We Don't Need No Stinkin' Rural Reviewers

There are new concerns about the process the U.S. Department of Education used to award the contract for the National Center on Rural Education Support. Information obtained from the Institute of Education Sciences indicate that the panel reviewing applications for the center did not include any rural education experts. This revelation raises the question of whether the panel was able to conduct a competent review of the applications for a rural education research center.

To be clear, I don't know exactly who reviewed applications for the center. I had asked for the list of reviewers but was told the Institute of Education Sciences does not identify the individuals who review particular applications or who review for particular competitions. Lynn Okagaki, Deputy Directory for Science at the Institute of Education Sciences did provide a list of everyone who served as scientific peer reviewers during fiscal year 2004.

That list included the names of 141 reviewers. Of those, only David Monk from Penn State University is recognizable as someone with substantial rural education expertise. He could not, however, have been a reviewer for the National Center on Rural Education Support because Penn State was an applicant. Ted Coladarci, Editor of the Journal of Research in Rural Education, similarly didn't recognize any other reviewers on the list having substantial rural education credentials. ("Sadly, no," he confessed.)

A reasonable conclusion is that the panel reviewing applications for the primary rural education research center lacked the expertise to make judgments pertaining to rural education issues. That's a problem! It's like having no pediatricians on a review panel for a program awarding a pediatric research center.

The department notes on its website that “to ensure a fair and competent review of all applications, program staff recruit persons who have expertise in areas pertinent to a program and from as many sources as possible.” This statement implies that not having reviewers with expertise in areas pertinent to the program creates a situation in which a review is unfair and incompetent.

To be fair to the staff at the Department of Education and the contractor that ran the review, I don’t think they purposefully left of people with rural education expertise off the panel. Rather, it probably never occurred to them that they needed some rural education expertise. Which points to the larger problem that the U.S. Department of Education has a very limited understanding of rural education issues.