People of all political persuasions all over the world have reason to mourn Senator Richard Lugar's loss to a Tea-Party candidate in the recent Indiana Republican primary. Senator Lugar is the ranking minority member on the Foreign Relations Committee, where he has long put principle and practicality above partisanship. Yet his defeat matters in education, too.

Even though Senator Lugar has never served on an education committee, he has always been interested in education. Before he was elected to the Senate, he was Mayor of Indianapolis and before that, Chairman of the Indianapolis School Board. But beyond this history, I think he just cares about the future of our country, and sees education as central to that vision.

Based on a long-ago article in The Wall Street Journal, Senator Lugar got interested in our Success for All program, and we visited an SFA school near Indianapolis together. From then on, he found many ways to support evidence-based reform in education broadly. In doing this, he routinely collaborated with Democrats. His guiding principle was always, "what's good for the children" and "what's good for the country." What is so disturbing is that his defeat in the primary was largely due to his commitment to bipartisan solutions to national problems.

Evidence-based reform is not a Democratic or Republican issue, and there are many from both parties who support it. For it to prevail, however, our political leaders will have to feel able to be seen in public hand in hand with their colleagues across the aisle. The defeat of Senator Lugar, a model of pragmatic leadership, is a great loss to the Senate and to the idea that in education legislation, children must come first.

Editor's Note: Robert Slavin is Chairman of the Board of the Success for All Foundation

For the latest on evidence-based education, follow me on twitter: @RobertSlavin

Posted by Robert Slavin at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On a recent trip to London, I visited Cayley Primary School, a high-poverty elementary school that has been using our Success for All* whole-school reform approach for several years. The principal, Lissa Samuel, has been at this same school for many years before and after it adopted Success for All. She is proud of the achievement gains, which include a jump from 30% to 80% of students passing sixth-grade reading assessments. During our conversation, though, she talked more about how disciplinary problems, fights, and stealing had completely disappeared. Success for All has very good approaches to classroom management and social-emotional learning, and Ms. Samuel thought these had helped. But even more powerful, she thought, was the effect of success itself. Kids who feel confident, engaged, and motivated to learn do not act out.

The importance of this observation, which I've heard in many, many schools, is profound. Especially at the policy level, I often encounter a belief that the path to improving outcomes on a broad scale is to use test-based accountability that force teachers to align their instruction with desired outcomes. If students are bored or resistant, then teachers should use effective classroom management methods that keep them in control.

Teachers do need a deep understanding of classroom management methods designed to prevent behavior problems, and then they need to be ready with effective responses if students misbehave despite good preventive efforts. Yet using classroom management methods to get students to attend to boring lessons is shoveling against the tide. The key ingredient in effective lessons isn't alignment, it's pizzazz: excitement, engagement, challenge.

How do you create pizzazz? Well-structured cooperative learning helps to engage students with each other in jointly learning context. Stimulating video content can add to excitement and understanding. Hands-on experimentation helps a lot when appropriate, as does competition between teams or against the clock.

Cayley Primary was full of pizzazz. Its mostly Bangladeshi students worked eagerly in four-member teams. They took turns reading to each other and helping each other with difficult words. Their teachers called on "random reporters" to represent their teams, and teammates prepared each other, not knowing which of them might be randomly chosen to play this role. Brief, humorous videos introduced letter sounds and sound-blending strategies to first graders. Throughout the school, students were invariably kind and helpful to each other. An observer who did not know the history might think that classroom management was not necessary in such a school, but it was proactive use of pizzazz that got it to where it is, and makes it all look easy.

Classroom management strategies matter, of course, but pizzazz matters more. Motivated, engaged, challenged, and successful students are well-behaved, not because they've been threatened but because they are too busy engaged in learning to misbehave. The goal of classroom management is not quiet classrooms, it's productive students. Using pizzazz to motivate and engage kids in learning valued content is the way to manage classrooms toward accomplishing the real goals of education.

*Robert Slavin is Chairman of the Board of the Success for All Foundation

For the latest on evidence-based education, follow me on twitter: @RobertSlavin

Posted by Robert Slavin at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Everyone loves a good list of things to do to get desired outcomes. Go into any bookstore and you'll see 10 habits, eight steps, 12 secrets, to accomplish all sorts of wonders. What's nice about lists is that they are easy to understand and they appear finite: implement the "seven-step plan to weight loss" and you're done.

