Neocolonial Research

Neocolonial research is a term applied to the form of education research designated by the U.S. federal government as the dominant form of research on educational programs and practices to be funded by the federal government. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), enacted in 2002, specifically states in more than 100 of 200 references on educational research that such research be “scientifically based.” In NCLB, scientifically based research is defined as that work involving objective and rigorous procedures resulting in valid and reliable data applicable to educational activities and programs. The meaning of the term neo-colonial stems from political theory and was first used by the Ghanan scholar, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1965, to describe the continuing imperialism exerted by the former colonial powers on the newly sovereign African states primarily through economic and monetary measures. More recent analyses of neocolonialism emphasize the importance of cultural, social, and political factors in addition to the original, narrow economic focus. In its imprimatur of scientifically based research in education, the federal government indirectly devalued all other forms of educational research, resulting in the use of the term neocolonial research to describe a form of imperialism exerted through the funding and through the culture of federally sanctioned educational practices.

Subsequent to the passage of NCLB, the National Academy of Sciences published a guide on the application of scientific research (SR) to education. The academy established six principles for acceptable scientific research:

• 1.
  SR poses significant questions that can be investigated empirically.
• 2.
  SR links research to relevant theory.
• 3.
  SR uses methods that permit direct investigation of the question.
• 4.
  SR provides a coherent and explicit chain of reasoning.
• 5.
  SR replicates and generalizes across studies.
• 6.
  SR discloses research to encourage professional scrutiny and critique.

To manage the funding and dissemination of SR in education, the federal Institute of Education Sciences (IES) was established and replaced the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. The use of randomized experiments became the [Page 604]gold standard of research designs and constituted those research projects most likely to be funded and endorsed by the federal government.

Alternative forms of education research—such as research based on qualitative methods and grounded in postmodernism, poststructuralism, cultural, critical, critical race, and feminist theoretical approaches in which knowledge is construed as complex, multifaceted, contextual, and thereby, problematic—were deemed questionable from a scientific design perspective. As a result, the IES has funded very few studies based on these alternative forms of research. The singular focus of the federal government on SR in education reversed several decades of advances for alternative research approaches. Beginning in the 1970s, education research methods shifted to the qualitative paradigm as a result of the difficulties of the then-dominant paradigm of quantitative and SR in measuring educational significance and in determining causal models because of the preponderance of interaction effects within the context of schooling.

In addition to directing the form of the production and dissemination of research, the federal government also required funded programs to show evidence of applying the findings of SR to their practice, thus adding curriculum to the federally defined domain of acceptable research practices. One curricular area most affected by these requirements is reading, specifically the federally funded Reading First programs for low-income students. Based on the findings of the National Reading Panel (NRP), Reading First programs require schools that receive grants to focus reading instruction on phonemic awareness, phonics, developing fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. To receive funding, states must also demonstrate to the federal government how they will assist school districts in ensuring that local districts that receive federal and state funding have engaged in professional development for teachers based on scientifically based evidence, an additional expansion of the use of neocolonial research. The political process, funding, and results of SR in the Reading First programs have come under increasing scrutiny regarding the reliability of SR across samples and, therefore, the replication of Reading First programs. Policy decision making has also been affected by contradictory SR findings in the areas such as the charter school research and the federally supported voucher program in the Washington, D.C. schools, leading educational experts to conclude that that no single research study can provide the definitive answer to application of research to curriculum or policy because of the limitations of data and the complexity of schooling and community.

...