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.

Cost-Effectiveness of Small Solutions

Imagine that you were shopping for a reliable new car, one that is proven to last an average of at least 100,000 miles with routine maintenance and repairs. You are looking at a number of options that fit your needs for around $24,000.

You happen to be talking to your neighbor, an economist, about your plans. “$24,000?” she says. “That’s crazy. You can get a motorcycle that would go at least 100,000 miles for only $12,000, and save a lot on gas as well!”

You point out to your neighbor that motorcycles might be nice for some purposes, but you need a car to go to the grocery store, transport the kids, and commute to work, even in rain or snow. “Sure,” says your neighbor, “but you posed a question of cost-effectiveness, and on that basis a motorcycle is the right choice. Or maybe a bicycle.”

In education, school leaders and policy makers are often faced with choices like this. They want to improve their students’ achievement, and they have limited resources. But the available solutions vary in cost, effectiveness, and many other factors.

To help leaders make good choices, economists have devised measures of cost-effectiveness, which means (when educational achievement is the goal) the amount of achievement gain you might expect from purchasing a given product or service divided by all costs of making that choice. Cost-effectiveness can be very useful in educational policy and practice in helping decision makers weigh the potential benefits of each of a set of choice available to them. The widespread availability of effect sizes indicating the outcomes and costs of various programs and practices, easily located in sources such as the What Works Clearinghouse and Evidence for ESSA, make it a lot easier to compare outcomes and costs of available programs. For example, a district might seek to improve high school math performance by adopting software and professional development for a proven technology program, or by adopting a proven professional development approach. All costs need to be considered as well as all benefits, and the school leaders might make the choice that produces the largest gains at the most affordable cost. Cost-effectiveness might not entirely determine which choice is made, but, one might argue, it should always be a key part of the decision-making process. Quantitative researchers in education and economics would agree. So far, so good.

But here is where things get a little dodgy. In recent years, there has arisen a lot of interest in super-cheap interventions that have super-small impacts, but the ratio between the benefits and the costs makes the super-cheap interventions look cost-effective. Such interventions are sometimes called “nudge strategies,” meaning that simple reminders or minimal actions activate a set of psychological process that can lead to important impacts. A very popular example right now is Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset strategy, in which students are asked to write a brief essay stating a belief that intelligence is not a fixed attribute of people, but that learning comes from effort. Her work has found small impacts of this essentially cost-free treatment in several studies, although others have failed to find this effect.

Other examples include sending messages to students or parents on cell phones, or sending postcards to parents on the importance of regular attendance. These strategies can cost next to nothing, yet large-scale experiments often show positive effects in the range of +0.03 to +0.05, averaging across multiple studies.

Approaches of this kind, including Growth Mindset, are notoriously difficult to replicate by others. However, assume for the sake of argument that at least some of them do have reliably positive effects that are very small, but because of their extremely small cost, they appear very cost-effective. Should schools use them?

One might take a view that interventions like Growth Mindset are so inexpensive and so sensible that what the heck, go ahead. However, others take some time and effort on the part of staff.

Schools are charged with a very important responsibility, ensuring the academic success, psychological adjustment, and pro-social character of young people. Their financial resources are always limited, but even more limited is their schoolwide capacity to focus on a small number of essential goals and stick with those goals until they are achieved. The problem is that spending a lot of time on small solutions with small impacts may exhaust a school’s capacity to focus on what truly matters. If a school could achieve an effect size of +0.30 on important achievement measures with one comprehensive program, or (for half the price) could adopt ten small interventions with effect sizes averaging +0.03, which should it do? Any thoughtful educator would say, “Invest in the one program with the big effect.” The little programs are not likely to add up to a big effect, and any collection of unrelated, uncoordinated mini-reforms is likely to deplete the staff’s energy and enthusiasm over a period of time.

This is where the car-motorcycle analogy comes in. A motorcycle may appear more cost-effective than a car, but it just does not do what a car does. Motorcycles are fine for touring in nice weather, but for most people they do not solve essential problems. In school reform, large programs with large effects may be composed of smaller effective components, but because these components are an integrated part of a well-thought-out plan, they add up to something more likely to work and to keep working over time.

