The issues facing public education in America are virtually endless. With policymakers and teachers being pulled in so many directions, it seems odd that controversy focuses on the Department of Education's Web site.
A current overhaul of the site, in an effort to make it more user-friendly and updated, is also making sure that visitors view research and statistics aligned with the Bush administration's education philosophy. Further changes to this site may be enacted this fall. The site, however, needs to remain a primary source for teachers, researchers and parents to find information about all types of education research, not just those studies supported by the current administration.
Type www.ed.gov in your Internet browser, and you may think you've misspelled the site. Rather than entering the DOE Web site, you've just entered an advertisement for the "No Child Left Behind" law. Thankfully, the government remembered to include a small link off that page to the main page of the DOE Web site, now buried a little deeper in cyberspace.
Education advocates across the country are more concerned, though, with what happens once the site's visitor gets past the "No Child Left Behind" initial propaganda. The most disturbing news came in a May 31 directive to department senior staff members. It made clear that "everything on the site dated before February 2001, just after President Bush took office, will be removed unless it is needed for legal reasons or it supports the 'No Child Left Behind Act'
or other administrative initiatives" ("No URL Left Behind? Web Scrub Raises Concerns," Education Week, Sept. 18).
It makes sense that the Bush administration would want to raise awareness and support for what it claims to be the "most sweeping changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act since it was enacted in 1965" (www.nochildleftbehind.gov), a policy reform that emphasizes tougher assessment accountability within schools while almost paradoxically calling for more local control and parent choice. The problem is that it is trying to garner support on a site visited 84,000 times each day by people mostly in search of unbiased information, not government policy.
Ultimately, we are left to question who has ownership of the ed.gov Web site. The answer is clear: the U.S. government. Each administration inherits the site and determines what to do with it.
No matter who owns it, though, the site should be a service to the American people. Rather than regulating the material it contains, the Web site's function should be to provide a comprehensive source for educational research. Now current and future teachers, researchers, parents and even policymakers from various states must find their own ways of gathering information, producing a more frustrating and time-consuming research process. And, as Education Information Services Librarian Kay Cutler points out, "If a researcher has to go to 12 Web sites for the information he used to get from one, he'll spend more time collecting data and less time analyzing it."
In choosing what will stay and what will go on the new site, the government may still decide to remove links to the Education Resources Information Center's digests. ERIC is government-managed, but receives research funding from outside contractors. ERIC digests, short summaries of research on important topics in education, are the third most popular item on the DOE site (Education Week). They are great sources for people looking to understand education research in plain English, without any political slant attached. Because the digests cover all types of current education issues, some of their contents will conflict with Bush's educational ideology.
Removing the ERIC digests from the ed.gov site would be further proof that the current administration can make information it doesn't agree with more difficult to find. In essence, if certain research doesn't support the administration's goals, the governmnent is saying such work is wrong, or at least invalid.
In today's classrooms, content standards are emphasized more and more. Teachers, discouraged by the burdens they feel imposed on them, often fail to look for creative solutions for covering the standard curriculum while at the same time equipping their students with important thinking skills. As a result, many students are simply being taught what to think rather than how to think.
Not surprisingly, then, the revamped DOE Web site follows suit. The current and future changes to the site need to be rethought. The site should provide balanced information on both sides of pertinent education debates.
Don't be tricky and tell the American people what to think. Let us decide for ourselves.
(Stephanie Batten's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at sbatten@cavalierdaily.com.)
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