In trying to improve struggling schools, government likes lists too, and so do educators. Comprehensive school reform in the 1990's required schools to implement nine elements (e.g. curriculum, professional development, parent involvement). Reading First had its list of five elements of reading instruction. Today, the most ambitious school improvement effort ever undertaken, School Improvement Grants (SIG), is trying to turn around America's most persistently difficult schools. Schools have to choose among four models, the least draconian of which (and therefore by far the most popular) is "transformation," which usually involves changing the principal and implementing a set of whole-school reforms. The reforms constitute - you guessed it - a list of required elements. And many transformation schools are adopting as a central element of their approach - you guessed it again - even more detailed lists of practices, in this case those found by Robert Marzano and/or Charlotte Danielson, to characterize effective schools.

Each element of all of these lists is valid, well-supported by research, and sensible. Yet a list, no matter how well justified, is not in itself an effective program.

Appealing as they appear, there are several problems with lists as a route to genuine improvement. First, lists focus on processes rather than outcomes. If every teacher has a parent involvement program, for example, then we can check this off, right? Wrong. There are more and less effective ways to involve parents. Whatever a school is doing with parents, it should be resulting in outcomes such as better attendance, more children getting eyeglasses or health care, better home-school communication, and fewer home-school conflicts. If notes home to parents do not accomplish these or other goals, then they are not moving the school toward success.

Another problem with lists is that they present needed actions separately, when real school reform should be an integrated whole. A first-grade teacher might set aside a time for phonics (check!), another for fluency (check!), and a third for comprehension (check!). But effective reading instruction requires the integration of strategies to move toward the ultimate goals.

Effective whole-school change comes about when proven practices are introduced in all aspects of school functioning, with a clear vision of what each practice looks like when effectively implemented and an elaborated coaching process to help all teachers use proven practices. It requires constant assessment of the degree to which proven practices are being widely implemented and assessment of students' progress toward key goals. Leadership and professional development structures need to be aligned around the goal of ensuring effective use of proven approaches throughout the school and maximizing communication and shared leadership among all school staff to get the best thinking and best efforts of all to focus on progressive improvements in implementations and outcomes.

Lists may be useful in ensuring implementation of all aspects of proven programs, but they do not themselves lead to improved practice or enhances outcomes. At the broadest level, here's the list most likely to turn around schools struggling to meet standards:

1. Adopt whole-school approaches proven to improve student outcomes.
2. Implement the program with intelligence, energy, and fidelity, constantly improving the quality of implementation and outcomes.
3. Keep doing (2), well, forever.

For the latest on evidence-based education, follow me on twitter: @RobertSlavin

Posted by Robert Slavin at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In America, there is no shortage of ideas for improving education at every level, pre-k to college. These ideas fall into two categories: Federal, state, and district policy, and school and classroom improvement. Proposals for reforming educational policies almost always focus on issues far from classroom practice: governance, standards, assessment, funding, accountability, certification, district organization. Everything in this list is important, but none of them really matters unless classroom instruction greatly improves. My belief is that instead of starting from large-scale issues and then hoping that solving big funding, governance, and accountability issues will somehow improve daily teaching, we should start thinking about how to create effective classrooms and then to create policies to support them. A recent Brookings report by Chingos and Whitehurst makes the same point. Unless teachers are exciting kids, teaching them effectively, making them feel capable and be capable, things will not change.

The recipe for school reform, then, is deceptively simple:
Take one class.
Stir.
Repeat.

So how do we stir one class? And even more importantly, how do we repeat? Everyone has seen great teaching, but how do we make this the norm for 3 million teachers and 50 million kids?

Obviously, we need better teachers and better generic professional development. But the way to bring about real change at a large scale is to improve classroom instructional models, then figure out how to support and sustain effective classroom models within schools, sustain and grow effective schools, and finally create district, state, and national policies to support the whole system. But the policy changes must start from the question of "how do we support effective classroom methods," not be expected to solve the problems on their own.

What are effective classroom methods? They are ones that have been rigorously evaluated and found to be effective. They may be math or reading or science programs, or whole school designs. Our website called the Best Evidence Encyclopedia and the quarterly magazine Better: Evidence-Based Education highlight evidence-based policy and practice. Effective programs are very different from each other, but they all seek to motivate, engage, and organize student learning.

