The American Rescue Plan Can Rescue Education, If We Use It to Fund What Works

The American Rescue Plan was passed in the U.S. Congress this week. This $1.9 trillion bill provides funding for a lot of things I care about as a citizen, but as an educator, I’d like to focus on the portion of it allocated to healing Covid learning loss. This is $29 billion, or roughly double the usual amount spent annually on Title I. This is a major investment in the students whose educations were harmed the most by Covid school closures. These are mostly disadvantaged students and rural students who could not gain access to remote teaching, or who did not have assistance at home to take advantage of remote instruction. Data from all over the country is showing the educational damage these children have sustained.

Clearly, the new money in the ARP could make a substantial difference in the achievement and adjustment of all students returning to in-person schooling. But if educational research tells us anything at all, it tells us these two things:

1. Making a big difference in educational outcomes costs money.
2. However, lots of well-meaning uses of money do not make any perceptible difference in outcomes.

Of course, the only way to tell effective uses of new funds from ineffective uses is through rigorous research.

One of the unusual aspects of the ARP education funding is that the legislation is not very specific about how the money is to be used. This is due in part to the fact the ARP was passed using a reconciliation procedure that does not allow for much specificity. The U.S. Department of Education will be drafting guidelines for the money soon, but these guidelines are likely to be relatively flexible, because the legislation itself was not very specific.

This flexibility is likely to allow anything from very good uses of money to very poor uses. My guess is that state and district leaders, and individual principals, will have plenty of freedom to use plenty of money. How novel!

I hope states and districts will use this opportunity to clearly define what is most important to accomplish in their post-Covid planning and then insist on choosing programs, practices, and policies based on the best evidence available. This time, educators will have the opportunity to use research-proven programs not because Congress or the U.S. Department of Education tells them to, but because they care about the learning and emotional well-being of their students.

In the period following the passage of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), state, district, and building leaders learned how to use services such as the What Works Clearinghouse and our www.evidenceforessa.org website to find out the strength of the evidence supporting various programs. I hope schools will continue to use these resources to select programs that have been proven effective. I’ve written many times about the importance of using proven tutoring programs, and this is indeed the most effective strategy by far for students who are far behind in reading or math. But there are many other approaches proven to be effective, especially for disadvantaged students. There is good evidence of effectiveness not only for classroom approaches to reading and math, but also programs for creative writing, science, social-emotional learning, early childhood education, and much more. The ARP funding allows schools to invest in proven programs and find out for themselves whether they work. ARP money will not be around forever, but wouldn’t it be a great use of the money to find out what works, so that when things return to normal, school and district leaders will know more than ever before what works and what doesn’t for their particular students and their particular schools?

In the first months after all schools open for in-person learning, schools are sure to be thinking in emergency mode, about investments in tutoring and other relatively expensive but highly effective strategies. But the damage Covid has done will have long-lasting impacts, and even if schools use proven tutoring methods to help the students at the greatest risk, it is also important to build for the long haul for all students, using proven programs of all kinds. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the terrible experience we have all been through leads to a more rational, evidence-driven approach to schooling, creating a lasting benefit not only for today’s children, but for future generations who will receive better educations than they would have before Covid?

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Large-Scale Tutoring in England: Countering Effects of School Closures

The government of England recently announced an investment of £1 billion to provide tutoring and other services to help the many students whose educational progress has been interrupted by Covid-19 school closures. This is the equivalent of $1.24 billion, and adjusting for the difference in populations, it is like a U.S. investment of $7.44 billion, even larger than the equivalent of the similar Dutch investment recently announced.

Both England and the Netherlands have Covid-19 disease and death rates like those of the U.S., and all three countries are unsure of when schools might open in the fall, and whether they will open fully or partially when they do. All three countries have made extensive use of online learning to help students keep up with core content. However, participation rates in online learning have been low, especially for disadvantaged students, who often lack access to equipment and assistance at home. For this reason, education leaders in all of these countries are very concerned that academic achievement will be greatly harmed, and that gaps between middle class and disadvantaged students will grow. The difference is that Dutch and English schools are taking resolute action to remedy this problem, primarily by providing one-to-one and one-to-small group tutoring nationwide. The U.S. has not yet done this, except for an initiative in Tennessee.

