A Congressman Drops the S-Bomb
January 25, 2007 03:43 PM
Subpoena, that is.
In a conversation about research delays at the U.S. Department of Education (ED), Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) describes the circumstances under which his subcommitteee would subpoena ED officials. This excerpt is from an interview by a Daily Kos blogger, who writes under the name DarkSyde:
Rep. Brad Miller, familiar to Daily Kos readers from his frequent posting here, will play a critical role in a new subcommittee formed by House Democrats to investigate allegations of GOP science and policy abuse. The new Science Oversight and Investigation (I & O) subcommittee will report to the House Committee on Science and Technology. The parent committee has jurisdiction over non-defense Federal spending. That includes agencies such as NASA, DoE, EPA, NOAA, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, just to name a few....
DarkSyde: Will the subcommittee have the power to subpoena, and is it likely to be used?
Rep. Miller: Yes, the subcommittee can vote to issue subpoenas, which would then need the signature of the committee chair, Bart Gordon. And yes, it’s pretty likely that the subcommittee will issue at least some subpoenas to get the documents and the testimony we need to do our job, but not as a first resort.
I’ve written here that Republicans are already claiming that Democrats in Congress will swamp the Bush Administration with subpoenas inspired by petty partisanship. The truth is that we’ll likely use subpoenas only after we’ve tried to get the information we need by simple request.
An example of how we might start would be my polite little letter to Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education, about the decision not to release a couple of research reports that did not fit Republican dogma. Supposedly the Department did not release the reports because the research was flawed. I asked for the memos that the Department relied on in deciding the reports did not meet the Department’s standards for scholarship. I got a letter back from an assistant secretary saying that the information I requested were "internal, deliberative documents" that they did not have to disclose.
If I ask nicely and they say no, that’s when we may consider issuing a subpoena. But I’ll feel real bad about it....
Rep. Miller seems to prefer polite letters to subpoenas. He also seems willing to do what it takes to fulfill his responsibility to review the actions of the executive branch.
Comments
In the recent report of NAEP Science results, a different kind of sample was used and the results of previous years' tests were recalculated. "Due to the change to nonpoststratified weights in 2005, national results for the 1996 and 2000 assessments at grades 4 and 8 may differ slightly from those previously reported." (p. 40, NCES 2006-466, Technical Notes). Recalculated data were actually very different. Below are the percents of students at that level or above as reported in 2005 with the previous data reported in parentheses (from NCES 2003-453, pages 7 and 19).
Proficient and Above
1996, 2000, 2005
G4 28 (29), 27 (29), 29 (?)
G8 29 (29). 30 (32), 29 (?)
Basic and Above
1996, 2000, 2005
G4 63 (67), 63 (66), 68 (?)
G8 60 (61), 59 (61), 59 (?)
If you think a 2% or 3% difference in proficient is not much, ask schools that, under NCLB, will be held accountable for a failure by 1% to make AYP.
As it stands, the data reported make it look like there may have been a recent improvement in grade 4 results and a generally flat trend at grade 8. What would the data have been if the sampling technique had been maintained? We don't know. We can't tell the effects of NCLB on Science scores on NAEP. Taking the old data as reported and new data as reported, it looks like there has been a generally flat trend at grade 4, students who would not have had much science anyway, and a big dip in performance at grade 8, the real NCLB students.
Rep. Miller believes that there may have been some hanky-panky with the public-private or ESL data. Similar statistical adjustments to NAEP main and trend assessments have obfuscated the effects of NCLB in reading and math.
Can we afford to place the fate of our educational system on tests that, with only supposedly minor changes in procedure, can produce such different results? If schools had been given the bad news in 2000 based on the NAEP data from 2000 Science, who would be responsible for apologizing to those students and parents and teachers and principals now? And USDE wants to include NAEP results on report cards? Who will pay to reprint the old reports when the new data are calculated?
Posted by: NAEP Science | January 29, 2007 09:08 PM
Thank you for commenting.
I'm not sure how we got from this post on possible subpoenas to a comment on NAEP science, but you've raised an important question about the use of NAEP results.
I've collected recent NAEP comments and will summarize them in a post today or tomorrow.
Posted by: John at AFT | January 30, 2007 09:07 AM