I don’t have much to add to Andrew’s post on Russ Whitehurst’s defense of Arne Duncan. Even with what Whitehurst wrote, I simply don’t buy that Duncan didn’t know of the D.C. voucher evaluation’s results, or even its very existence, while Congress was debating the program’s fate a little over a month ago. But, unfortunately, the reality is that neither I nor anyone else will probably ever get a clear look inside the black box of who really knew what, when, in the Department of Education.
So suppose the secretary really was totally clueless. What does this say about the value of the Institute of Education Sciences, the division of the Education Department responsible for the report? IES received the evaluation results in November and released the report on April 3. Clearly, it had the results well in advance of congressional action on the program. That leaves only a few reasons why it wouldn’t have released the findings — or even something characterized as “expedited” or “preliminary” — in time to inform congressional debate:
- IES employees hadn’t sufficiently scrutinized — or perhaps even looked at — the report several months after they had received it.
- IES had scrutinized the report and couldn’t push out the results because of strict adherence to rigid bureaucratic procedures.
- For political or other reasons, IES purposely sat on the results.
None of those, quite simply, are acceptable answers given the job of IES as stated clearly on the Department of Education’s website:
The mission of IES is to provide rigorous evidence on which to ground education practice and policy.
Mission disturbingly not accomplished, IES.
