blog posts and news stories

Importance is Important for Rules of Evidence Proposed for ED Grant Programs

The U.S. Department of Education recently proposed new rules for including serious evaluations as part of its grant programs. The approach is modeled on how evaluations are used in the Investing in Innovation (i3) program where the proposal must show there’s some evidence that the proposed innovation has a chance of working and scaling and must include an evaluation that will add to a growing body of evidence about the innovation. We like this approach because it treats previous research as a hypothesis that the innovation may work in the new context. And each new grant is an opportunity to try the innovation in a new context, with improved approaches that warrant another check on effectiveness. But the proposed rules definitely had some weaknesses that were pointed out in the public comments available online. We hope ED heeds these suggestions.

Mark Schneiderman representing the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) recommends that outcomes used in effectiveness studies should not be limited to achievement scores.

SIIA notes that grant program resources could appropriately address a range of purposes from instructional to administrative, from assessment to professional development, and from data warehousing to systems productivity. The measures could therefore include such outcomes as student test scores, teacher retention rates, changes in classroom practice or efficiency, availability and use of data or other student/teacher/school outcomes, and cost effectiveness and efficiency that can be observed and measured. Many of these outcome measures can also be viewed as intermediate outcomes—changes in practice that, as demonstrated by other research, are likely to affect other final outcomes.

He also points out that quality of implementation and the nature of the comparison group can be the deciding factors in whether or not a program is found to be effective.

SIIA notes that in education there is seldom a pure control condition such as can be achieved in a medical trial with a placebo or sugar pill. Evaluations of education products and services resemble comparative effectiveness trials in which a new medication is tested against a currently approved one to determine whether it is significantly better. The same product may therefore prove effective in one district that currently has a weak program but relatively less effective in another where a strong program is in place. As a result, significant effects can often be difficult to discern.

This point gets to the heart of the contextual issues in any experimental evaluation. Without understanding the local conditions of the experiment the size of the impact for any other context cannot be anticipated. Some experimentalists would argue that a massive multi-site trial would allow averaging across many contextual variations. But such “on average” results won’t necessarily help the decision-maker working in specific local conditions. Thus, taking previous results as a rough indication that an innovation is worth trying is the first step before conducting the grant-funded evaluation of a new variation of the innovation under new conditions.

Jon Baron, writing for the Coalition for Evidence Based Policy expresses a fundamental concern about what counts as evidence. Jon, who is a former Chair of the National Board for Education Sciences and has been a prominent advocate for basing policy on rigorous research, suggests that

“the definition of ‘strong evidence of effectiveness’ in §77.1 incorporate the Investing in Innovation Fund’s (i3) requirement for effects that are ‘substantial and important’ and not just statistically significant.”

He cites examples where researchers have reported statistically significant results, which were based on trivial outcomes or had impacts so small as to have no practical value. Including “substantial and important” as additional criteria also captures the SIIA’s point that it is not sufficient to consider the internal validity of the study—policy makers must consider whether the measure used is an important one or whether the treatment-control contrast allows for detecting a substantial impact.

Addressing the substance and importance of the results gets us appropriately into questions of external validity, and leads us to questions about subgroup impact, where, for example, an innovation has a positive impact “on average” and works well for high scoring students but provides no value for low scoring students. We would argue that a positive average impact is not the most important part of the picture if the end result is an increase in a policy-relevant achievement gap. Should ED be providing grants for innovations where there has been a substantial indication that a gap is worsened? Probably yes, but only if the proposed development is aimed at fixing the malfunctioning innovation and if the program evaluation can address this differential impact.

Empirical is participating in recently awarded five-year REL contracts

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education recently announced the recipients of five-year contracts for each of the 10 Regional Education Laboratories (RELs). We are excited to be part of four strong teams of practitioners and researchers that received the awards.

The original request for proposals in May 2011 called for the new RELs to work closely with alliances of state and local education agencies and other practitioner organizations to build local capacity for research. Considering the close ties between this agenda and Empirical’s core mission we joined the proposal efforts and are now part of winning teams in the West (led by WestEd), Northwest (led by Education Northwest), Midwest (led by the American Institutes for Research (AIR)), and Southwest (led by SEDL) The REL Southwest is currently under a stop work order while ED addresses a dispute concerning its review process. Empirical Education’s history in conducting Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) and in providing technical assistance to education agencies provides a strong foundation for the next five years.

A Conversation About Building State and Local Research Capacity

John Q Easton, director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), came to New Orleans recently to participate in the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. At one of his stops, he was the featured speaker at a meeting of the Directors of Research and Evaluation (DRE), an organization composed of school district research directors. (DRE is affiliated with AERA and was recently incorporated as a 501©(3)). John started his remarks by pointing out that for much of his career he was a school district research director and felt great affinity to the group. He introduced the directions that IES was taking, especially how it was approaching working with school systems. He spent most of the hour fielding questions and engaging in discussion with the participants. Several interesting points came out of the conversation about roles for the researchers who work for education agencies.