Cost-effectiveness is a useful concept for schools seeking to make big differences in achievement, using serious resources. For small interventions with small impacts, don’t bother to calculate cost-effectiveness, or if you do, don’t compare the results to those of big interventions with big impacts. To do so is like bragging about the gas mileage you get on your motorcycle driving Aunt Sally and the triplets to the grocery store. It just doesn’t make sense.

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.

Two Years of Second Grade? Really?

In a recent blog, Mike Petrilli, President of the Fordham Institute, floated an interesting idea. Given the large numbers of students in high-poverty schools who finish elementary school far behind, what if we gave them all a second year of second grade? (he calls it “2.5”). This, he says, would give disadvantaged schools another year to catch kids up, without all the shame and fuss of retaining them.

At one level, I love this idea, but not on its merits. One more year of second grade would cost school districts or states the national average per-pupil cost of $11,400. So would I like to have $11,400 more for every child in a school district serving many disadvantaged students? You betcha. But another year of second grade is not in the top hundred things I’d do with it.

Just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about, my state, Maryland, has about 900,000 students in grades K-12. Adding a year of second grade for all of them would cost about $10,260,000,000. If half of them are, say, in Title 1 schools (one indicator of high poverty), that’s roughly $5 billion and change. Thanks, Mike! To be fair, this $5 billion would be spent over a 12-year period, as students go through year 2.5, so let’s say only a half billion a year.

What could Maryland’s schools do with a half billion dollars a year?  Actually, I wrote them a plan, arguing that if Maryland were realistically planning to ensure the success of every child on that state tests, they could do it, but it would not be cheap.

What Maryland, or any state, could do with serious money would be to spend it on proven programs, especially for struggling learners. As one example, consider tutoring. The well-known Reading Recovery program, for instance, uses a very well-trained tutor working one-to-one with a struggling first grader for about 16 weeks. The cost was estimated by Hollands et al. (2016) at roughly $4600. So Petrilli’s second grade offer could be traded for about three years of tutoring, not just for struggling first graders, but for every single student in a high-poverty school. And there are much less expensive forms of tutoring. It would be easy to figure out how every single student in, say, Baltimore, could receive tutoring every single year of elementary school using paraprofessionals and small groups for students with less serious problems and one-to-one tutoring for those with more serious problems (see Slavin, Inns, & Pellegrini, 2018).

Our Evidence for ESSA website lists many proven, highly effective approaches in reading and math. These are all ready to go; the only reason that they are not universally used is that they cost money, or so I assume. And not that much money, in the grand scheme of things.

I don’t understand why, even in this thought experiment, Mike Petrili is unwilling to consider the possibility of spending serious money on programs and practices that have actually been proven to work. But in case anyone wants to follow up on his idea, or at least pilot it in Maryland, please mail me $5 billion, and I will make certain that every student in every high-poverty school in the state does in fact reach the end of elementary school performing at or near grade level. Just don’t expect to see double when you check in on our second graders.

References

Hollands, F. M., Kieffer, M. J., Shand, R., Pan, Y., Cheng, H., & Levin, H. M. (2016). Cost-effectiveness analysis of early reading programs: A demonstration with recommendations for future research. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 9(1), 30-53.

Slavin, R. E., Inns, A., Pellegrini, M. & Lake (2018).  Response to proven instruction (RTPI): Enabling struggling learners. Submitted for publication.

Photo credit: By Petty Officer 1st Class Jerry Foltz (https://www.dvidshub.net/image/383907) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Getting Past the Dudalakas (And the Yeahbuts)

Phyllis Hunter, a gifted educator, writer, and speaker on the teaching of reading, often speaks about the biggest impediments to education improvement, which she calls the dudalakas. These are excuses for why change is impossible.  Examples are:

Dudalaka         Better students

Dudalaka         Money

Dudalaka         Policy support

Dudalaka         Parent support

Dudalaka         Union support

Dudalaka         Time

Dudalaka is just shorthand for “Due to the lack of.” It’s a close cousin of “yeahbut,” another reflexive response to ideas for improving education practices or policy.

