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Editor's Note: This week, Jim Shelton and John Easton of the Education Department will provide the question and join in the discussion. Shelton heads the Office of Innovation and Improvement, and Easton leads the department's research branch, the Institute of Education Sciences.
The federal government and private institutions such as graduate schools, foundations, and nonprofit groups spend billions of dollars on promoting educational innovation, developing and designing new programs, supporting research, evaluating programs, and disseminating their findings. But these resources are not organized, prioritized, or leveraged for maximum impact. Innovations are often not scaled because of lack of evidence; research is frequently separated from the problems of practice; and evaluation findings provide little insight into why a particular program succeeded or not. These disconnects demand a new vision, one that binds the work of researchers, evaluators, developers, practitioners, and policymakers and builds a cohesive structure for school reform.
Given this need, what are the essential components of an effective innovation, research, development, and dissemination infrastructure in education? How can we tap into the collective expertise of practitioners when designing and refining new school programs? Finally, what are the capabilities that need to exist at the local, state, and national levels and how should organizations that provide them fit together into a coherent whole? Our ultimate goal is to ensure that all students can benefit from well-designed and thoroughly tested best practices.
-- Jim Shelton and John Easton
17 responses: Monty Neill, Justin C. Cohen, John Easton, Alexander Russo, Nelson Smith, Bill Jackson, Tom Vander Ark, Steve Peha, Chad Wick, Joel Klein, Bruce Hunter, Deborah W. Meier, Lisa Graham Keegan, Sandy Kress, Diane Ravitch, Jay Pfeiffer, Mike Antonucci
When Congress takes up reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, whether in 2010 or later, the results will define the nation's education policy for years to come. One of the challenges is reconciling sharp differences about how to amend the landmark bill.
How can the Obama administration and Congress put together a winning majority for reauthorization of ESEA? What should change, what should remain more or less the same, and why?
-- Eliza Krigman, NationalJournal.com
21 responses: Dennis Van Roekel, John Bailey, Chad Wick, Michael L. Lomax, Eliza Krigman, Richard Rothstein, Gary Huggins, Rod Paige, Diane Ravitch, Ellen Winn, Steve Peha, Andrew J. Rotherham, Bill Jackson, Monty Neill, Gina Burkhardt, Sandy Kress, Steve Peha, Tom Vander Ark, Greg Richmond, Bruce Hunter, Pedro A. Noguera
Updated at 9:32 a.m. on Nov. 2.
The Education Department is working on finalizing applications for the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's education reform agenda. The program, whose goals include turning around low-performing schools, is widely reported to be a blueprint for the administration's plans for the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.
In a recent article for Education Next, expert Andy Smarick made a compelling case against the "turnaround" strategy. "Once persistently low performing, the majority of schools will remain low performing despite being acted upon in innumerable ways," Smarick wrote. He argued that poorly performing schools should be closed.
Is the turnaround strategy fundamentally flawed? Is the Race to the Top Fund throwing billions of dollars down the drain?
-- Eliza Krigman, NationalJournal.com
23 responses: Steve Peha, Andy Smarick, Steve Peha, Eliza Krigman, David G. Sciarra, Steve Peha, Nelson Smith, Eliza Krigman, Andy Smarick, Monty Neill, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Phil Quon, Eliza Krigman, Rep. John Kline, Ted Hershberg, Sandy Kress, Steve Peha, Kevin Carey, Tom Vander Ark, Diane Ravitch, Frederick M. Hess, Sherman Dorn, Richard Rothstein
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