and together with the K-12 schools so that you get the full mix of activity among the various players.

Dr. MCGUIRE. I think the idea of being king is not a bad one. [Laughter.]

Mr. EHLERS. You have entertained that too, huh?

Dr. MCGUIRE. I just hope that somewhere along the line we will pause to draw up our problems in big and important enough a way that we find ourselves compelled to go after them with real force that this country is fully capable of. So, for instance, I do not know why we don't just commit ourselves to saying that we want substantially all the kids in this country to know how to read by eight or nine years of age. And when we think about that problem and what it would take to solve it, it leads us directly to the question of teacher training, it leads us directly to the question of curriculum and curricular materials, it leads us directly to the question of how we organize our schools in the first place, et. cetera, et. cetera. But I think when we go after these problems in pieces and chunks, we make it so hard to add our knowledge base back so as to provide any guidance that is truly helpful to people in the schools.

Chairman SMITH. Representative Biggert.

Mrs. BIGGERT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Maybe since Mr. Ehlers is on such a roll, I should ask the panelists what they think of his amendment to Title I, to include science to the standards and testing requirements for Title I. But I won't.

Mr. EHLERS. They all approve it.

Mrs. BIGGERT. Instead, I would like to know from Dr. Sunley, Dr. McGuire, and Dr. Lyon, how do you determine the research activities? Do you sometimes find yourselves overlapping with each other, or is there kind of a working together to ensure that those research studies are not duplicating each other's activities?

Dr. SUNLEY. We have people at all levels through all three organizations that are working together to make sure we understand what each other's portfolio of research activities might be. In fact, we sort of run the gamut, as it were, of different kinds of activities as well. NSF, of course, focuses on math and science education, technological education, and the use of learning technologies as a tool in education across all fields. The Department of Education tends to focus I think a little bit on broader issues that cover all potential disciplines in education. And I will not put words in Kent McGuire's mouth, I will let him tell you more about that. And NICHD, again, is more focused on some of the developmental issues and how they come into play in terms of how students learn. I think what the interagency program is beginning to do is bring the strengths of all three agencies into play in addressing what seem to us to be the most pressing issues for student learning in these core subject areas.

Dr. MCGUIRE. Very quickly. I think to have that question asked from time to time is helpful with respect to coordination. Secondly, I guess I would argue that we really do try at OERI to focus on those things where we have a real opportunity to add value. So we really depend on the basic research that you see underway as a consequence of NSF or the National Institutes of Health. And the

challenge for us is to take that basic knowledge and leverage it in lots of really smart and intelligent ways.

I think the burden for us under the IERI is to be vigilant about and sure that in doing these things together we really meet two standards: (1) That the work we support here is either strengthened as a consequence of the partnership and therefore done better than it could otherwise be done; or (2) there is not any other way to pull off the work. And while we should all be smart about what each other is up to, we should not take the time and effort to partner just for the sake of it. But that is on all of our minds and I think we are working at it.

Dr. LYON. Let me give you a good example that I think gets to the heart of your question. There is educational policy that is now being put in place, and has been put in place for years, that addresses how children whose first language is Spanish should be taught. All of those policy suggestions are based on extremely minimal data; it is vapor. We really do not know the conditions under which kids whose first language is Spanish should be taught to speak English and to read English. So the OERI and the NICHD have combined efforts to ask these basic questions for, believe it or not, the first time in history at this level of rigor, at this level of longevity, at this level of multidisciplinariness.

So this is a place where we can bring to the task an understanding of how English reading develops and the tools, the tasks, and the methodologies that are necessary for that. What OERÍ brings to the task is its knowledge of classroom structures, teacher preparation, and teacher-student interactions and so forth. But, believe it or not, all of the policies that have been put in place with respect to the most increasing ethnic society in this country has never undergone any rigorous test whatsoever. We cannot do it alone, and I do not know if OERI could have done it alone, but it is a partnership that works quite well.

Mrs. BIGGERT. Thank you. And thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman SMITH. Mr. Gutknecht.