In earlier Sputnik blogs, I've described policies designed to identify, evaluate, and scale up proven programs, so I won't go into the details here. What I wanted to communicate was the simplicity of the basic approach. Just begin with a well-founded model of what one class should be like. Then create a system designed to scale up these classes. That's the recipe.

For the latest on evidence-based education, follow me on twitter: @RobertSlavin

Posted by Robert Slavin at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Among the many objections I sometimes hear to the concept of evidence-based reform in education is a concern that buying into evidence entails buying into stodgy, boring, top-down instruction. I think these concerns carry over from concerns about instruction driven by standardized testing and accountability. But evidence-based education and test-driven education are very different.

Evidence (and evidence-based reform) are entirely neutral on the nature of teaching. Whatever works is what is valued. The distinction between teaching driven by accountability and teaching informed by evidence is crucial. Using test scores to evaluate teachers and schools, at least as defined by NCLB, runs the risk of focusing teachers on a narrow band of reading and math skills, and school and district leaders often try to improve performance by "alignment," trying to get teachers to spend more time on the skills and knowledge likely to be assessed. In contrast, evidence-based policies have no such limitations. If instructional methods have been found to be effective in high-quality research on measures that are valued, then teachers may be encouraged to use these strategies. For example, even if writing, science, and social studies are not part of a given accountability scheme, teachers can be encouraged and assisted to use them anyway. This is particularly important to improve practices in areas or grade levels not assessed, but even in areas that are assessed, evidence shifts the focus of reform from curriculum alignment to professional development and adoption of proven strategies, including innovative materials, software, and strategies.

Given the likely dominance of accountability strategies in educational policies for a long time to come, evidence-based reform provides a crucial means of broadening favored strategies. If developers and researchers can identify methods of improving achievement beyond curriculum alignment, then this offers solid means of confronting the widespread belief that alignment is the best means of improving performance on accountability measures, a belief as central to the theory of action behind Common Core as to that behind NCLB.

In actual fact, proven programs in areas such as math and reading do not resemble boring, top-down, alignment-driven teaching. Instead, proven programs tend to emphasize engagement of students with content. Examples include cooperative learning, tutoring, and teaching of metacognitive strategies. None of these are boring teaching methods that put students in passive roles. The fact is, boring doesn't work. Stodgy, teacher-directed teaching doesn't work. Embracing evidence embraces a diversity of approaches and moves our field forward, building on the strengths of educators rather than micromanaging them, remaining open to anything that makes a difference on any valued measure.

Posted by Robert Slavin at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Over the past 40 years, I've visited an awful lot of schools. Usually, I'm visiting high-poverty elementary or secondary schools that are doing well. I love visiting schools, I love the kids, the teachers, and the administrators, who are all doing their best to create a culture of success and caring that is often a haven in a depressed neighborhood.

Whenever I visit schools, I try to spend most of my time in classrooms, of course. I often pick out three kids at random, one near the front, one in the middle, and one at the back of the class. I pretend they are my own kids (I happen to have three). Are "my" three kids getting a good education?

In traditionally-organized classes, what I often see is both comforting and disturbing at the same time. On the surface, most classes are run pretty well. There are occasional exceptions, especially in inner-city high schools, but "urban jungle" scenarios are rare.

On the other hand, looking at "my" kids gives me a different perspective. In a really good class, in which it appears that the entire class is participating in a lesson, at least one of "my" kids is quiet and unengaged all period. In other, less exciting classes, it may be all three. We once did an experiment in which we took central administrators into their own schools to watch teaching in this way. Invariably, they were shocked. The reality is that traditional teaching, even when done very well, still leaves a lot of kids quiet and unengaged.

There are strategies, especially various forms of cooperative learning, that are designed to engage every child every period of every day. Although forms of cooperative learning are known and occasionally used by many teachers, the proven strategies are far from common practice. Perhaps if school administrators and researchers routinely visited schools and picked out three kids to watch in each class, they'd see why even a well-behaved class is not necessarily reaching all children, and then begin looking for more effective alternatives.

For the latest on evidence-based education, follow me on twitter: @RobertSlavin

Posted by Robert Slavin at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One of the criticisms often leveled at evidence-based reform in education is this: Programs may be proven effective in controlled experiments, but on a larger scale, they won't be implemented with care and therefore won't work. I have seen many awful implementations of programs that have been successful elsewhere and I agree that this is a problem. Proven programs don't implement themselves.

