Opinion: New Toolkit Helps Policymakers Use Research from 4 Decades of Education Reform

When A Nation at Risk was released in 1983, few expected the slim federal report to produce any significant impact. Its dire warnings of a “rising tide of mediocrity,” though, galvanized the country and led to four decades of determined efforts to improve the nation’s schools.

What has been the result?

The Hoover Institution’s A Nation at Risk +40 project brought together a dozen scholars in an attempt to better assess the real-life impact of these efforts. Each author dug deep into a key education reform initiative — standards-based accountability, new governance models, changes in teacher training and development, technology implementation and countless others — with the goal of cataloging what was tried and what happened as a result.

While each paper in the series speaks to a specific chapter of America’s school reform story, a critical added analysis was provided by the Hoover Institution’s Margaret “Macke” Raymond , who took on the task of looking across this series of reports to better understand what, if anything, they collectively tell us about school reform more broadly.

Her conclusions?

While “40 years of scattershot reforms, have on the whole, failed to improve student learning,” she writes, there are indeed some high-level takeaways that “hold the potential for illuminating future directions” in school reform.

Specifically, Raymond’s findings suggest that policymakers can improve their odds of substantive and lasting policy impact by tackling six challenges related to planning, engagement, consensus building and implementation.

Overcoming Impulsiveness : Policymakers are under pressure to act and can be quick to embrace a reform strategy that has found success elsewhere. It worked there, the thinking goes, so it should work here. The research suggests, however, that local policymakers do not always take the time to determine whether their chosen approach is a good fit. Were the factors that led to that success in place in the new locale? If not, then what? Policymakers need to resist the urge to move quickly, and instead devote the time and resources necessary to understand how reform success can be accomplished for the specific populations they serve.

Moving Beyond the Margins : Policymakers who understand the challenges that come with large-scale reform sometimes focus on more marginal quick-win strategies, hoping these will prove easier to execute. Efforts of this kind can have impact and are typically cheaper and easier to launch. But policymakers can overlook that in their sheer “death by a thousand cuts” volume, marginal efforts can also produce reform fatigue and resistance. Worse still, the bandwidth they consume is then unavailable for broader, more systemic change. Small-scale approaches have their place — especially when structured as pilots from which lessons can be learned — but four decades of marginal reforms haven’t moved the needle. Approach them with caution.

Creating Coherence : Policymakers seldom take the time to understand how a proposed reform will interact with or impact efforts that are already on the books. As Raymond notes, reforms tend to be “ ‘bolted on’ one after another, without regard for how they fit together.” Each one, then, has the effect of “diluting the impact of the others.” Before enacting something new, policymakers would do well to engage stakeholders in more fully understanding the potential impact of launching yet another reform approach. Better yet, they should undertake a detailed inventory of existing efforts, study their results both in the near term and over time, and aggressively phase out initiatives that no longer meet their objectives.

Addressing Impatience : The steady drumbeat of electoral cycles creates pressure to demonstrate quick results. Policymakers seldom appreciate, though, that in some instances — the adoption of new curricular materials, for example, or the creation of new teacher preparation programs — measurable impact can take years to materialize. Impatience for results can undermine an initiative’s long-term success and sends a message to the forces of the status quo that if they just hold out long enough, “this too, shall pass.” Policymakers need to maintain reform momentum over the long term, which typically requires sustained (and often bipartisan) coalition building and deep levels of ongoing engagement.

Prioritizing Implementation : Raymond’s findings suggest that countless education reform initiatives have been put to sea with great fanfare, only to be dashed to pieces on the rocks of implementation. The journey of a reform idea from the capitol steps to the classroom door is far longer and more hazardous than most policymakers realize. As a result, they hardly ever craft detailed implementation roadmaps identifying who is responsible for which mission-critical actions at various levels. They seldom build feedback loops to track implementation progress and rarely utilize small-scale pilots to identify potential roadblocks in advance. Absent unrelenting attention to the day-to-day work of implementation, policymakers should have little hope for sustained and meaningful change.

Ensuring effectiveness . “Apart from formal pilots,” Raymond reports, “most reforms launch without considering how to learn from them.” New initiatives are rarely accompanied by a plan for research and analysis, and policymakers seldom conduct in-depth program evaluation. As a critical first step, policymakers need to determine the key metrics they intend to track as indicators of success. If they are making progress, how will they know? From there, procedures need to be put in place for regular reviews of the relevant data, including feedback from stakeholders. The critical question for policymakers: If their reform is clearly not on track to success, what do they do then?

In the conclusion to her study, Raymond notes that the Hoover Institution’s analysis of four decades of school reform has produced “an impressive record of what not to do.” To help policymakers put these lessons to good use, Hoover has crafted an education policy self-assessment tool that is organized around the six key challenges described above and asks policymakers a series of questions to help them test their thinking. The education reform movement has seen some successes over the past 40 years, but policymakers also have plenty to learn from failures. The Hoover Institution’s new toolkit will help them do just that.