Of course, there are real constraints that teachers and education leaders face that genuinely restrict what they can do. The problem with dudalakas and yeahbuts is not that the objections are wrong, but that they are so often thrown up as a reason not to even think about solutions.

I often participate in dudalaka conversations. Here is a composite. I’m speaking with a principal of an elementary school, who is expressing concern about the large number of students in his school who were struggling in reading. Many of these students were headed for special education. “Could you provide them with tutors?” I ask. “Yes, they get tutors, but we use a small group method that emphasizes oral reading (not the phonics skills that the students are actually lacking) (i.e., yeahbut).”

“Could you change the tutoring to focus on the skills you know students need?”

“Yeahbut our education leadership requires we use this system” (dudalaka political support). Besides, we have so many failing students (dudalaka better students) so we have to work with small groups of students (dudalaka tutors).”

“Could you hire and train paraprofessionals or recruit qualified volunteers to provide personalized tutoring?”

“Yeahbut we’d love to, but we can’t afford them (dudalaka money). Besides, we don’t have time for tutoring (dudalaka time).”

“But you have plenty of time in your afternoon schedule.”

“Yeahbut in the afternoon, children are tired. (Dudalaka better students).”

This conversation is not of course a rational discussion of strategies for solving a serious problem. It is instead an attempt by the principal to find excuses to justify his school’s continuing to do what it is doing now. Dudalakas and yeahbuts are merely ways of passing blame to other people (school leaders, teachers, children, parents, unions, and so on) and to shortages of money, time, and other resources that hold back change. Again, these excuses may or may not be valid in a particular situation, but there is a difference between rejecting potential solutions out of hand (using dudalakas and yeahbuts) as opposed to identifying and then carefully and creatively considering potential solutions. Not every solution will be possible or workable, but if the problem is important, some solution must be found. No matter what.

An average American elementary school with 500 students has an annual budget of approximately $6,000,000 ($12,000 per student). Principals and teachers, superintendents, and state superintendents think their hands are tied by limited resources (dudalaka money). But creativity and commitment to core goals can overcome funding limitations if school and district leaders are willing to use resources differently or activate underutilized resources, or ideally, find a way to obtain more funding.

The people who start off with the very human self-protective dudalakas and yeahbuts may, with time, experience, and encouragement, become huge advocates for change. It’s only natural to start with dudalakas and yeahbuts. What is important is that we don’t end with them.

We know that our children are capable of succeeding at much higher rates than they do today. Yet too many are failing, dudalaka quality implementation of proven programs. Let’s clear away the other dudalakas and yeahbuts, and get down to this one.

This blog is sponsored by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation

Spend Smart to Achieve Equity in Education

Politics, it is said, is all about who gets what. “What” is defined as money. Good people of all parties generally want to use government funding to improve peoples’ lives. But is giving people more money the same as improving their lives?

In education, money is important. Improving education usually costs money. You can’t make chicken soup out of chicken feathers, as we say in Baltimore. Further, inequalities in education funding between wealthy and disadvantaged districts within the same regions remain substantial. The children who need the most get the least, because education funding is usually tied to property taxes. Obviously, areas high in wealth can raise a lot more money with the same tax rate than can neighboring districts low in wealth. This is understood by all Americans as just the way of the world, but it is in fact anything but the way of the world. In fact, our system is so unfair and so unlike what happens in our peer nations that when I talk about it abroad, I have to explain it three or four times before my foreign friends can understand how any advanced country could do such a thing. In all other countries I know about, all schools receive equal funding, most often supplemented to help impoverished schools catch up. This has been true for decades, under right wing and left wing governments throughout the developed world.

I believe that equalizing school funding, and supplementing it for disadvantaged schools, is a moral responsibility, well worth fighting for. But will it solve the inequities in outcomes we see among our schools serving wealthy and disadvantaged neighborhoods?

