Evidence-Based Reform in Education: What Will it Take?

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

During the twentieth century, medicine, agriculture, technology, and other fields embraced a simple but powerful idea: Use what works. They began to require that innovative medicines, seeds, and machines be put to the test before being widely adopted. The result was revolutionary progress in each of these fields, which continues today. Evidence-based reform in any area does not just protect the public from ineffective innovations; it also creates a dynamic of progressive improvement, in which many researchers and developers are working to replace today’s best solutions with something even more effective, confident that the market will enthusiastically adopt proven innovations. Before evidence became important in medicine, agriculture, and technology, products and treatments in each area were disseminated by slick marketing, misleading demonstrations, word of mouth, and tradition. In the nineteenth century, for example, there was already plenty of knowledge in medicine, but neither physicians nor the general public paid consistent attention to it. In the early 1900s, William Halsted, a medical researcher at Johns Hopkins University, spent 30 years trying with limited success to convince physicians to wash their hands before operations and use sterile procedures that had been validated in research going back to the 1860s. The practice of education today is at much the same pre-scientific point as medicine was a hundred years ago. We have much knowledge in education, and educators do occasionally pay attention to it, as physicians did in 1908. However, there is limited research evaluating specific programs, practices, or materials, and that which does exist is rarely consequential in educators’ decisions. As a result important decisions about educational programs are likely to be made based on slick marketing, misleading demonstrations, word of mouth, tradition, and politics. This not only fails to provide the best educational programs to vulnerable children, but it also removes any incentive for developers to create programs and technology that actually work better than current practices. The result is the famous pendulum of educational reform, in which new ideas appear, become widely used, and only then are evaluated. By the time the evaluation evidence is in, the market has already given up on the new idea, and has rushed off to the latest new idea (see Slavin, 1989). A pendulum swing describes innovation in all fields, such as art and fashion, in which taste rather than evidence drives consumer choices. Unfortunately, education is one such field.