The English initiative has two distinct parts. £650 million will go directly to schools, with an expectation that they will spend most of it on one-to-four tutoring to students who most need it. The schools will mostly use the money to hire and train tutors, mainly student teachers and teaching assistants.

The remaining £350 million will go to fund an initiative led by the Education Endowment Foundation. In this National Tutoring Programme (NTP), 75% of the cost of tutoring struggling students will be subsidized. The tutoring may be either one-to-one or one-to-small group, and will be provided by organizations with proven programs and proven capacity to deliver tutoring at scale in primary and secondary schools. EEF is also carrying out evaluations of promising tutoring programs in various parts of England.

What Do the English and Dutch Tutoring Initiatives Mean for the U.S.?

The English and Dutch tutoring initiatives serve as an example of what wealthy nations can do to combat the learning losses of their students in the Covid-19 emergency. By putting these programs in place now, these countries have allowed time to organize their ambitious plans for fall implementation, and to ensure that the money will be wisely spent. In particular, the English National Tutoring Programme has a strong emphasis on the use of tutoring programs with evidence of effectiveness. In fact, the £350 million NTP could turn out to be the largest pragmatic education investment ever made anywhere designed to put proven programs into widespread use, and if all goes well, this aspect of the NTP could have important implications for evidence-based reform more broadly.

The U.S. is only now beginning to seriously consider tutoring as a means of accelerating the learning of students whose learning progress has been harmed by school closures. There have been proposals to invest in tutoring in both houses of Congress, but these are not expected to pass. Unless our leaders embrace the idea of intensive services to help struggling students soon, schools will partially or fully open in the fall into a very serious crisis. The economy will be in recession and schools will be struggling just to keep qualified teachers in every classroom. The amount of loss in education levels will become apparent. Yet there will not be well-worked-out or well-funded means of enabling schools to remedy the severe losses sure to exist, especially for disadvantaged students. These losses could have long-term negative effects on students’ progress, as poor basic skills reduce students’ abilities to learn advanced content, and undermine their confidence and motivation. Tutoring or other solutions would still be effective if applied later next school year, but by then the problems will be even more difficult to solve.

Perhaps national or state governments or large private foundations could at least begin to pilot and evaluate tutoring programs capable of going to scale. This would be immediately beneficial to the students involved and would facilitate effective implementation and scale-up when government makes the needed resources available. But action is needed now. Gaps in achievement between middle class and disadvantaged students were already the most important problem in American education, and the problem has certainly worsened. This is the time to see that all students receive whatever it takes to get back on a track to success.

 This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Are the Dutch Solving the Covid Slide with Tutoring?

For a small country, the Netherlands has produced a remarkable number of inventions. The Dutch invented the telescope, the microscope, the eye test, Wi-Fi, DVD/Blue-Ray, Bluetooth, the stock market, golf, and major improvements in sailboats, windmills, and water management. And now, as they (like every other country) are facing major educational damage due to school closures in the Covid-19 pandemic, it is the Dutch who are the first to apply tutoring on a large scale to help students who are furthest behind. The Dutch government recently announced a plan to allocate the equivalent of $278 million to provide support to all students in elementary, secondary, and vocational schools who need it. Schools can provide the support in different ways (e.g., summer schools, extended school days), but it is likely that a significant amount of the money will be spent on tutoring. The Ministry of Education proposed to recruit student teachers to provide tutoring, who will have to be specially trained for this role.

The Dutch investment would be equivalent to a U.S. investment of about $5.3 billion, because of our much larger population. That’s a lot of tutors. Including salaries, materials, and training, I’d estimate this much money would support about 150,000 tutors. If each could work in small groups with 50 students a year, they might serve about 7,500,000 students each year, roughly one in every seven American children. That would be a pretty good start.

Where would we get all this money? Because of the recession we are in now, millions of recent college graduates will not be able to find work. Many of these would make great tutors. As in any recession, the federal government will seek to restart the economy by investing in people. In this particular recession, it would be wise to devote part of such investments to support enthusiastic young people to learn and apply proven tutoring approaches coast to coast.