This is a more complex question. But the simple answer is that for improving outcomes, there are better and worse ways to use money. We know a lot of proven strategies for turning money into achievement, and with modest continuing investment in the resources to help schools adopt and implement proven programs and in national R & D to create and evaluate proven programs, we could make substantial progress in reducing gaps and gaining on our international competitors. But if we expect that simply adding money to the current system will be sufficient, we are likely to be disappointed.

Spending is always a contentious issue. Spending smart should not be. Whatever we have decided to spend on education, we can all agree that every penny should count and the best way to ensure that money makes a difference is to use it on proven approaches.

Equalizing or even supplementing funding for high-poverty schools is the right thing to do, but we cannot just spend. We have to spend smart.

Money and Evidence

Many years ago, I spent a few days testifying in a funding equity case in Alabama. At the end of my testimony, the main lawyer for the plaintiffs drove me to the airport. “I think we’re going to win this case,” he said, “But will it help my clients?”

The lawyer’s question has haunted me ever since. In Alabama, then and now, there are enormous inequities in education funding in rich and poor districts due to differences in property tax receipts in different districts. There are corresponding differences in student outcomes. The same is true in most states. To a greater or lesser degree, most states and the federal government provide some funding to reduce inequalities, but in most places it is still the case that poor districts have to tax themselves at a higher rate to produce education funding that is significantly lower than that of their wealthier neighbors.

Funding inequities are worse than wrong, they are repugnant. When I travel in other countries and try to describe our system, it usually takes me a while to get people outside the U.S. to even understand what I am saying. “So schools in poor areas get less than those in wealthy ones? Surely that cannot be true.” In fact, it is true in the U.S., but in all of our peer countries, national or at least regional funding policies ensure basic equality in school funding, and in most cases I know about they then add additional funding on top of equalized funding for schools serving many children in poverty. For example, England has long had equal funding, and the Conservative government added “Pupil Premium” funding in which each disadvantaged child brings additional funds to his or her school. Pupil Premium is sort of like Title I in the U.S., if you can imagine Title I adding resources on top of equal funding, which it does in only a few U.S. states.

So let’s accept the idea that funding inequity is a BAD THING. Now consider this: Would eliminating funding inequities eliminate achievement gaps in U.S. schools? This gets back to the lawyer’s question. If we somehow won a national “case” that required equalizing school funding, would the “clients” benefit?

More money for disadvantaged schools would certainly be welcome, and it would certainly create the possibility of major advances. But in order to maximize the impact of significant additional funding, it all depends on what schools do with the added dollars. Of course you’d have to increase teachers’ salaries and reduce class sizes to draw highly qualified teachers into disadvantaged schools. But you’d also have to spend a significant portion of new funds to help schools implement proven programs with fidelity and verve.

Again, England offers an interesting model. Twenty years ago, achievement in England was very unequal, despite equal funding. Children of immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and other minorities performed well below White British children. The Labour government implemented a massive effort to change this, starting with the London Challenge and continuing with a Manchester Challenge and a Black Country Challenge in the post-industrial Midlands. Each “challenge” provided substantial professional development to school staffs, as well as organizing achievement data to show school leaders that other schools with exactly the same demographic challenges were achieving far better results.

Today, children of Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants are scoring at the English mean. Children of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants are just below the English mean. Policy makers in England are now turning their attention to White working-class boys. But the persistent and substantial gaps we see as so resistant to change in the U.S. are essentially gone in England.

Today, we are getting even smarter about how to turn dollars into enhanced achievement, due to investments by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and Investing in Innovation (i3) program in the U.S. and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in England. In both countries, however, we lack the funding to put into place what we know how to do on a large enough scale to matter, but this need not always be the case.

Funding matters. No one can make chicken soup out of chicken feathers, as we say in Baltimore. But funding in itself will not solve our achievement gap. Funding needs to be spent on specific, high-impact investments to make a big difference.

