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EPAA/AAPE Approaches Its Majority

Gene V. Glass EPAA/AAPE Editor Emeritus University of Colorado-Boulder

Like all great things, EPAA was born out of guilt.

In search of a change in weather, I left the University of Colorado Boulder in August 1986 to take a job at Arizona State University—for the winters, not for the desert summers. Each summer was spent back in Colorado (where now after a 25-year hiatus I have taken an appointment at CU Boulder again). I felt guilty deserting my ASU colleagues and students for those many summers at ASU. The guilt was mitigated a bit when a graduate student showed me how to use electronic mail in May 1987. I could communicate with Arizonans all summer while living the life of a Coloradoan; perfect!

In August 1989, the first cohort of students entered the education policy studies PhD program at ASU. I had 18 months of email experience under my belt, and it was quickly becoming apparent that one-to-many electronic communication was presenting intriguing possibilities. Those students must have been bewildered by how much time we spent in that first seminar learning about BITNET, text editors, dial-up connections, and gopher servers (an early form of file transfer). We emailed each other outside of class, exchanged papers (all in text pasted into the body of email letters), and even ventured outside of ASU to include some of my old colleagues and new ones in distant places in our discussions.

The University was suggesting that classes might want to make use of “discussion list” programs and start forums, like the early day Usenet forums. Those of us on the education policy PhD faculty joined up with our doctoral students and initiated some conversations that crossed old boundaries like courses and semesters. And by 1991, it was clear that boundaries like universities also made no sense and we created EDPOLYAN, probably the first open Internet discussion forum on education policy. EDPOLYAN grew like proverbial topsy during its first year of operation. It was wide open, unedited, and distributed several posts each day. The distribution list quickly grew to more than 1,000 persons. Some of the discussions were priceless, like nothing I have experienced “virtually” or otherwise since. Take, for example, an early exchange among a dozen scholars about the earliest widely marketed “value added” teacher assessment system: http://www.gvglass.info/TVAAS/. This exchange foreshadowed reams of publications on teacher value-added assessment that have followed in the 20 years afterwards.

By 1993, it was clear to me that no-holds-barred cyber-discussion was not everyone’s cup of tea. Many scholars of real stature and reputation were not comfortable putting their thinking out in a public place where it could be criticized by “just anybody.” Although I most admired the individuals with the nerve to take on all comers—scholars like Tom Green, Sherman Dorn, A G Rud, Les McLean—I also saw a need for the more controlled, vetted forms of communication that other scholars had become accustomed to. So in the months leading up to January 1993, I announced on EDPOLYAN that an open-access (“free-to-read”) refereed journal, Education Policy Analysis Archives, would appear with the new year and that submitted articles would now be considered for publication. The first accepted article—“Action Research and Social Movement” by Stephen Kemmis, then of Deakin University—Geelong (Australia)—was distributed by email to the EDPOLYAN list on January 19, 1993. It was simultaneously uploaded to an ASU “gopher server” for downloading the sameday (“gopher” being an early day piece of software facilitating anonymous file transfer back in the dark ages of the Internet). The format was “text,” with no colors, no images, just the alphabet and punctuation. The second article published in EPAA was “Educational Reform in an Era of Disinformation” by David C. Berliner. This article appeared on February 2, 1993, and was a precursor to Berliner’s widely read and hugely influential book The Manufactured Crisis that was published in 1995. Volume 1, Number 2 has been downloaded approximately 45,000 times in its nearly 20-year history.

By mid-1994, two trends were becoming apparent. The appetite for traditional forms of scholarly communication like EPAA was growing rapidly, and the tone of no-holds-barred Internet forum discussion was becoming troubling. EDPOLYAN had 1,000 subscribers, a mixture of courageous scholars willing to discuss their ideas with nearly everyone and non-scholars with less disciplined styles of acquiring knowledge and with abrasive manners of putting forth their thinking—“flaming” it was called. The latter began to drown out the former, and I began to feel uneasy about having built the venue. Late in 1995, I announced to the many subscribers to EDPOLYAN that the forum had become an embarrassment to my college and me personally and that in one month it would be shut down. There followed a flurry of postings: apologies, pledges to behave better, plans to meet elsewhere, and expressions of incredulity. At the end of one month I issued the following command: QUIET DELETE EDPOLYAN *@*. My attempt to create a public venue for high-minded discussion of education policy had failed.
But EPAA was going strong. Volume 1 consisted of 15 articles; Volume 2 had 14 and Volume 3 in 1995 had 20. Rejection rates were low because only scholars fairly secure in their professional positions would risk publishing in this new form. Those who did were rewarded with a visibility for their work and feedback on their ideas like they had never experienced before.

EPAA Home Page, 1997

All publication in the first three volumes was by “text.” Tables had to be constructed by lining up characters as well as one might. There were no graphs, no pictures. The medium was very limiting. Howard Wainer, one of the world’s most prominent exponents of visual data display, had to publish Volume 2, Number 10 “Academic performance of New Jersey’s public schools” using nothing but ABCDEFG etc. and a few punctuation marks. I was embarrassed.