Mr. GUTKNECHT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I must say that my wife works at a nursery school that basically was started in Rochester, Minnesota to study child development, a nursery school called Aldridge Nursery School. She understands all of this a whole lot better than I do. But I have just been fascinated listening to all of this because I have to say honestly that this is an area that is both fascinating and frustrating. I say often that I have learned more from my kids than they will ever learn from me. I say that because I have three children and they are all three different and they all learn differently. And we see this even at my wife's nursery school. She talks about the kids quite often and about how some take longer to learn a certain skill than others.

Let me start at the outset, I really think what you do is important and I think as a Congress we need to continue to advance the research. But every child is different. Just looking at my own three and the way they learn and how they develop, the human mind is so complicated. I do not know if we will ever really come up with a perfect system for educating kids because they are all different. Maybe you can respond to that.

Dr. LYON. We are not going to come up with a perfect system. But there is order within the complexity. Because we study language and reading so much, I have to try to come to your comments and your question from that domain. Science could be a whole other ball of wax. But if you step back and you look at something like reading in the English language and ask what does it take to be able to do it, what you are going to find evidence doing from robust studies is converging on a number of things that kids have to bring to bear to learn to read.

Without being "jargony," they have got to be able to tell the shapes in front of them go this way or that way, they have got to understand that our language is composed of sounds, they have got to slap those sounds on top of those squiggly lines, they have got to learn to do that quickly, they have got to bring to bear a lot of vocabulary and stuff so they understand what it is they read. It is much more complicated than that, of course. But the fact is researchers across this table or from agencies across this table have spent years converging on what it takes. In fact, the NRC report on beginning reading went into detail about what it takes to learn how to read.

The tough part is how do you get what it takes to these kids with these massive individual differences. That is where teachers, and I was trying to suggest this earlier, teachers would benefit from a training regimen that helped them understand that all of these complex developmental capabilities are made up of components that have to be integrated. Some children get those components by getting the big picture first. Other children get those components by having them shown with greater clarity individually and then integrated.

The graph that the Chairman had put back up in terms of those different things, they are actual clinical trials looking at how dif ferent children respond to combinations of different approaches. And in the main, that can be managed fairly well. But the teachers have to be pulled away from "one size fits all," which I think is what you are getting to, the magic bullet, and ask themselves, having a foundation in what it takes to learn something, okay, here is Sally, she has got this part and this part, but something is off in this part. What do I select from a variety of means to bolster that particular missing piece.

But essential to this process, just like in any problem-solving process, is to understand what is being integrated; what the different things are that kids need. Because we can I think tell you with a great deal of confidence that to learn how to read in the English language you have to have certain conditions in place that are all necessary but not sufficient in their own right, and most teachers do what they feel is necessary and forget the sufficiency part, that there is multiple pieces that have to fit together. That is why you get stuff like whole language versus phonics versus this and that, when in fact those different kinds of ways of teaching are more appropriate for different kids at different stages of development. And while that sounds complicated, we certainly are figuring it out pretty well.

Dr. MCGUIRE. I just would say two things. You made the point again I was trying to make in my five minutes, that you are not

going to escape that reality. I think we should embrace it instead. We need to worry about doing research that controls most of that reality away, because it is when we do that that we run the risk of coming up with findings that just do not apply in the broad view. I think there are three or four things we can do, however. I have got two kids, 6 and 10, they are like night and day. But we can arm teachers with much greater repertoire so that they are more sophisticated about how they handle those differences when they see them. We can put a lot more knowledge about how people learn into the materials that are available to teachers, into the professional development experiences that are available to them. We can work much harder than we have to come up with much better assessment and assessment technologies so that people are much more efficient at recognizing what those differences are and how to respond to them.

So I think if we ignore that complexity and view those differences as problematic, we undermine our efforts to really address them.