Governing From the Outside In and Back Out Again

“If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the highest return.” – Benjamin Franklin

“We have a saying in Congress, when decisions are being made: ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.’” – Senator Tom Harkin

When it comes to innovation, federal government bureaucrats usually do not sit around in their offices coming up with lots of brilliant and not-so-brilliant ideas. The majority of innovative ideas seized upon by the government originate elsewhere: a small program run by a local community leader; a researcher at a state university; or an engineer in a private sector company. Yet few of these people or programs, if left to their own devices, have the knowledge to conduct a moderately sized RCT or quasi-experimental study to determine the effectiveness of the program, much less any incentive or funding to do so. If told to go big or go home, most would never make it out the front door. Most of these people would be content to remain in their backyards running a program based on anecdotal evidence of accomplishment in their local community. No collaboration, no learning from other people’s mistakes, and no benefiting from other communities’ successes. Their ideas may be terrific, but local educators are not likely to evaluate or disseminate their ideas nationally.

The Fiscal Year 2016 Budget Resolution released by the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives this week asserts that the federal government works to “smother” and “stifle” innovation. It claims instead that this budget “promotes innovation” and reduces “ineffective” and “duplicative” programs. One of the ways it does this is by putting policy decisions in the hands of states and localities, which it states will lead to more “choices and opportunities for Americans.” Unfortunately, this is contrary to the intended result. States and localities do not have the capability to expand innovative ideas and disseminate the results the way the federal government can. Moreover, this would lead to greater duplication of efforts. As I’ve stated before, states do not do their own cancer research or defense technology research because it would be inefficient and uneconomical. The same is true for other areas of research and development.

Also released this week was a bipartisan paper entitled Moneyball for Education written by Frederick Hess and Bethany Little. In this paper, Hess and Little find common ground to suggest ideas for improving federal education policies using evidence and evaluation to spend taxpayer dollars more effectively and improve student outcomes. They assert that growing the database of innovative programs with evidence of positive outcomes and disseminating this information is in the public interest. It will provide greater flexibility and choice to state and local decision makers with an increased return on their investment thanks to the evidence behind the programs.

State and local governments should play a key role in the education process in education. Promising ideas should be welcome from everywhere — state and local governments, charter schools, universities, non-profits, and for profits. Innovators should be encouraged and given development funding to make their ideas practical and ready for evaluation. If the evaluations show positive effects, the programs should be scaled up nationally and offered as alternatives (not mandated) for local and state educators to use.

What I’ve just described is very similar to what the Investing in Innovation (i3) program already does. i3 is an outstanding example of how the federal government can support innovation no matter what its source and then help evaluate and disseminate information that state and local educators can use to make wise decisions. No matter which party initiated it or what it is called, this process is the way federal, state, and local government can best work together to introduce innovation without imposing mandates or restricting choice. Yet the current majority funding proposals have taken i3 out of the budget.

A healthy system of evidence-driven innovation has to involve all levels of government and many actors outside of government. It is both outside-in and inside-out, with each part of the system playing the role to which it is best suited.

Let a thousand (local) flowers bloom, and then send sacks of proven flower seeds back to the locals to use as they see fit. But there is a key step in the middle of this process that only the federal government can play: evaluation, and communicating the results of the evaluations. So it should be in education.

Follow Robert E. Slavin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertSlavin

Robert E. Slavin

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

Eat Your Pets

Don’t worry, Fluffy. This isn’t about you. I’m talking about Chia Pets.

Many years ago, someone invented little terracotta animals on which you could plant chia seeds that would grow into a coat for the animal. These were all the rage a while back and still exist, as a last-ditch birthday gift for six-year-olds, for example. More than a half million Chia Pets are still sold each year.

More recently, health food enthusiasts have been touting the benefits of eating chia seeds and chia plants. Thus, eat your pets.

So what does this have to do with evidence-based reform in education? I could mention that more is probably spent on maintaining our essential chia reserves than on all research seeking technological breakthroughs to teach, say, algebra. But I would never stoop to making such a comparison.

Instead, the point I want to make is this. In education, people always want simple answers, when only slightly less simple answers are actually useful. If “eat your pets” were proclaimed in education, you’d immediately have a small faction in favor of eating pets and a really big one opposed, with almost no one saying “eat your Chia Pet, but not other pets.” Much too reasonable, and no one likes independent clauses in education pronouncements.

