Overcoming the Legacy of Incremental Education Reform

This blog post originally appeared on Brookings.edu.

When NASA began planning a manned flight to the moon, their rocket scientists did a few calculations.  They realized that incremental improvements in rocket design would not provide enough lift.  Whereas the Jupiter series of rockets had a payload capacity of 11 kilograms, the new rockets would require a payload 10,000 times greater (to carry all the extra equipment manned flight would require).  In the end, the Saturn V rocket was dramatically different from previous rocket designs—because it had to be.   At 360 feet in height, it stood more than five times taller, five times wider and 100 times heavier than the Jupiter rockets that preceded it.

In education, we never bother to calculate the thrust needed to carry our schools to our stated targets.  Too often, we draw up proposals which are directionally correct: better professional development for teachers, higher teacher salaries, incrementally smaller class sizes, better facilities, stronger broad-band connections for schools, etc. However, we do not pause long enough to consult the evidence on expected effect sizes and assemble a list of reforms that could plausibly succeed in achieving our ambitious goals.  When we fail to right-size our reform efforts, we breed a sense of futility among teachers, parents and policymakers.  We might as well be shooting bottle rockets at the moon.

Let’s take a goal often repeated by our political leaders: closing the gap with top-performing nations on international assessments.  What do we really think will be required to achieve such a goal? ...

To read the full post, please visit Brookings.edu.