Dr. LYON. I do not mean to get on this microphone again, but I just want to put some concreteness to what Kent just said. In well controlled clinical trials we can see which kids respond to which kinds of things. For example, we then move those clinical trials to Washington, DC where we have nine schools right here downtown, 800 children, 60-something classrooms, 30 kids in a classroom. Now what we figured out works with kids just like in Washington, DC in smaller settings will still work in these bigger classrooms. But here is the complexity: How do you help teachers move away from what they have done for 15 years and change to the more efficacious procedures without reverting back to what they did when the kid doesn't make those quick gains? How do you deal with the scaling up of these very intricate kind of instructional interactions when they are deluged with bus duty, lunch duty? How do you deal with teachers whose classrooms are inundated with more social issues sometimes than academic issues? All of that has to be figured out. We are in Houston in 26 schools, 3,000 children. The things that happen in Houston that get in the way of scaling up the interventions are quite a bit different than in DC.

But we do not really understand how you actually scale this stuff up taking account of everything that goes on in schools so that you have the maximum probability of getting what you know works to the kids. Because what works is not going to not work in these other settings. What works is going to be impeded from working. Somebody last night asked me if it was best to move kids from Atlanta who were not learning to read in intercity schools to churches to teach them because of the setting change. I told them that might be a pretty good idea, but let's back up and look at the conditions that have to be in place in those churches. You still have to have whoever it is, their pastors, their parents, or their teachers know what it takes to learn to read, what gets in the way, and what you do about it. We look toward those kinds of setting fixes and so forth and so on without paying attention that we still always have to drop back to these fundamental questions.

Chairman SMITH. Mr. Vinovskis.

Dr. VINOVSKIS. Let me just add to that. I think you are really getting at the heart of the problem. We need the basic research at the individual level to see how to deal with that variation and what to do. We need to see it in different settings. All of the studies that we have, follow through and everything else, shows that it is very hard to move one set of materials to another very easily. That is what development is about and that is what Kent was getting at. And he is absolutely right.

The other thing about all of this which is lurking underneath, which goes back to what Representative Johnson and others have talked about, is you have to have resources to do it. The problem is we can waste a lot of money, and we have, and we are continuing to. What we want to do is what is cost-effective in terms of helping student outcomes. That is what we are talking about, those outcomes. But at the end of the day, you are going to have to have those resources.

And whatever we do in education is going to only have a marginal impact. You know why we have fads? You force us to have fads. You have us come testify before you that we have the magic bullet, not us but another panel you will get, and we will say “Oh, yes, fund us and three years from now ***." Kent did not say that. He will not last long in Washington. But that is the problem. You are not going to cure all of these things. Some of this is basic environmental issues. We need more money particularly for poverty, which, to be truthful, we are not doing very much about in our society, and then at the margin we can make a difference. That is what we are talking about, but it is only at the margin.

Chairman SMITH. Dr. Wigdor.

Dr. WIGDOR. Kent mentioned assessment before. I would draw your attention to the need for much more emphasis on research on assessments that help us diagnose. We do a lot with psychometrics, a lot of good assessments that are useful for accountability purposes, for this and that purpose, but we have not spent nearly enough time and energy I think thinking about creating assessments to help us diagnose each child and what their strengths and weaknesses are. These are assessments for teachers to use so they can make those crucial decisions.

Chairman SMITH. Again, thank you all very much. Outstanding hearing. Outstanding panelists.

We would like to thank Steve Eule and Jim Weller, Sharon Hayes, Peter Harsha for preparing for this hearing.

It is hard to just leave it here. But for a start, with the consent of the subcommittee, I will send a letter to Secretary Shalala, Secretary Riley, and Director Caldwell, with a transcript of this hearing, asking that they have a personal representative from their office involved in both OERI and the IERI that will help facilitate final decisions that can be implemented. I would invite our panelists again to personally advise this subcommittee of any particular changes in the law. If you can prove to us what is a very necessary and reasonable public expense at the Federal level, namely, the research that we do so that we do not have to reinvent the wheel in different States, then I am sure most of us sitting here are going to aggressively work towards proper funding and increased funding once you can assure Congress that the money is being wisely spent.