Imagine that we created an American equivalent of the Dutch tutoring program. How could such a huge effort be fielded in time to help the millions of students who need substantial help? The answer would be to build on organizations that already exist and know how to recruit, train, mentor, and manage large numbers of people. The many state-based AmeriCorps agencies would be a great place to begin, and in fact there has already been discussion in the U.S. Congress about a rapid expansion of AmeriCorps for work in health and education roles to heal the damage of Covid-19. The former governor of Tennessee, Bill Haslam, is funding a statewide tutoring plan in collaboration with Boys and Girls Clubs. Other national non-profit organizations such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, City Year, and Communities in Schools could each manage recruitment, training, and management of tutors in particular states and regions.

It would be critical to make certain that the tutoring programs used under such a program are proven to be effective, and are ready to be scaled up nationally, in collaboration with local agencies with proven track records.

All of this could be done. Considering the amounts of money recently spent in the U.S. to shore up the economy, and the essential need both to keep people employed and to make a substantial difference in student learning, $5.3 billion targeted to proven approaches seems entirely reasonable.

If the Dutch can mount such an effort, there is no reason we could not do the same. It would be wonderful to help both unemployed new entrants to the labor force and students struggling in reading or mathematics. A double Dutch treat!

This blog was developed with support from Arnold Ventures. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Arnold Ventures.

Note: If you would like to subscribe to Robert Slavin’s weekly blogs, just send your email address to thebee@bestevidence.org. 

Getting Schools Excited About Participating in Research

If America’s school leaders are ever going to get excited about evidence, they need to participate in it. It’s not enough to just make school leaders aware of programs and practices. Instead, they need to serve as sites for experiments evaluating programs that they are eager to implement, or at least have friends or peers nearby who are doing so.

The U.S. Department of Education has funded quite a lot of research on attractive programs A lot of the studies they have funded have not shown positive impacts, but many have been found to be effective. Those effective programs could provide a means of engaging many schools in rigorous research, while at the same time serving as examples of how evidence can help schools improve their results.

Here is my proposal. It quite often happens that some part of the U.S. Department of Education wants to expand the use of proven programs on a given topic. For example, imagine that they wanted to expand use of proven reading programs for struggling readers in elementary schools, or proven mathematics programs in Title I middle schools.

Rather than putting out the usual request for proposals, the Department might announce that schools could qualify for funding to implement a qualifying proven program, but in order to participate they had to agree to participate in an evaluation of the program. They would have to identify two similar schools from a district, or from neighboring districts, that would agree to participate if their proposal is successful. One school in each pair would be assigned at random to use a given program in the first year or two, and the second school could start after the one- or two-year evaluation period was over. Schools would select from a list of proven programs and choose one that seems appropriate to their needs.

            Many pairs of schools would be funded to use each proven program, so across all schools involved, this would create many large, randomized experiments. Independent evaluation groups would carry out the experiments. Students in participating schools would be pretested at the beginning of the evaluation period (one or two years), and posttested at the end, using tests independent of the developers or researchers.

There are many attractions to this plan. First, large randomized evaluations on promising programs could be carried out nationwide in real schools under normal conditions. Second, since the Department was going to fund expansion of promising programs anyway, the additional cost might be minimal, just the evaluation cost. Third, the experiment would provide a side-by-side comparison of many programs focusing on high-priority topics in very diverse locations. Fourth, the school leaders would have the opportunity to select the program they want, and would be motivated, presumably, to put energy into high-quality implementation. At the end of such a study, we would know a great deal about which programs really work in ordinary circumstances with many types of students and schools. But just as importantly, the many schools that participated would have had a positive experience, implementing a program they believe in and finding out in their own schools what outcomes the program can bring them. Their friends and peers would be envious and eager to get into the next study.

A few sets of studies of this kind could build a constituency of educators that might support the very idea of evidence. And this could transform the evidence movement, providing it with a national, enthusiastic audience for research.

Wouldn’t that be great?

 This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Do School Districts Really Have Difficulty Meeting ESSA Evidence Standards?

