Based at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, the Center serves as a focal point for education policy research across Harvard University and will work to develop a campus-wide effort in education policy research.
Purpose
The accountability movement has produced an avalanche of testing data in school districts and state departments of education. However, despite the large investments made in measuring outputs, the nation’s policymakers have yet to learn many of the lessons such data can teach. We believe the time is right for a new type of partnership between philanthropy, higher education, and state and local education agencies to learn those lessons and push the education policy debate forward.
First, state and local education agencies generally do not have the capacity to analyze such data on their own. The traditional state roles--issuing school report cards, developing teacher certification requirements, monitoring compliance with state and federal law--have not included program evaluation or policy analysis. Few states ever attempt to compare (consider, measure, analyze) the gains in student achievement produced by different programs and policies implemented in different districts. Moreover, even if they were to develop such a capacity, local policymakers may be seen as biased and not enjoy the benefit of the doubt to evaluate their own initiatives.
Second, while university-based researchers have sophisticated tools to work with quantitative data, they have often focused on the wrong questions. Most of the cutting-edge education research has used large national samples, collected by the U.S. Department of Education. Unfortunately, because social scientists sit on the committees designing those surveys, such data have been designed to answer the questions posed by social scientists--not by policy makers.
Third, the frontiers of the education policy debate have shifted. States and districts are experimenting in a number of ways--with new curricula, different approaches to teacher recruitment and training, school choice plans, merit pay schemes--from which we stand to learn if we invest in careful evaluation designs now. Valuable opportunities for identifying the impact of alternative policies have already been squandered.