Consequently, I jumped on the innovation by a young student—Marc Andreessen—at UI-Champaign-Urbana when it was first shown to me in early 1995: Mosaic, the first real web browser! Type fonts, pictures (always referred to as “images”), sound recordings (remember “.WAV”?), even motion pictures (“video clips”). The first article to be published by EPAA with an image was Haggai Kupermintz’s “The Bell Curve: Corrected for Skew” Volume 4 Number 20. (See below.) EPAA started to look exactly like a journal created by linotype machines or WANG desktop publishers and printed on paper. And appearances mattered; EPAA experienced an upswing in submitted manuscripts from authors who formerly might have worried about being seen in certain places.

First image published in EPAA, Vol. 4 No. 20

Submissions to EPAA increased and so did the rejection rate. EPAA was reviewing submissions and returning decisions to authors within a week. All 30 or so members of the Editorial Board would receive every submission within 24 hours of its receipt by the Editor with a message that read “If you are interested, have the time, and know something about this field, send me your review; if you don’t review within a few days, the decision will be made without your input.” (My cynicism about peer review was beginning to show.) I began to receive emails from deans and promotion committees asking for EPAA’s rejection rate. It was clear that the quick route to prominence for a journal was to reject almost everything.

The years between 1995 and today witnessed many changes in the contents of EPAA. The journal began to draw large numbers of readers. Slightly fewer than a thousand “visitors” per weekday were being recorded as the 1990s ended. The 1998 volume sported a “Top 5% Web Site” icon on the home page—amazing to contemplate today when the world wide web is largely the domain of Ebay, Facebook, and a million dots-coms selling everything from diapers to funeral urns. Some years (volumes) in the late 1990s and early 2000s contain 50 and more articles.
The journal began to attract attention outside the US and Canada. In late 1998, Roberto Rodríguez Gómez of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México sent me an email asking if EPAA would ever consider publishing an article in Spanish. I wrote back immediately asking him if he would consider being the journal editor for Spanish—thus betraying my woeful inadequacy as an organization planner. Roberto said “Yes,” and the collaboration continued for five years, greatly increasing the journal’s visibility internationally. Gustavo Fischman took over from Roberto in 2003 and continued to expand the Spanish and Portuguese offerings of Education Policy Analysis Archives/ Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas.

A few book reviews were published in the early years, and their popularity suggested the need for a separate journal of book reviews in education—which was created in 1998 and continues today, having published its 3,000th book review in mid-January 2012: Education Review/Reseñas Educativas http://www.edrev.info.
Education Policy Analysis Archives/ Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas has published some extraordinary contributions to the education policy scholarly literature in its 20-year history. Linda Darling-Hammond published “Teacher Quality and Student Achievement” (Vol. 1 No. 1) on January 1, 2000, which has now been “downloaded” more than 165,000 times. Nothing of the sort in any other venue enjoys such visibility. Lawrence Rudner published “Achievement and Demographics of Home School Students: 1998” (Vol. 7 No. 8), which is today approaching 180,000 downloads in its 12-year history on the Internet. Unlike articles published in paper journals, which still disappear quickly into university library stacks, articles on the Internet appear to enjoy great longevity.

In 2004, having edited EPAA/AAPE since its beginning, I began to worry about its image as a journal published forever by one college and one editor. Certainly that image did not honor the real ownership of the journal, which belonged to the literally hundreds of editorial board members (working as referees) and authors who are the journals true owners. So in mid-2004, an RFP was sent out to the world requesting proposals for assuming the English editorship and publication of EPAA/AAPE. It was understood that the editing of Spanish and Portuguese contributions would remain with Gustavo Fischman, since skills such as his are not widely available. It was an unusual RFP, befitting an open-access journal that never did have a budget or salaries or expenses of any kind other than the time and efforts of its many contributors. We were pleased to receive a half-dozen superb proposals from some of the top scholars in the nation. Sherman Dorn of the University of South Florida—a long-time participant in the ancestral Listserv EDPOLYAN and a solid contributor to EPAA/AAPE as both editorial board member and occasional author—was chosen as the new Editor for the English EPAA for a five-year term. Readers noticed an immediate increase in the quality of published articles; the transition to a new editor with a keen eye and more respect for peer-review was widely regarded as a forward step. Sherman served admirably through 2009, at which time several of my colleagues at Arizona State University became the new English Editors of EPAA: Gustavo E. Fischman, who added these new duties to his longstanding efforts as Editor for Spanish and Portuguese; Jeanne M. Powers; and David Garcia. These three continue to edit the English side of EPAA to this day.

I have at times made heady predictions of the imminent demise of paper journals. Perhaps the last prediction was made in 2000 and set the date of Doom’s Day as 2010. If we survive the year 2012, the end time according to the long count Mayan calendar, we may yet see the disappearance of all paper journals. In point of fact, the harder the science, the faster do the scientists move away from paper. Few mathematicians and physicists bother with traditional paper journals any more. Likewise for chemists and certain areas of biology. To my disappointment, scholars of education are more reluctant to cut their ties to paper journals than almost any other field we have studied. True, some prominent journals now post on the Internet even as they continue to ravage forests. But the articles that ought to be read the most too often remain in the hands of commercial interests who refuse to drop the bizarre fetish for paper, for which they must charge fees.

EPAA/AAPE has always flown one flag: the public (writ large) pays to have research on education conducted; they should not pay again to read the results. EPAA/AAPE is free-to-read. I hope it shall always remain so.

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