Earlier this year, we made the bipartisan case for why and how federal education policymakers need to start playing “Moneyball.” By adopting and adapting the Oakland Athletics’ pioneering approach in baseball of making decisions informed by data—rather than hunches, biases, and “the way we’ve always done things”—we can get better returns on our federal education investments and better outcomes for students.
Specifically, playing Moneyball for Education would mean:
- Collecting better, more useful data and building evidence about how well programs and policies work;
- using evidence to improve practice and inform policies; and
- shifting funds toward those things that deliver more promising results.
Sounds easy, right? Not so fast. Like baseball, Moneyball is actually a game of nuance, a concept that is rarely synonymous with federal policymaking. Too often policy is made absent the data that would allow it to be more effective.