MR. COHEN: I think the air in here is getting a bit thin. I began to worry when Lee proposed to close down PhD programs, and I got really concerned when Dr. Whitehurst said that AERA was a wonderful organization.

So, I am trying to breathe deeply. I want to talk about a couple of topics, and my concerns are with high quality research education, with professional responsibility in the graduate education of educators.

My understanding of the problem arises in research universities. So, I will talk about four things as quickly as I can.

I want to talk a bit about the sociological situation, in which graduate education, including research training, occurs.

I want to talk a bit about the consequences of that sociological situation for professional education particularly.

I want to say a few words about the environment, the political and intellectual environment in which we subsist, and then I want to say a few things about the alternatives that I can imagine.

First, on the sociological situation. Schools of education have social and professional roles. They exist to grant undergraduate and advanced degrees to teachers and administrators. That is their primary social role.

That is what has turned them into the bovine cash machines that people keep mentioning. That is what generates student credit hours, tuition and all the other things that it is easy to forget about in such discussions.

They also offer advanced education for professionals in education, and in both of these roles they reflect the professional specializations that have grown up in practice, and they reflect those specializations for good fiscal and professional reasons. One need not celebrate the specializations to appreciate why they are there.

In addition to these things, around the fringes of these behemoths of graduate professional education, around the fringes we find serious contributions to both basic and applied knowledge.

There is no doubt in my mind that, considered historically, those contributions have improved, both in quantity and in quality, in the past three decades, enormously improved.

There is also no question in my mind that these institutions have a very, very long way to go before they reach something like a decent standard of quality, either in professional education or in the graduate education of researchers.

This cartoon version of professional education that I have just sketched cuts across the development of any sort of common professional language, whether for professionals or for professional inquirers.

It also cuts against deep research training, except in those areas that have grown up around the fringes of the core of professional education.

It cuts against full time study, which several of you have mentioned, and which is very, very important. It cuts against the development of common standards, whether professional or research.

This situation has enormous consequences for professional education. Just for example, the core business of these institutions is educating teachers and administrators and various specialists of a professional sort.

We have only the weakest traditions of research on that sort of professional education. We do very little defensible work on the core business of the enterprise.

The improvements in educational research have come outside of that core business. They are great, but it means that these institutions are operating in ways that are extremely weakly informed by anything you might consider as valid evidence.

Just think about how many really good studies you could list on the effects of teacher education, something that Bob Floden and Suzanne Wilson did a very nice piece on a year and a half ago.

The central professions of education have not been built in ways that make either the generation of professional knowledge, the systematic generation of professional knowledge that can have some common validity, a priority.

For that reason, they haven't been constructed in ways that make the use of professional or scientific knowledge a priority, for practitioners.

That means that these large public, mostly, graduate education institutions take in people whose practice is not devoid of intelligence, but it is largely devoid of an appreciation of what it would take to generate common professional knowledge of some quality, or to use that knowledge in practice or in improving practice.

So, that is a humongous problem, right at the center of this enterprise that we are discussing, and in my mind, it raises profound questions of professional responsibility.

Schools of education, if we just move to the research training consequences here, schools of education chronically permit students to graduate as researchers who have extremely weak research training.

This happens even at schools of education where Steve Raudenbush has studied and taught. Steve is a national treasure.

One of the first things I did when Ted Sizer(?) hired Mike Smith and Sandy Jencks and myself onto the ed school faculty, was to go to the dissertation section of the library and to read the sorts of theses that were produced in the graduate school of education.

That was a shocking experience. That was also one of the early things I did when my wife and I migrated to Michigan State University.

It was an equally shocking experience, and it was equally shocking at the University of Michigan. There seems to be no minimum standard for research training.

A student who persists long enough can get a degree, a research degree. I mean, that is a serious problem with professional responsibility, or irresponsibility. I haven't seen any movement in our field to try to deal with it.

As I said, this is the cartoon version of the enterprise in which we are thinking about how to improve research training.

This enterprise, which grew up in an era in which public education was about opening access and generating educational attainment, it wasn't about performance as we understand the term. It was about building institutions that could take in everybody and get everybody through.

All sorts of things were done in public schools to enable that, which I am sure all of you are familiar with, but very few of them had to do with supporting solid, academic performance.

That situation in public education has a great deal to do with why ed schools and departments of education have grown up, as they have, so that I can draw this little verbal cartoon.

The environment is changing. Increasingly, public officials and civic leaders see and treat public education as an outcome oriented enterprise and, increasingly, there is pressure for evidence based interventions, and evidence based reasoning about spending the money that goes into the enterprise.

Whatever you may think about no child left behind, whatever you may have thought about the Clinton version, the IASA, whatever you may think about state standards based reform, I don't think this is going to go away.

It troubles me deeply that so few of my colleagues seem to be taking seriously this development in the country.

That is the cartoon version of the environment in which we are thinking about all these issues, and you heard bits of it in various of the presentations.

So, what alternatives can I think of that might be reasonably feasible or discuss-able? Well, one is, as several other speakers have mentioned, the split degree, the research and practitioner degree, where we hive off research training into a much more serious enterprise than it now is in most places.

One other manifestation of these problems, which I forgot to mention is, that even where there is good methods training in education, typically there are not advanced courses that require students to use the methods that they were to have learned in those beginning courses.

That is an educational calamity, because however good the methods courses are, if one doesn't use and reuse, learn and relearn the ideas, the analytic frames, one is not going to -- Thorndike was right. There really are practice effects.

I mean, that is a terrific problem. So, when I say hive off research training, I mean build a curriculum that really is cumulative, as Dr. Whitehurst was suggesting, and I forget which of his points this was, where he was talking about the progressive products.

What he was saying in effect was you have got to learn this stuff at increasingly difficult levels and learn to produce.

It has been rare in my experience, and in the experience of the colleagues I have questioned about this, research students, to find students who get to the thesis stage in the school of education and know roughly what it means to do a serious, sustained piece of work.

Their curriculum is course, course, course, and most of the courses are introductory. There is no meta curriculum that helps them understand where they are supposed to be going.

So, all by itself, the split degree would be an enormous effort requiring deep thought and lots of work, and this option includes leaving the education of intending practitioners as it is, even though I think it is seriously professionally irresponsible.

The second option, which is much more difficult, includes the specialized research degree, but also includes developing professional training for intending practitioners, which helps them to learn what systematic inquiry into professional practice is, and how to do it and how to use it, and to help them develop common standards of salience and quality.

In my view, this is a much grander challenge than developing good, segregated research training. Because of the ways in which public education and professional education were built in this country, knowledge generation and knowledge use was not part of the agenda of professional practice or education.

If we intend to turn the system in ways that will make it more effective, especially more effective for kids who don't already know how to use schools, that is going to have to change, but that is an enormous challenge.

A third option, which is not mutually exclusive with the first two, would be to fund joint programs, joint programs, as Steve Raudenbush mentioned earlier, with statistics and biostat, joint programs with economics.

Some of the most impressive work that is being done on education today is being done by labor economists, and it would be possible, I think, to fund such joint programs.

I haven't thought it through far enough or talked to enough people to know exactly how to do it but, at a minimum, funding joint fellowship programs would be a significant step in the right direction. That could be done with some of these other things.

Finally, the last option, the one that is easiest and least taxing and most dangerous, of course, is to just limp along. Thank you.

[Applause.]