Robert E. Slavin is director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. His Ph.D. is in social relations and he is chairman of the Success for All Foundation. He understands the potential for biased interpretations of research. “The quality of research has been less important than just using it to bash the other side and I think that’s beginning to change a great deal,” he said. “First off, there’s a lot more high-quality research that’s worth paying attention to that are practical on the impacts of particular programs, practices and policy decisions.”

Part of the new respect for research is by necessity. Most recently, this has been greatly accelerated by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that defines what it means to have strong evidence supporting a given program. There are consequences for certain purposes for schools that choose programs that meet those standards. ESSA defines strong, moderate and promising levels of evidence. “Those definitions are clear enough to be enforceable,” Slavin said.

According to Slavin, ESSA is not just all stick and no carrot. “They [superintendents/administrators] know that research supporting a given program or practice really will have consequences, especially in terms of receiving school improvement funds. But there are also seven other specific programs in the ESSA law that provide competitive preference points if you promise to adapt a program that has strong evidence of effectiveness or solid evidence of effectiveness. There’s a lot of encouragement in the ESSA law.”

That does not mean that ESSA has decisively swayed naysayers in favor of evidence-based decisions.

“The law is fairly new. No Child Left Behind mentioned the concept based on scientifically based research 110 times or so and it ended up having very little impact on practice because that was so squishy a definition that people soon realized that just about anything could fit under that definition. The potential here is that the ESSA law is going to go much further based on a much clearer definition and much more research to choose from — much more high-quality studies out there than existed when No Child Left Behind began,” Slavin said.

The very best in education research, according to Slavin, is of “medical quality.” “There is a strong emphasis, for example, on third-party evaluation, a strong emphasis on random assignment, a strong emphasis on very large experiments that make it difficult to take advantage of chance because things can vary a great deal on a small scale,” Slavin said.

While reading technical research is not necessarily for the faint of heart, nor for those pressed for time or less than fully committed, there are summaries and other tools that can be helpful. Slavin recommended the “What Works Clearinghouse” and his own organization’s “Evidence for ESSA” as ways to cut through technicalities and clutter.

Much of the current research is undoubtedly centered on practices and programs that produce measurable results, as identified by student achievement on things like test scores. Do we know through research, though, what defines someone’s ability to teach?

The truth may be that the further you are away from education as a profession the more likely you are to know exactly what makes a great teacher. Many of the people who determine things like school funding or how much choice to allow fall into that category.

They remember their favorite teachers from as far back as kindergarten. Maybe they were funny or spirited or made history come alive or any of the other clichés we trot out to describe great teaching.

Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and founding director of its Science of Learning Initiative, has surveyed in great detail the attitudes and expectations we have about teaching. In essence, and to use
another cliché, we are often wrong but always certain.

“We asked people questions about effective teaching and learning and there were huge slots of people who said they could identify great teaching when they saw it,” Boser said. “We just saw a lot of misconceptions about how the public views great teaching and learning.”

These misconceptions require more than just rejecting research; it is an exercise where we let our eyes deceive us.

“If I walked behind a brain surgeon there would be things I would notice as signs of quality. Did he have a good rapport with his assistants? Was he or she careful about the task at hand? But as to the actual task at hand, I would have no idea,” Boser said.

If we think that brain surgery is more difficult than teaching we need to know that most brains look the same, the tools look the same and failure as a brain surgeon is both more instant and more measurable. Teaching is much harder to measure as either success or failure and can be as much dependent on the quality of the tools as it is on the performance.

Will having more choices and better research into teaching, learning and behaviors get us to agreement on the path forward any time soon? Probably not.

More choices do not assure better ones. Neal McCluskey, the director of the Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom and a former high school English teacher, argues that the proof is hardly in when it comes to choice decisions. “Whenever we have discussions about what we think is the best way to deliver school choice, we always must add the caveat, ‘Well, you know, the research may suggest this or we need more research’ but there’s nothing that is an ironclad law that one way of delivering school choice is better than another,” McCluskey said.

Part of what parents, and some educators, fear about measurement of education is almost
certainly the fear of failure. Most people didn’t like taking tests as students and they don’t want their children, or school, judged as failing based on testing.

Of education, McCluskey said, “It’s a hugely expensive thing that people expect a whole lot more out of, more than just who is producing the best standardized test scores. In fact, we’ve seen over the last five years or so a really substantial backlash against standardized test scores. The Every Student Succeeds Act puts a lot less emphasis on test scores and how they are used compared to No Child Left Behind or Common Core, because of objections linked to testing and accountability.”

People, according to McCluskey, are more certain of what they want in education than they are of how to get there.