The Center for Educational Policy recently released a report on how school districts are responding to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requirement that schools seeking school improvement grants select programs that meet ESSA’s strong, moderate, or promising standards of evidence. Education Week ran a story on the CEP report.

The report noted that many states, districts, and schools are taking the evidence requirements seriously, and are looking at websites and consulting with researchers to help them identify programs that meet the standards. This is all to the good.

However, the report also notes continuing problems districts and schools are having finding out “what works.” Two particular problems were cited. One was that districts and schools were not equipped to review research to find out what works. The other was that rural districts and schools found few programs proven effective in rural schools.

I find these concerns astounding. The same concerns were expressed when ESSA was first passed, in 2015. But that was almost four years ago. Since 2015, the What Works Clearinghouse has added information to help schools identify programs that meet the top two ESSA evidence categories, strong and moderate. Our own Evidence for ESSA, launched in February, 2017, has up-to-date information on virtually all PK-12 reading and math programs currently in dissemination. Among hundreds of programs examined, 113 meet ESSA standards for strong, moderate, or promising evidence of effectiveness. WWC, Evidence for ESSA, and other sources are available online at no cost. The contents of the entire Evidence for ESSA website were imported into Ohio’s own website on this topic, and dozens of states, perhaps all of them, have informed their districts and schools about these sources.

The idea that districts and schools could not find information on proven programs if they wanted to do so is difficult to believe, especially among schools eligible for school improvement grants. Such schools, and the districts in which they are located, write a lot of grant proposals for federal and state funding. The application forms for school improvement grants always explain the evidence requirements, because that is the law. Someone in every state involved with federal funding knows about the WWC and Evidence for ESSA websites. More than 90,000 unique users have used Evidence for ESSA, and more than 800 more sign on each week.

As to rural schools, it is true that many studies of educational programs have taken place in urban areas. However, 47 of the 113 programs qualified by Evidence for ESSA were validated in at least one rural study, or a study including a large enough rural sample to enable researchers to separately report program impacts for rural students. Also, almost all widely disseminated programs have been used in many rural schools. So rural districts and schools that care about evidence can find programs that have been evaluated in rural locations, or at least that were evaluated in urban or suburban schools but widely disseminated in rural schools.

Also, it is important to note that if a program was successfully evaluated only in urban or suburban schools, the program still meets the ESSA evidence standards. If no studies of a given outcome were done in rural locations, a rural school in need of better outcomes could, in effect, be asked to choose between a program proven to work somewhere and probably used in dissemination in rural schools, or they could choose a program not proven to work anywhere. Every school and district has to make the best choices for their kids, but if I were a rural superintendent or principal, I’d read up on proven programs, and then go visit some rural schools using that program nearby. Wouldn’t you?

I have no reason to suspect that the CEP survey is incorrect. There are many indications that district and school leaders often do feel that the ESSA evidence rules are too difficult to meet. So what is really going on?

My guess is that there are many district and school leaders who do not want to know about evidence on proven programs. For example, they may have longstanding, positive relationships with representatives of publishers or software developers, or they may be comfortable and happy with the materials and services they are already using, evidence-proven or not. If they do not have evidence of effectiveness that would pass muster with WWC or Evidence for ESSA, the publishers and software developers may push hard on state and district officials, put forward dubious claims for evidence (such as studies with no control groups), and do their best to get by in a system that increasingly demands evidence that they lack. In my experience, district and state officials often complain about having inadequate staff to review evidence of effectiveness, but their concern may be less often finding out what works as it is defending themselves from publishers, software developers, or current district or school users of programs, who maintain that they have been unfairly rated by WWC, Evidence for ESSA, or other reviews. State and district leaders who stand up to this pressure may have to spend a lot of time reviewing evidence or hearing arguments.

On the plus side, at the same time that publishers and software producers may be seeking recognition for their current products, many are also sponsoring evaluations of some of their products that they feel are mostly likely to perform well in rigorous evaluations. Some may be creating new programs that resemble programs that have met evidence standards. If the federal ESSA law continues to demand evidence for certain federal funding purposes, or even to expand this requirement to additional parts of federal grant-making, then over time the ESSA law will have its desired effect, rewarding the creation and evaluation of programs that do meet standards by making it easier to disseminate such programs. The difficulties the evidence movement is experiencing are likely to diminish over time as more proven programs appear, and as federal, state, district, and school leaders get comfortable with evidence.

