Administrative affairs  |  Education  |  UW and the community

October 7, 2010

Hard evidence for better policymaking: Introducing the Center for Education Data and Research

For Dan Goldhaber, director of the new Center for Education Data and Research, there’s never a Mission Accomplished-style moment in education. Rather, he says, programs should always be works in progress, learning from what succeeds and — just as critically — what does not.

“We need to move to a system where we don’t view the next decision, the next policy, as the end, but as moving us forward in a path toward continuous improvement, ” said Goldhaber, a professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences with UW Bothell who has in recent years been affiliated with the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “The central idea is, the education system has to become a continuously learning system.”

Why a new center focused primarily on data and research? Two main reasons, Goldhaber said. First, “Policymakers need to get hard evidence about what really affects student achievement in order to make good decisions.” Second, he said, is “to change the way we think about education policy” away from simply asking whether a program works, toward a landscape of continuous evolution and improvement.

In practical terms, that means working closely with school district and state policymakers and to expect changes even as new programs are put in place. Goldhaber said, “The way a program is implemented can have dramatic effects on the ability, from a research perspective, to know whether it’s working or not.”

He gave the example of grocery stores that offer discounts to patrons who present their membership cards when buying groceries. It’s well worth it for the store, because the cards record information about the purchasing practices of the customers that can be used to create statistical models of patron behavior. Too often, he said, education fails to make similar up-front investments that would pay off with information about program success or failure later on. You have to show people that you can learn from research, he said, and that the research can be translated into better policy decisions.

This also includes, as noted in the center’s mission statement, recognizing and capitalizing on small, incremental policy improvements rather than looking for single-end, or “magic bullet” solutions. The mission statement concludes, “The ultimate goal is to help move the education enterprise toward being a continuously evolving system where learning from policy variation and adjusting policies based on what is learned is the norm, not the exception.”

As its name implies, the work of the center has a decided “quantitative bent,” Goldhaber said. Opinions vary, of course, as to what researchers should be looking at in terms of school and student performance. “My research approach is very outcomes-oriented. I typically don’t measure how people feel — I am measuring various kinds of hard evidence, like student achievement on standardized tests and teacher attrition.”

Goldhaber said though many in education agree standardized tests are a limited and insufficient way to measure classroom achievement and improvement, “the idea that we’re going to ignore that they exist — that seems to be the wrong approach.” He briefly discussed the Los Angeles Times deciding to publish a database of about 6,000 teachers, ranked by their effectiveness in raising test scores as analyzed over seven years of data. Though he feels the newspaper was wrong to publish the scores, Goldhaber said, “It would never have come to this had there been more of an openness in thinking about information.”

He said it requires some trust for policymakers and researchers to work together toward the same goals. He cited the Consortium on Chicago School Research as an example of such a relationship. The consortium, teaming researchers at the University of Chicago with those in the school district and other area organizations, was formed in 1990 after the Chicago School Reform Act that decentralized the city’s schools.

The new center has four guiding principles:

• Research is oriented around actionable policy issues
• Research is independent and objective.
• Research meets high standards for scientific rigor.
• Research findings are made broadly accessible.

The center has three broad research areas: school and teacher effectiveness, educational accountability and governance, and teacher labor markets.

Current research projects focus on:

• the effectiveness of teacher preparation and recertification policies;
• the efficiency and effectiveness of an incentive-based teacher compensation system created in Denver, Colo., by teachers and the school district.
• the statistical relationship between teacher performance and student achievement for the ProTeach Portfolio, a new, evidence-based assessment of teaching in Washington created by the Professional Educator Standards Board and Educational Testing Services.
• the implications of seniority-based teacher layoff policies.
• the stability, over a relatively long period of time, of various measures of teacher quality.

UW colleagues joining Goldhaber in the new center are Jerald Herting, research associate professor of psychosocial and community health; and Mark Long, assistant professor in the Evans School of Public Affairs. Other researchers affiliated with the new center are John Krieg, associate professor of economics at Western Washington University in Bellingham; Lesley Lavey, a doctoral student in political science at the University of Wisconsin; and Mike Puma, a longtime education researcher who runs the Maryland-based firm Chesapeake Research Associates.

Public schools, Goldhaber said, are “the key institution we have that allows for upward mobility and for people to advance in society based on merit — and I worry about the country and the extent to which some of these institutions have been eroding.”

Much of the center’s work will focus on Washington state matters, though Goldhaber intends to continue using data from other states and national datasets, basically to use whatever data that can best help address important policy questions.

Too often, Goldhaber said, decisions in education are made along ideological lines, and policymakers show “a certain parochiality when it comes to understanding the effects of institutional and educational interventions.

The new center, he said, has great potential to better connect policymakers with solid research and to help them “to think about reform in a somewhat more experimental way.”

Learn more about the new Center for Education Data and Research at its website.