How can we ensure widespread, effective, intelligent use of proven programs? After many years of wrestling with this question, I have a set of principles for ensuring high-quality implementations of proven programs, which I will now reveal to one and all.

1. Make sure teachers chose to implement the program. When anyone is forced to do something, they often do a poor job of it. Work with volunteers. If a program works with individual teachers, let them opt in. If it works with schools, let the teachers vote (Success for All* requires 75% in favor). After you demonstrate local success, then come back and offer the program again to those who chose not to do the program, but start with people who are committed and positive about implementation.

2. The school is the unit of change. It's very hard for isolated teachers to do serious innovation. Schools taking on programs usually get much better results. In secondary schools, departments may take on this function.

3. Make sure the program itself is well specified. Teachers should have a clear idea of what it is, and have manuals, videos, student materials, and other aids to quality implementation.

4. Provide plenty of training and, even more importantly, follow-up support. Real change is hard, and teachers need both top-quality initial training and visits over time from skilled coaches, who give feedback and help teachers stay on track.

5. Assess implementation and student outcomes. Every few months, look at how teachers are implementing the approach and give them friendly feedback. Look at student data to see that kids are benefiting from the program, and share the data with the teachers.

6. Engage implementers with each other. Teachers implementing new programs need opportunities to share ideas, visit each other's classes, ask each other for help, and take joint responsibility for outstanding outcomes.

7. Plan for the long haul. The change process goes on forever. If you want quality implementation, plan on sticking at it for a long time, to help school staffs continue to grow in sophistication and skill.

A very wise businessman I know lives by the principle that a mediocre plan well implemented always beats a great plan poorly implemented. I don't know if that applies in education, but I do know that a great plan implemented with care, fidelity, and intelligence is the only thing that makes a difference. Whatever national or local policies we adopt must make sure that proven programs are outstandingly implemented, especially with the kids who need them most.

For the latest on evidence-based education, follow me on twitter: @RobertSlavin

* Robert Slavin is Chairman of the Board of the Success for All Foundation

Posted by Robert Slavin at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The history of technology in education is one of schools running to catch up with technology developments outside of school. Learning from our past follies in this area, perhaps now it is time we anticipate how ubiquitous computer access can be achieved and then exploited to benefit all children.

Computers have been used in schools since the early 1970s, and today there are at least a few in virtually every school, and most students now have access at home. But, the fact that not all students have their own computers at home limits instructional uses of computers in as well as out of school. A teacher cannot, for example, assign homework requiring a computer if only 20 out of her 25 students have working computers at home.

A number of developments are about to change this. One is the rapid adoption of smart phones and tablet computers, which are making electronic access more common and less expensive at home. The second is the impending extinction of the paper textbook, which may soon create an enormous economic incentive for school districts or states to give away inexpensive computers to students, so that they can replace paper textbooks with cheaper e-texts.

When every student has a computer, the educational uses of technology can be transformed, especially if innovators seize the opportunity to create exciting, interactive software rather than simply converting linear textbooks into their electronic equivalents.

Ubiquitous access to computers could solve one of the key limitations on educational computer apps, the fact that devices available only during the school day conflict with the structure of school, which typically has teachers and classrooms designed for group teaching, not individualized, self-paced work. As a result, actual use of computers documented by research is far less than what advocates or providers might hope, and this may explain the limited impacts of computer-assisted instruction on reading and math learning.

If teachers could assign daily homework on computers, students could on their own do work that fills in gaps in their learning. Students performing ahead of the class could go into advanced topics. Just as kids play games not only with the computers, but also with others virtually anywhere else, if students have just read an assigned book or learned about a given topic, they could engage in guided discussions online about that book or topic with e-pals anywhere in the world.

Ubiquitous computers at home could enable students to watch video content at home linked to topics they are learning in school. Why take class time to show a video when it can be viewed as homework? This opens up new uses for already-produced as well as new educational programming while also offering teachers more time on task in the classroom.

Despite the rapid approach of ubiquitous computer availability at home, I am not aware of much research or development anticipating this eventuality. There are thousands of educational apps, games, videos, and other content being created each year, of course, but is anyone weaving these into complete approaches to reading, math, science, or social studies instruction and evaluating the outcomes? It is time for the education R&D infrastructure to jump in with both feet to ensure that we are not just creating new products for young consumers. Guided by research and a mission to improve outcomes for kids, we can shift the market's focus to effective tools for students eager to learn in the technological world they are already inhabit.

