Making Schools Work

By Nina Pasquini

Tom Kane deploys data to help improve education.

In a taxi bound for the Pierre Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Thomas Kane rehearsed the pitch he’d memorized to persuade the world’s richest man to fund a radical new approach to education reform.

Ordinarily, Kane’s speech is slow and deliberate, punctuated by measured pauses. The Gale professor of economics and education is careful to avoid overreach, demarcating the known clearly from the unknown, avoiding any suggestion of causation when two variables are merely correlated. But on the morning of October 20, 2007, Kane knew his time with Bill Gates ’77, LL.D. ’07, was limited, and he wanted a tight case for why understanding teacher effectiveness was the key to improving schools.

“For 30 years, we’ve known that some teachers are simply more effective at raising student achievement than others, and that paper qualifications tell us little about who those most effective teachers are going to be,” Kane said in Gates’s suite, over a table crowded with bottles of Diet Coke. “And, yet, in our human resource policy, we’ve acted like just the opposite were true: we’ve put all of our effort into raising certification requirements.” The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed five years earlier, had attempted to improve teacher quality by focusing on degrees, state licensure, and standardized tests for educators—all poor indicators of teachers’ skills in the classroom.

In front of Gates was a heavily marked-up copy of a 2006 Brookings Institution paper, reporting an analysis by Kane and colleagues of data from 150,000 students in 9,400 Los Angeles classrooms from 2000 to 2003. The researchers found a striking pattern: teachers who succeeded in raising students’ test scores one year did so consistently—and there was little correlation between this success and certification. The impacts on student achievement were “massive,” they wrote: on average, students taught by a top-quartile teacher gained five percentile points relative to students with similar baseline scores and demographic characteristics, while those assigned to a bottom-quartile teacher lost five points.

At the meeting, as Kane advocated for further research on the subject, he was not promoting a particular intervention in schooling, a field rife with ideas for improvement. Instead, he articulated a new way to approach education reform—one centered around measuring and tracking the effectiveness of interventions. This may sound obvious: other fields, from medicine to business, rely on systems for testing new ideas and adjusting best practices accordingly. “That doesn’t happen in education. And that’s why the conventional wisdom has not been evolving,” Kane says now. “We’ve been having the same debates over and over and over.”

The consequences are clear. Since the 1983 federal report “A Nation at Risk” warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity” in American education, federal and state governments have spent billions trying to improve student outcomes. Yet American teenagers’ performance in reading and math has remained stagnant since 2000—and disparities between high- and low-performing students are growing. Pandemic learning losses have exacerbated these challenges: on a 2023 administration of an international math test, American fourth graders’ scores dropped 18 points compared to 2019, and eighth graders dropped 27 points.

Kane has dedicated his career to addressing this crisis by helping school leaders and policymakers test ideas for reform. This was the challenge Gates and Kane discussed in New York. Existing research made it clear that some teachers helped students score higher on standardized tests. But how could they confirm those scores aligned with student achievement measured in other ways? And how might scholars define and measure what made an effective teacher? The answers could transform schools—enabling them to reward the most successful teachers, move them where they were most needed, and help others follow their lead.

Kane’s preparation for the meeting apparently paid off: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed $60 million to answering these questions, aiming to inform the teacher evaluation policies that states were developing at the time.

It wasn’t Kane’s first time at the intersection of philanthropy, policy, and classrooms. As an education policy researcher—and now, as the faculty director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR)—his career has placed him at the center of fierce debates about issues ranging from the NCLB to charter schools to pandemic learning loss. Throughout, he has remained steadfast in his belief that evidence—not ideology—should guide education reform. “And I say that because I know most things don’t work,” he explains. “I just can’t tell you, until we do the study, which things work and which don’t.”

Read the full profile at harvardmagazine.com.