Evidence-based reform was always going to be difficult, because of the amount of change it entails and the stakes involved. But sooner or later, it is the right thing to do, and leaders who insist on evidence will see increasing levels of learning among their students, at minimal cost beyond what they already spend on untested or ineffective approaches. Medicine went through a similar transition in 1962, when the U.S. Congress first required that medicines be rigorously evaluated for effectiveness and safety. At first, many leaders in the medical profession resisted the changes, but after a while, they came to insist on them. The key is political leadership willing to support the evidence requirement strongly and permanently, so that educators and vendors alike will see that the best way forward is to embrace evidence and make it work for kids.

Photo courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Superman and Statistics

In the 1978 movie “Superman,” Lois Lane, star journalist, crash-lands in a helicopter on top of a 50-story skyscraper.   The helicopter is hanging by a strut to the edge of the roof, and Lois is hanging on to a microphone cord.  Finally, the cord breaks, and Lois falls 45 floors before (of course) she is swooped up by Superman, who flies her back to the roof and sets her down gently. Then he says to her:

“I hope this doesn’t put you off of flying. Statistically speaking, it is the safest form of travel.”

She faints.

Don’t let the superhero thing fool you: The “S” is for “statistics.”

I’ve often had the very same problem whenever I do public speaking.  As soon as I mention statistics, some of the audience faints dead away. Or perhaps they are falling asleep. But either way, saying the word “statistics” is not usually a good way to make friends and influence people.

 

The fact is, most people don’t like statistics.  Or more accurately, people don’t like statistics except when the statistical findings agree with their prejudices.  At an IES meeting several years ago, a well-respected superintendent was invited to speak to what is perhaps the nerdiest, most statistically-minded group in all of education, except for an SREE conference.  He actually said, without the slightest indication of humor or irony, that “GOOD research is that which confirms what I have always believed.  BAD research is that which disagrees with what I have always believed.”  I’d guess that the great majority of superintendents and other educational leaders would agree, even if few would say so out loud to an IES meeting.

If educational leaders only attend to statistics that confirm their prior beliefs, one might argue that, well, at least they do attend to SOME research.  But research in an applied field like education is of value only if it leads to positive changes in practice.  If influential educators only respect research that confirms their previous beliefs, then they never change their practices or policies because of research, and policies and practices stay the same forever, or change only due to politics, marketing, and fads. Which is exactly how most change does in fact happen in education.  If you wonder why educational outcomes change so slowly, if at all, you need look no further than this.

Why is it that educators pay so little attention to research, whatever its outcomes, much in contrast to the situation in many other fields?  Some people argue that, unlike medicine, where doctors are well trained in research, educators lack such training.  Yet agriculture makes far more practical use of evidence than education does, and most farmers, while outstanding in their fields, are not known for their research savvy.

Farmers are, however, very savvy business owners, and they can clearly see that their financial success depends on using seeds, stock, methods, fertilizers, and insecticides proven to be effective, cost-effective, and sustainable.  Similarly, research plays a crucial role in technology, engineering, materials science, and every applied field in which better methods, with proven outcomes, lead to increased profits.

So one major reason for limited use of research in education is that adopting proven methods in education rarely leads to enhanced profit.  Even in parts of the educational enterprise where profit is involved, economic success still depends far more on politics, marketing, and fads, than on evidence. Outcomes of adopting proven programs or practices may not have an obvious impact on overall school outcomes because achievement is invariably tangled up with factors such as social class of children and schools’ abilities to attract skilled teachers and principals.  Ask parents whether they would rather have their child to go to a school in which all students have educated, upper-middle class parents, or to a school that uses proven instructional strategies in every subject and grade level.  The problem is that there are only so many educated, upper-middle class parents to go around, so schools and parents often focus on getting the best possible demographics in their school rather than on adopting proven teaching methods.

