of Study" in the 1970s. However, in recent years the situation has changed in several important ways. The national standards movement has helped define high expectations for all children and in many ways has raised the stakes for education reformers by insisting on authentic student performance (variously measured) as the goal of reform. Adoption in many states of accountability systems based on performance assessments, a movement promoted by recent changes in Title I legislation, gives educators widely accepted performance goals worth aiming for. At the same time, there are very important developments taking place in school-by-school reform almost entirely outside of the federal R&D structure. I am referring to the creation of ambitious, comprehensive models of school reform supported by national networks of staff developers and participating schools, such as James Comer's (1988) School Development Program, Henry Levin's (1987) Accelerated Schools, Ted Sizer's (1984) Coalition of Essential Schools, and our own Success for All and Roots and Wings programs (Slavin, Madden, Dolan, & Wasik, 1994, 1996; Slavin et al., 1994). Each of these networks includes hundreds of schools, regional training programs, and efforts to build collaboration and concern for instructional quality within and among a vast and geographically dispersed set of schools. Reading Recovery (Pinnell, DeFord, & Lyons, 1988), which is not a schoolwide change design but has had profound effects on educational practice, maintains a network involving thousands of schools. More recently, the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC), now called New American Schools (NAS), funded the development and dissemination of seven schoolwide reform designs. Three of these were built on existing national reform groups: the Atlas design was primarily based on Comer's and Sizer's programs, the National Alliance for Restructuring Education was based on the New Standards Project, and our own Roots and Wings model (Slavin, Madden, Dolan, & Wasik, 1994) was based on our Success for All program. However, the development and dissemination agendas of these groups have been substantially advanced by NAS support, and seven promising reform models have been added to the nation's supply of school-reform initiatives. These models are already in use in hundreds of schools. To these might be added the Carnegie Corporation's Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative—which is reforming middle schools in 15 states—the College Boards's Equity 2000 project, curriculum-specific professional development networks such as the National Writing Project and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and many smaller but still impressive school-reform networks.