Historically, most IES research grant programs have been aimed at university or other academic researchers. It is noteworthy that even in a program for “Evaluation of State and Local Education Programs and Policies,” grants have been awarded only to universities and large research firms. There is no expectation that researchers working for the state or local agency would be involved in the research beyond the implementation of the program. The RFP for the next generation of Regional Education Labs (REL) contracts may help to change that. The new RFP expects the RELs to work closely with education agencies to define their research questions and to assist alliances of state and local agencies in developing their own research capacity.

Members of the audience noted that, as district directors of research, they often spend more time reviewing research proposals from students and professors at local colleges who want to conduct research in their schools, rather than actually answering questions initiated by the district. Funded researchers treat the districts as the “human subjects,” paying incentives to participants and sometimes paying for data services. But the districts seldom participate in defining the research topic, conducting the studies, or benefiting directly from the reported findings. The new mission of the RELs to build local capacity will be a major shift.

Some in the audience pointed out reasons to be skeptical that this REL agenda would be possible. How can we build capacity if research and evaluation departments across the country are being cut? In fact, very little is known about the number of state or district practitioners whose capacity for research and evaluation could be built by applying the REL resources. (Perhaps, a good first research task for the RELs would be to conduct a national survey to measure the existing capacity.)

John made a good point in reply: IES and the RELs have to work with the district leadership—not just the R&E departments—to make this work. The leadership has to have a more analytic view. They need to see the value of having an R&E department that goes beyond test administration, and is able to obtain evidence to support local decisions. By cultivating a research culture in the district, evaluation could be routinely built in to new program implementations from the beginning. The value of the research would be demonstrated in the improvements resulting from informed decisions. Without a district leadership team that values research to find out what works for the district, internal R&E departments will not be seen as an important capacity.

Some in the audience pointed out that in parallel to building a research culture in districts, it will be necessary to build a practitioner culture among researchers. It would be straightforward for IES to require that research grantees and contractors engage the district R&E staff in the actual work, not just review the research plan and sign the FERPA agreement. Practitioners ultimately hold the expertise in how the programs and research can be implemented successfully in the district, thus improving the overall quality and relevance of the research.

Stimulating Innovation and Evidence

After a massive infusion of stimulus money into K-12 technology through the Title IID “Enhancing Education Through Technology” (EETT) grants, known also as “ed-tech” grants, the administration is planning to cut funding for the program in future budgets.

Well, they’re not exactly “cutting” funding for technology, but consolidating the dedicated technology funding stream into a larger enterprise, awkwardly named the “Effective Teaching and Learning for a Complete Education” program. For advocates of educational technology, here’s why this may not be so much a blow as a challenge and an opportunity.

Consider the approach stated at the White House “fact sheet”:

“The Department of Education funds dozens of programs that narrowly limit what states, districts, and schools can do with funds. Some of these programs have little evidence of success, while others are demonstrably failing to improve student achievement. The President’s Budget eliminates six discretionary programs and consolidates 38 K-12 programs into 11 new programs that emphasize using competition to allocate funds, giving communities more choices around activities, and using rigorous evidence to fund what works…Finally, the Budget dedicates funds for the rigorous evaluation of education programs so that we can scale up what works and eliminate what does not.”

From this, technology advocates might worry that policy is being guided by the findings of “no discernable impact” from a number of federally funded technology evaluations (including the evaluation mandated by the EETT legislation itself).

But this is not the case. The White House declares, “The President strongly believes that technology, when used creatively and effectively, can transform education and training in the same way that it has transformed the private sector.”

The administration is not moving away from the use of computers, electronic whiteboards, data systems, Internet connections, web resources, instructional software, and so on in education. Rather, the intention is that these tools are integrated, where appropriate and effective, into all of the other programs.

This does put technology funding on a very different footing. It is no longer in its own category. Where school administrators are considering funding from the “Effective Teaching and Learning for a Complete Education” program, they may place a technology option up against an approach to lower class size, a professional development program, or other innovations that may integrate technologies as a small piece of an overall intervention. Districts would no longer write proposals to EETT to obtain financial support to invest in technology solutions. Technology vendors will increasingly be competing for the attention of school district decision-makers on the basis of the comparative effectiveness of their solution—not just in comparison to other technologies but in comparison to other innovative solutions. The administration has clearly signaled that innovative and effective technologies will be looked upon favorably. It has also signaled that effectiveness is the key criterion.

As an Empirical Education team prepares for a visit to Washington DC for the conference of the Consortium for School Networking and the Software and Information Industry Association’s EdTech Government Forum, (we are active members in both organizations), we have to consider our message to the education technology vendors and school system technology advocates. (Coincidentally, we will also be presenting research at the annual conference of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, also held in DC that week). As a research company we are constrained from taking an advocacy role—in principle we have to maintain that the effectiveness of any intervention is an empirical issue. But we do see the infusion of short term stimulus funding into educational technology through the EETT program as an opportunity for schools and publishers. Working jointly to gather the evidence from the technologies put in place this year and next will put schools and publishers in a strong position to advocate for continued investment in the technologies that prove effective.

While it may have seemed so in 1993 when the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology was first established, technology can no longer be considered inherently innovative. The proposed federal budget is asking educators and developers to innovate to find effective technology applications. The stimulus package is giving the short term impetus to get the evidence in place.