How can education begin to make the rapid, irreversible improvements characteristic of agriculture, technology, and medicine?  The answer has to take into account the fundamental fact that education is a government monopoly.  I’m not arguing whether or not this is a good thing, but it is certain to be true for many years, perhaps forever.  The parts of education that are not part of government are private schools, and these are very few in number (charter schools are funded by government, of course).

Because government funds nearly all schools, it has both the responsibility and the financial capacity to do whatever is feasible to make schools as effective as it possibly can.  This is true of all levels of government, federal, state, and local.  Because it is in charge of all federal research funding, the federal government is the most logical organization to lead any efforts to increase use of proven programs and practices in education, but forward-looking state and local government could also play a major role if they chose to do so.

Government can and must take on the role that profit plays in other research-focused fields, such as agriculture, medicine, and engineering.   As I’ve argued many times, government should use national funding to incentivize schools to adopt proven programs.  For example, the federal government could provide funding to schools to enable them to pay the costs of adopting programs found to be effective in rigorous research.  Under ESSA, it is already doing this, but right now the main focus is only on Title I school improvement grants.   These go to schools that are among the lowest performers in their states.  School improvement is a good place to start, but it affects a modest number of extremely disadvantaged schools.  Such schools do need substantial funding and expertise to make the substantial gains they are asked to make, but they are so unlike the majority of Title I schools that they are not sufficient examples of what evidence-based reform could achieve.  Making all Title I schools eligible for incentive funding to implement proven programs, or at least working toward this goal over time, would arouse the interest and enthusiasm of a much greater set of schools, virtually all of which need major changes in practices to reach national standards.

To make this policy work, the federal government would need to add considerably to the funding it provides for educational research and development, and it would need to rigorously evaluate programs that show the greatest promise to make large, pragmatically important differences in schools’ outcomes in key areas, such as reading, mathematics, science, and English for English learners.  One way to do this cost-effectively would be to allow districts (or consortia of districts) to put forward pairs of matched schools for potential funding.   Districts or consortia awarded grants might then be evaluated by federal contractors, who would randomly assign one school in each pair to receive the program, while the pair members not selected would serve as a control group.  In this way, programs that had been found effective in initial research might have their evaluations replicated many times, at a very low evaluation cost.  This pair evaluation design could greatly increase the number of schools using proven programs, and could add substantially to the set of programs known to be effective.  This design could also give many more districts experience with top-quality experimental research, building support for the idea that research is of value to educators and students.

Getting back to Superman and Lois Lane, it is only natural to expect that Lois might be reluctant to get on another helicopter anytime soon, no matter what the evidence says.  However, when we are making decisions on behalf of children, it’s not enough to just pay attention to our own personal experience.  Listen to Superman.  The evidence matters.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Government Plays an Essential Role in Diffusion of Innovations

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of concern in reform circles about how externally derived evidence can truly change school practices and improve outcomes. Surveys of principals, for example, routinely find that principals rarely consult research in making key decisions, including decisions about adopting materials, software, or professional development intended to improve student outcomes. Instead, principals rely on their friends in similar schools serving similar students. In the whole process, research rarely comes up, and if it does, it is often generic research on how children learn rather than high-quality evaluations of specific programs they might adopt.

Principals and other educational leaders have long been used to making decisions without consulting research. It would be difficult to expect otherwise, because of three conditions that have prevailed roughly from the beginning of time to very recently: a) There was little research of practical value on practical programs; b) The research that did exist was of uncertain quality, and school leaders did not have the time or training to determine studies’ validity; c) There were no resources provided to schools to help them adopt proven programs, so doing so required that they spend their own scarce resources.

Under these conditions, it made sense for principals to ask around among their friends before selecting programs or practices. When no one knows anything about a program’s effectiveness, why not ask your friends, who at least (presumably) have your best interests at heart and know your context? Since conditions a, b, and c have defined the context for evidence use nearly up to the present, it is not surprising that school leaders have built a culture of distrust for anyone outside of their own circle when it comes to choosing programs.

