September 24, 2014Article

Education Week: Harnessing Penny Power to Learn What Works

by Robert Balfanz

Education/ 2014/

Teachers and principals are always looking for ways to better teach and support students—including searching for reliable information about interventions that have been proven to work in classrooms similar to their own. Unfortunately, these searches often come up empty, and education policy discussions on how to invest limited taxpayer dollars are too often driven by inadequate, incomplete, or biased information as a result of the lack of data on what works, when, where, and for whom.

What if Congress took a different approach? What if the federal government used one penny of every dollar it now spends on K-12 education—which I estimate to be about $40 billion—to develop evidence and knowledge so that the rest of that dollar could be spent wisely? This would free up approximately $400 million annually, which could enable a game-changing approach to how we spend federal education dollars.

Recently, I published a report with the group Results for America, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, to show how this could be done. If Congress set aside a bit more of the money it already spends on education for evaluations, the U.S. Department of Education could figure out how to better invest the rest by launching a comprehensive and responsive knowledge-building effort to determine what is working in federally funded education programs. It could also help solve some common problems of practice that educators face every day—problems like how to help more children get ready for kindergarten, how to improve academic literacy for adolescents, and how to help 9th graders stay on track to high school graduation and college readiness.