Making Evidence Locally

February 14, 2017

CEPR Faculty Director Thomas J. Kane rethinks education research under the Every Student Succeeds Act in the following EdNext article.

The new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), envisions a powerful role for states in managing the evidence base behind school improvement efforts. Not only must they certify that interventions meet the “evidence-based” requirements spelled out in the law, they also must monitor and evaluate federally funded school-improvement efforts going forward. There’s only one problem: states have never played such a role before.

In order to fulfill this obligation, states will need a scalable model of impact evaluation which could operate at the local level, where decisions are being made. States should adopt a simple goal: any major initiative involving more than 100 classrooms should be subject to a local pilot test before being rolled out. In other words, districts should be running their own small-scale impact studies, implementing interventions in a subset of their classrooms, establishing comparison groups, tracking and comparing results, and acting on the evidence. That’s been the path to improvement in a variety of fields, from pharmaceuticals to retail sales. Given our incomplete understanding of the way students learn and teachers change their teaching, it is the only path to sustained improvement in U.S. education.

After a decade of investing in state and local data systems, many of the components of such a system—like longitudinal data on individual students and indicators matching students to teachers—have already been built. But some key pieces are still missing. We need a way to pool data among school districts, most of which are too small to assemble sufficient comparison groups on their own. We need a quicker and less expensive route to launch impact evaluation studies rather than the current costly and time-consuming practice of designing each new study from scratch. And local education agencies need an ongoing analytic partner that can standardize key parts of research analysis, such as how comparison groups are identified. Finally, local leaders need new venues for synthesizing results, comparing notes, and choosing which interventions to test next.

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