We see this insistence on super-simplification all the time. Is technology good or bad? Cooperative learning? Accountability? We have pretty good answers to each of these, and many more, but they each require an independent clause or two that explains “for whom” and “under what circumstances.”

Education will never make progress until we can educate the public to tolerate a little bit of explanation. Otherwise, we’ll be eating our pets until the cows come home.

Follow Robert E. Slavin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertSlavin

Robert E. Slavin

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

Six Low-Cost or Free Ways to Make American Education the Best in the World

It does not take a political genius to know that for the foreseeable future, American education is not going to be rescued by a grand influx of new money. Certainly in the near term, the slow economic recovery, gridlock in Washington, and other factors mean that the path to substantial improvement in outcomes is going to be paved not with new gold, but with better use of the gold that’s already there.

No problem.

We already spend a lot of money on education. The task right now is to change how we spend federal, state, and local resources so that more money is spent on programs and practices known to make a difference rather than on investments with zero or unknown impacts on learning. Here are my top six suggestions for how to spend our education resources more effectively. (I’ll go into more details on these in future blogs).

1. Provide incentives for schools and districts to implement programs with strong evidence of effectiveness in competitive grants. In competitive grants in all parts of federal and state government, offer “competitive preference points” for applicants who promise to adopt and effectively implement programs proven to be effective. For example, schools proposing to implement programs identified as having “strong evidence of effectiveness” under the new EDGAR definitions might receive four extra points on a 100-point scale, while those meeting the criteria for “moderate evidence of effectiveness” might receive two points. Readers of this blog have seen me make this recommendation many times. Perfect example: School Improvement Grants for low-achieving schools. Cost: zero.

2. Provide incentives for schools and districts to implement programs with strong evidence of effectiveness in formula grants. The big money in federal and state education funding is in formula grants that go to districts and schools based on, for example, levels of poverty, rather than competitive applications. The classic example is Title I. Schools have great freedom in how they use these funds, so how can they be encouraged to use them in more effective ways? The answer is to provide additional incentive funding if schools or districts commit to using proven programs with their allotted formula funds. For example, if schools agree to use a portion of their (formula-driven) Title I funds on a proven program, they may qualify for additional funds (not from the formula pot). This was the idea behind the Obey-Porter Comprehensive School Reform initiative of the late 1990s, which encouraged thousands of Title I schools to adopt whole-school reform models. Cost: This strategy could be done at a cost of perhaps 1% of the current $15 billion annual Title I budget.

3. Offer commitment to proven programs as an alternative to use of value-added teacher evaluation models. A central part of the current administration’s policies is incentivizing states and districts to adopt teacher evaluation plans that combine principal ratings of teachers with value-added scores based on students’ state reading and math tests. This is a required part of Race to the Top in those states that received this funding, and it is a required element of state applications for a waiver of elements of No Child Left Behind.

In practice, current teacher evaluation policies are intended to do two things. First, they insist that schools identify extremely ineffective teachers and help them find other futures. If done fairly and consistently, few oppose this aspect of teacher evaluation. Principals have evaluated teachers and identified those with serious deficits forever, and I am not arguing against continuing this type of evaluation.

The second purpose of the teacher evaluation policies is to improve teaching and learning for all teachers. This is the expensive and contentious part of the policies; in most states it requires a combination of frequent, structured observation by principals and “value-added” assessments of a given teacher’s students. The technical difficulties of both are substantial, and no study has yet shown any benefit to student learning as a result of going through the whole ordeal.

If the goal is better teaching and learning, why not require that all reform approaches meet the same evidence standards? If a school proposes to use a schoolwide strategy that (unlike current teacher evaluation policies) has strong evidence of effectiveness, the school should be permitted, even encouraged, to suspend aspects of the new model as long as it is implementing proven alternatives with fidelity and good outcomes. Cost: Modest, assuming proven programs are similar in cost to the expensive new teacher evaluation strategies.

