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Warren Professor and Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann addressed a group of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners today on the challenges of scaling up successful educational interventions from one site to many. The group, gathered at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to share their insights and to connect the "missing dots" between theory and practice that often undercut promising innovations, were participants in a conference, "Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-based Educational Improvement," cosponsored by HGSE and MAR*TEC. The following are excerpts from Dean Lagemann’s address at the "Scaling Up Success" conference.
Why are problems of scale so difficult in education? The simple answer is that education is an enormously complicated activity, with many different parts that need alignment, if learning is to be effective. Consider, as an example, the situation of a learner—say, a young Hispanic boy in first grade—who is trying to learn to read in English. Whether that young learner will learn to read in English will depend on variables as different as the development of his brain, the language skills of his family, the skill and caring of his teacher, the adequacy of the cognitive demands placed on him by the learning materials he is given, and much else, like whether he is homeless, in need of glasses, or distracted by ADD. Obviously, given the complexity of each and every instructional interchange or each and every learning moment, it is inordinately difficult to diagnosis what is going on—or what is most important in educational transactions. It is often impossible to discern what factor or combination of factors actually helped our young learner to learn or not to learn. Lacking a capacity for quick and easy diagnosis, it is even more difficult to transfer something that appears successful in one setting to another setting, or to ten settings and then one hundred settings. Problems of scaling up derive from the fact that education involves so many interacting variables, most of which cannot be controlled, even if they can be identified. While everything I have just said may seem quite obvious to academics and practitioners whose work centers on education, from a historical perspective, it is only very recently that people have understood education and problems of scale in this way. Until recently, simple, linear input/output models dominated the study of learning and instruction. It was assumed that if you got the inputs right—mainly curriculum that was of the proper scope and sequence—you were likely to get the right outputs in the form of learning. If that did not happen, it was assumed that there was some problem in the learner and that problem was not to be of concern to you as an educator since the problem was presumed to be innate to the learner and probably not fixable. We now see things differently and, appropriately, take much more responsibility for learning triggered by effective instruction. And it is our new—and, as I said, appropriate—insistence on effective instruction that has fueled interest in questions of scale - or question concerning how one spreads effective instructional practices. ***
I see the problem of scale in education as a subset of questions pertaining to usable knowledge. Questions of scale are, first of all, questions of design: how one can organize subject matter in ways that will entice, provoke, inform, and, in some way, change existing knowledge or habits of mind. In addition, questions of scale are questions of context: how do matters of culture, geography, and circumstance influence the consequences of particular educational interventions. Some smart scholar once showed the television program "Dallas" to different groups in Israel and, not surprisingly, they found that Israelis of European, Russian, and Arab backgrounds interpreted the show in very different ways. Beyond dealing with questions of design and context, people interested in scaling educational innovations must also think about sustainability. Many—too many—innovations in education have not survived because they were too expensive and did not achieve economies of scale. I have long believed that one of the major challenges educators face is to balance mission and market. Those of us in education prefer to think about all the good things we wish to do in the world. But the fact is that schools and colleges have to pay their bills. If we invent wonderful programs that require more resources than are available, we have not done anyone a significant service. Sure, in the early stages of development, some innovations may be more expensive than routine resources can support. But, over the long haul, I think designers of innovations that we hope to bring to scale either need to address matters of sustainability or need to partner with people who can think well about the bottom line. Questions of scale are enormously complex and multifaceted and they are a subspecies of a kind of knowledge—usable knowledge—that we are just beginning to appreciate and understand. We need to get more and more people up to speed on cutting-edge views of knowledge creation, translation, and use in education. Last but not least, while we are still too much in the inventing mode to be able to explain our concerns in ways that are generally accessible to wide, lay audiences, I hope we will keep communications with those audiences very much in mind. Educating the public about education is a central component of sustaining innovations in education. Unless the public understands what we do, they will not support it financially or politically. Educating the public about education is difficult, and we do not do it very well, but it is essential. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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