DR. BRUCE: -- minutes to midnight, but you have to understand that there are 11 years left through No Child Left Behind, everybody has got to be at or above this path, and this is the infamous path, to 100 percent, every child has got to meet that goal in now 11 years. Class goal, public education is a 13 year process, a randomized trial where some students actually don’t get any education, and we put them in some special place, is not likely to happen and get us results in 11 years, since that’s a 13 year process. But it’s worrying for me, it’s both a promising time and a very worrying time because I’ve watched in the course of one school year the reaction of schools, of school administrators, school superintendents, or principals change dramatically to being not as focused on students and what’s good for students, but what is that students’ score going to do for my school.

We’re a fall testing state, we’re still actually conducting our tests, and as kids are mobile during testing time it’s very disturbing to me to have that question be the first question someone asks me. Well if I finish the testing of this student what’s the impact on my AYP status? Now with that sort of negative introduction I want to say that there’s never been a time when educators need better information about what is good effective practice in the classroom.

States need it, in Indiana we’re looking at using the What Works Clearinghouse best practice kinds of tools and links off of our website as our first level of technical assistance because Under No Child Left Behind as we identify schools that fail to meet their targets for adequately process we’ve got to provide technical assistance to them. We’re close to having our final list of all schools and in Indiana that’s going to be under 25 percent of the 1900 public schools that are going to be identified as failing to meet AYP, which is let’s just say that’s 500 schools, there are 250 Department of Ed employees, every Department of Ed employee has two schools now to provide technical assistance to. How are we going to get assistance to schools who need it, how are we going to provide good practice to them? And in the end it’s going to be, although I hate to go to the medical model, it is going to be an issue of triage, you’re going to have to find for the directory sources from states, at least in Indiana’s case, we’re going to have to find the schools in greatest need and we’re going to concentrate our resources there. Schools who just barely failed to meet AYP and I’d love to see the research model behind the AYP model of 37 ways to fail and one to succeed, but those schools who are very close, who miss by one tenth of one percent of their students passing in the special education subgroup, they’re going to be left to a list of best practices. And the more developed that can be, the more information there is about the generalizability of research practice of what’s been found to be good research the more likely it is that schools are going to choose a treatment that may be appropriate for their setting.

When we look at how you conduct this research in schools and whether it’s truly randomized field trials or some other research technique you need to understand that for every single school the stakes are high and have gotten higher, and it’s a real approach avoidance kind of, I’d guess I’d say there’s this cognitive dissidence, in my early days I was a rat runner, you know I was trained in classical research psyche and you’ve got schools who want information, want to know that they’ve got good practice, want to know what good practice is, at the same time they’ve got a line that they have to meet. And if there’s a group of students who don’t get the treatment, whether it’s in their school, whether it’s a classroom in their school or the school next door and that treatment seems to be somewhat effective, the issue that was raised very early this morning about treatment slippage is a very real issue, you don’t have three years, four years to conduct research and get results back to schools about good practice every year that goes by the bar has been raised higher for the level of performance.

As the guy who’s in charge of the test I need to make sure I do share my concerns about not just the quality of the assessments but the amount of stakes that are being placed on typically a single instrument that was not designed to evaluate either the effectiveness of schools or states but was actually designed to measure something about individual students. So schools are going to be asking you questions like what do I get out of this, what do my kids get out of this, what’s the cost of this for us? How soon can we implement this and how soon most importantly will I have results?

We heard a good bit about initial planning and you never want to underestimate the amount of lead time that it takes, particularly when you’re in states that pride themselves on local control, if you’re going to go outside of one, if you want to cross more then one district boundary, good luck, you’re really going to find out about local control. So you don’t want to underestimate the lead time but also don’t underestimate the pressure that schools, that districts are going to feel to see results of any kind of research that’s done these days. And I’m not sure, I want to say I need to, the first part of this afternoon’s presentation I think helped put a lot of this in perspective for me because I’m not sure what the right approach is and we certainly want to look at all the possible models. We know that education clearly has not done the job, now what the right approach is to determining effective educational practice is yet to be determined, there’s lots of work to do there, but people want results quickly because at least until the next election or the next reauthorization of ESEA you’ve got the death path that’s set up there for every single school.

Remember that you are dealing with a system that’s used to being, that really takes the idea of local control to the nth degree and that there’s the sanctity of what’s behind the classroom door. And you can deliver and believe you have all the compliance that you desire from an individual teacher in a group setting but once that door closes what goes on inside that classroom may or may not resemble what you thought the treatment was going to look like. Good teachers share and looking at how you’re going to randomize I think is a very important piece because trying to control studies within a school becomes, or treatments within a school becomes very, very difficult. Because the good teachers will share ideas that seem to be working and because at heart they’re there to serve students, and while they may believe in the larger research, the larger goals of the research it’s really hard to tear good teachers away from delivering services to students.

Participating in research though raises the profile of the school, and that’s in both good and bad ways, so be sensitive to that as you go out. One of the points I heard here that I really agree with is co-opting the staff, when you’re looking for this participation making sure that people understand in terms that are real for them, what are the potential benefits, what will they get out of it, what will it cost them, are things that you need to work with. But if you can get good buy-in from the community with which you’re working and whether that’s just the school community or the larger community I think you’ll be very well served.

On the caution side, I do want to caution you about the issues of fairness and notice because in many, in a state that’s got some large urban centers and some very rural settings I guarantee you there are only 30, out of 296 school corporations there are only 25 or 30 school districts, excuse me, we call them corporations because we like to be different, Indiana has peer issues, I mean Louisiana has peer issues, Indiana has corporations and not districts, but there are only 25 or 30 that have any kind of research review, so there are lots of naïve people out in the farmlands of Indiana and you need to be, you need to protect their interests if they’re not sophisticated in the larger sense in terms of research and also understand that with this pressure that’s come from No Child Left Behind that schools are seeking a silver bullet in many cases, and your research may dangle that bullet in front of them and you want to operate ethically with that piece as well.

There’s been a little bit said about politics and like the pressures of No Child I don’t think you can underestimate the potential effects for your, for any research that’s being done in schools from politics. That’s why if you can get that larger buy-in from the community, however you define that, you’ll be better served from the fact that the average tenure of a large urban superintendent is just over a year and a half, and the things that, the way winds can blow quickly when you weren’t anticipating the fact that four of the seven school board members who approved your research in August are not elected in November might impact what’s going to happen for the rest of the year in the school where the treatment is just now up and running and you were expecting to collect data both in December and June and you’re told that the winds have changed. So you want to make sure that you understand the politics and that you use the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, that idea where you look at your entrée, who’s on the ground who can help you and tell you which way the wind is blowing. All that can ever do is help you in these kinds of situations or dealing with these things because the political landscape at the local level in terms of education has gotten a lot more rugged in the last three or four years and the current climate of accountability at all costs and a fairly narrow definition of accountability at all costs isn’t improving the evenness of that.

So that’s sort of my view from the state.