However, all three of conditions a, b, and c have changed substantially in recent years, and they are continuing to change in a positive direction at a rapid rate:

a) High-quality research on practical programs for elementary and secondary schools is growing at an extraordinary rate. As shown in Figure 1, the number of rigorous randomized or quasi-experimental studies in elementary and secondary reading and in elementary math have skyrocketed since about 2003, due mostly to investments by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) and Investing in Innovation (i3). There has been a similar explosion of evidence in England, due to funding from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). Clearly, we know a lot more about which programs work and which do not than we once did.

b) Principals, teachers, and the public can now easily find reliable and accessible information on practical programs on the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), Evidence for ESSA, and other sites. No one can complain any more that information is inaccessible or incomprehensible.

c) Encouragement and funding are becoming available for schools eager to use proven programs. Most importantly, the federal ESSA law is providing school improvement funding for low-achieving schools that agree to implement programs that meet the top three ESSA evidence standards (strong, moderate, or promising). ESSA also provides preference points for applications for certain sources of federal funding if they promise to use the money to implement proven programs. Some states have extended the same requirement to apply to eligibility for state funding for schools serving students who are disadvantaged or are ethnic or linguistic minorities. Even schools that do not meet any of these demographic criteria are, in many states, being encouraged to use proven programs.

Photo credit: Jorge Gallo [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

I think the current situation is like that which must have existed in, say, 1910, with cars and airplanes. Anyone could see that cars and airplanes were the future. But I’m sure many horse-owners pooh-poohed the whole thing. “Sure there are cars,” they’d say, “but who will build all those paved roads? Sure there are airplanes, but who will build airports?” The answer was government, which could see the benefits to the entire economy of systems of roads and airports to meet the needs of cars and airplanes.

Government cannot solve all problems, but it can create conditions to promote adoption and use of proven innovations. And in education, federal, state, and local governments are moving rapidly to do this. Principals may still prefer to talk to other principals, and that’s fine. But with ever more evidence on ever more programs and with modest restructuring of funds governments are already awarding, conditions are coming together to utterly transform the role of evidence in educational practice.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Helping Struggling Schools

Illustration by James Bravo

There are a lot of schools in the U.S. that need to be achieving much better outcomes. However, there is a much smaller group of schools in which achievement levels are appalling. The solutions for garden-variety low-achieving schools are arguably different from those for schools with the very worst levels of performance.

In recent years, a key resource for very low-achieving schools has been the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program. SIG provides substantial funding to schools in the lowest 5 percent of their states on achievement measures. Up until this year, schools receiving SIG funds had to choose among four models.

This year, three new models were added to SIG. These include an option to use an evidence-proven whole-school reform model; such a model has to have been successfully evaluated in a study meeting What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) standards. This is potentially a significant advance. Perhaps, if many schools choose proven models, this option will enhance the effectiveness and image of the much-maligned SIG program. (Full disclosure: Our Success for All program is one of four approaches approved thus far by the U.S. Department of Education for use under the evidence-proven whole-school option for SIG.)

However, stop for a moment and consider what’s going on here. The lowest-achieving schools in America are being offered substantial funding (currently, up to $2 million over five years) to turn themselves around. These schools need the very best programs provided by organizations with a proven track record. Of all schools, why should these very needy schools receive unproven approaches, perhaps invented from scratch for the SIG proposal and therefore never even piloted before? When your car breaks down, do you tow it to a mechanic who has never fixed a car before? When you have medical problems, do you want to be someone’s first patient?

There should always be a fund separate from ordinary Title I to provide intensive assistance to schools in the lowest 5 percent of their states on state assessments. However, instead of focusing SIG on governance, personnel, and untested prescriptions, as it has done up to now, SIG (or its successor) should focus on helping schools select and effectively implement proven programs. In addition to the four “evidence-proven whole-school reform” models identified recently, SIG schools might be funded to implement a mix of reading approaches, math approaches, tutoring models, and social-emotional approaches, for example, each of which has convincing evidence of effectiveness.

The recent changes in SIG, allowing proven whole-school reforms, are a big step in the right direction, but additional steps in the same direction are needed to make this crucial investment a model of wise use of federal funds to solve serious problems in education.

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Robert E. Slavin

Director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University