4. Train and equip paraprofessionals as tutors. The most common expenditure of Title I funds is on paraprofessionals or aides, educators who do not usually have teaching degrees but perform all sorts of functions within schools other than class teaching. Paraprofessionals can be wonderful and capable people, but evidence in the U.S. and U.K. consistently finds that as they are most commonly used, they make little difference in student learning.

Yet there is also extensive evidence that paraprofessionals can be very effective if 
they are trained to provide well-structured one-to-one or one-to-small group tutoring to students who are struggling in reading and math. Paraprofessionals are a multi-billion dollar army eager and capable of making more of a difference. Let’s empower them to do so. Cost: Minimal (just training and materials).

5. Encourage schools to use Supplemental Educational Services (SES) funding on proven programs. As part of No Child Left Behind, Title I schools had to use substantial portions of their Title I dollars to provide Supplemental Educational Services (SES) to students in schools failing to meet standards. Study after study has found SES to be ineffective, and expenditures on SES are waning, yet they remain as a significant element of Title I funding, even in states with waivers. If districts could be encouraged to use SES funds on programs with evidence of effectiveness in improving achievement (such as training paraprofessionals and teachers to be tutors in reading and/or math), outcomes are sure to improve. Cost: Minimal.

6. Invest in research and development to identify effective uses of universal access to tablets or computers. Despite economic and political hard times, schools everywhere are moving rapidly toward providing universal, all-student access to tablets or computers. There is a lot of talk about blended learning, flipped learning, and so on, but little actual research and development is going on that is likely to identify effective and replicable classroom strategies likely to make good use of these powerful tools. As it has done many times before, American education is about to spend billions on technology without first knowing which applications actually work. Setting aside a tiny percentage of the costs of the hardware and software, we could fund many innovators to create and rigorously evaluate approaches using all-student technology access, before we get stuck on ineffective solutions (again). Cost: modest.

* * *

I’m sure there are many more ways we could shift existing funds to advance
American education, but they all come down to one common recommendation: use what works. Collectively, the six strategies I’ve outlined, and others like them, could catapult American education to the top on international comparisons, greatly reduce education gaps, and prepare our students for the demands of a technological economy, all at little or no net cost, if we’re willing to also stop making ineffective investments. Moreover, all of these six prescriptions could be substantially underway in the next two years, during the remainder of the current administration. All could be done by the Department of Education alone, without congressional action. And again, I’m sure that others have many other examples of low-cost and no-cost solutions that I haven’t thought of or haven’t addressed here.

A revolution in American education does not necessarily require money, but it does require courage, leadership, and resolve. Those are resources our nation has in abundance. Let’s put them to work.

Follow Robert E. Slavin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertSlavin

Robert E. Slavin

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

Wink Wink Nudge Nudge: Use Proven Programs

Discussions about evidence-based reform in education often founder on the question of financing. Who is going to provide the funding necessary to help schools adopt proven programs?

There are some areas in which additional funding might be necessary, which I’ll address in a moment. But the most important federal action to promote adoption of proven programs is to encourage schools and districts to use existing federal funding in this way. In particular, leaders of high-poverty schools constantly sniff the wind to be aware of what the feds want them to do. If the feds say “Wink wink nudge nudge, use proven programs,” high-poverty schools will get a lot more interested in what these are and how they can get ahold of them. Beyond winks and nudges, the feds and state leaders can offer a few competitive preference points to proposals that promise to adopt and effectively implement proven programs. Again, if government is handing out discretionary money based on local proposals, it costs nothing to nudge these proposals toward proven programs.

Of course, government funding is needed to help develop and evaluate promising programs, and sometimes to provide incentive or start-up funding to help schools or districts adopt them. But the really big money, like Title I and Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants, is what should be phasing toward support for proven approaches, and with a wink, a nudge, some competitive preference points, and an ever-growing set of proven programs from which schools may choose, our system of schooling can become far more effective over time, especially for the struggling schools that receive the largest amounts of federal funding.

Follow Robert E. Slavin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertSlavin

Robert E. Slavin

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