For the latest on evidence-based education, follow me on twitter: @RobertSlavin

Posted by Robert Slavin at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I do a fair amount of speaking on the importance of evidence-based reform in education, and I hear a disturbing objection to this idea: insisting on evidence for educational programs will slow down the process of innovation.

At one level, this is an astonishing argument. If we don't know if innovations work, why should we care if they are not widely used? Actually, at least 99% of the textbooks, software, and professional development approaches adopted by schools today have never been evaluated successfully in comparison to control groups, so complaining about evidence-based reform is a bit premature.

However, there is a genuine dilemma. Technology innovations, for example, develop very rapidly, and it takes time to do proper evaluations. If government insisted that schools use only proven programs, there would be a danger that promising innovations might never get established, or might be obsolete by the time the report appears.

The solution to this dilemma is to encourage but not require schools to adopt proven programs. Government could offer special incentive funds (as in the Obey-Porter Comprehensive School Reform program of the late 1990s) or by awarding 5 to 10 competitive preference points for schools that commit to implementing proven programs with fidelity. Beyond encouraging schools themselves, these incentives would encourage developers and innovators to create and evaluate promising approaches, knowing that if they work, many schools may adopt them.

The whole idea of evidence-based reform is to go beyond ideas and create a system to support the development, evaluation, and dissemination of effective innovations. Wise policies would support all steps in this process, including step one: the crucial development and piloting of promising innovations.

Posted by Robert Slavin at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Every political science student knows the old adage that the focus of government is "Who gets what?" That is, government takes in taxes and then distributes benefits, and contending groups pressure government to increase the proportion of those benefits delivered to their constituents.

The "who gets what" dynamic exists as much in education as anywhere else, and perhaps even more, as education (like the military) is overwhelmingly a government-funded operation. Whenever the annual budget numbers come out for the U.S. Department of Education, advocacy groups scan every figure looking for gains or losses in their favored line items. There is nothing wrong with this, but the laser focus on line items may be distracting us from a focus on the more important question: are we getting better able to solve the enduring problems of education? Do we know more about "what works" and how to use public funds to support proven approaches?

The Obama Administration's Investing in Innovation (i3) initiative is an excellent example of a "what works" approach rather than a "who gets what" mentality. It is funding a broad array of educational innovations to scale up proven ones and help developers of new approaches build capacity and effectiveness. Senator Bennet is advancing a proposal to create a set-aside in i3 for a new ARPA-ED initiative, modeled after the Defense Department's successful DARPA. Unique to this proposal, discussed this week at the American Enterprise Institute, is that it would explicitly avoid "who gets what" structure and would focus directly on creating groundbreaking new technological capabilities in education. In fact, when prodded about how this would benefit rural communities, the Department of Education's Jim Shelton boldly indicated that that kind of small thinking would not transform the way we educate kids in this country, and we instead need to focus on capabilities above special interests.

The i3 funding is unprecedented, but it is still a tiny slice of federal education funding. Over time, it is sure to increase the number of proven, replicable programs from which schools can choose. If you view the $150 million per year i3 and a potential set-aside for ARPA-ED initiatives as a strategy to improve the impact of the $14 billion Title I program, you have to conclude that i3 and ARPA-ED are extremely cost-effective investments. Yet in the media, percentage increases in big line items like Title I are widely reported and debated, while the smaller line items, like research, development, and dissemination, are lost in the small print.

Government reports budget numbers annually and National Assessment of Educational Progress data every few years. Perhaps in addition to these reports, the federal government should publish a regular report on how much more we've learned over the past period about how to improve student learning and other outcomes. Maybe focusing on and identifying advances in proven capacity to improve student outcomes would encourage legislators to invest in this capacity and encourage educators to use it, perhaps moving education policy toward more of a "what works" focus.

I am more hopeful than ever that we are headed in the right direction, but we have a way to go to make evidence the centerpiece of a new reality of teaching children effectively.

For the latest on evidence-based education, follow me on twitter: @RobertSlavin

Disclosure: Dr. Slavin's organization, the Success for All Foundation, is a recipient of federal Investing in Innovation funds.

Posted by Robert Slavin at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend