[AAACE-NLA]FW: [NIFL-COALITION:930] ERIC: MUCH more than a database!

[George E. Demetrion]

David,

Thanks for posting that message on the "transformation" of ERIC into a
mere data-base.  It's difficult to know for sure what the Bush
administration is up to given the secrecy of their operations.  One thing
that seems clear, based on the US Department of Education's Strategic
Plan 2002-2007, is the desire of the Bush-Paige leadership to transform
the Department, including the definition of the intellectual
presuppositions that undergirds the scholarship on education, on the
precepts of scientific-based educational research, as they understand it.
 All other forms of scholarship are viewed as fads, and "ideology,"
perhaps analogous to a commonly-held pejorative interpretation of Voodoo.

Of course, I could be exaggerating or unduly sounding the alarm bell, but
the following three sentences come right out of the Strategic Plan.  If
I'm off base on my concern, how would others interpret the meaning and
purpose of these sentences that introduce Strategic Goal 4 titled,
"Transform education into an evidence-based field"

"Unlike medicine, agriculture and industrial production, the field of
education operates  largely on the basis of ideology and professional
consensus.  As such, it is subjected to fads and is incapable of
cumulative progress that follows from the application of the scientific
method and from the systematic collection and use of objective
information in policy making.  We will change education to make it an
evidence-based field."

May I suggest, at least as a working hypothesis that many of the current
studies that are housed within the ERIC data-base reflect the ideology,
fads, and professional consensus that the current Department seeks to
transform.  To continue with my working hypothesis,  by eliminating what
some of us view as the richness of this collection, the Department will
be providing a service in clearing the ground from the debris of what
they view as outmoded ways of thinking, in order to give their data
collection repositories greater visibility unencumbered by competing
perspectives.

This obsession of the current administration of getting into the
knowledge construction business based on what some of us view as their
narrow ideological and intellectual frameworks is more than a chilling
example of the impact of effective coordinated political power to not
only shape power, but to influence the direction of culture, not through
vigorous diaologue, but through repression and suppression of competing
perspectives.  This was, after all, how the Bush administration gained
the "consensus" to prosecute the war against Iraq.. Educational theory is
but another battleground in the neo-conservative objective of
deconstructing the influence of progressive thought and practice
extending back to the beginning of the 20th century.

By all means contact

Jeff Halsted, Contract Specialist 
E-mail: Jeff.C.Halsted at ed.gov 
Telephone: (202) 708-8283 
Fax: (202) 708-9817 
U.S. Mail: U.S. Department of Education 
Contracts and Purchasing Operations 
Regional Office Building, Room 3069 
7th and D Streets, SW 
Washington, DC, 20202 

But keep in mind that there may be a lot beneath the surface than a
simple managerial re-prioritization of resources, wherein the move to
marginalize ERIC is part of a broader ideological plan to institute the
Department's skewed view of educational research.

What's next, getting rid of those messy, pesky listservs?

Good thing the Bush administration is not in control of the Canadian
government.  Otherwise the NALD data base could come under the same type
of scrutiny.  All the world is not the United States of America, yet (or
at least a certain idealized version of it), but not for lack of trying
among the ardent ideologues in and surrounding the Bush administration. 
While knowledge may be construed as a form of power, perhaps the more
interesting and dangerous phenomenon is how power becomes instituted as
legitimized knowledge.  Look how many people are now blithely using the
term, "scientific-based educational research."

George Demetrion
sophocles5 at juno.com


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