Scientific Findings and Classroom Practice

Recent drastic cuts to the US Department of Education are worrying for a number of reasons. While federal funding makes up only about 10 percent of what K-12 schools spend, it’s almost entirely directed at students who are the most vulnerable—those from low-income families, for example, and those diagnosed with learning difficulties. The government did just release nearly $7 billion in funding it had previously frozen, but the future remains uncertain.

The DOE’s education research arm has also been the target of drastic cuts, and many consultants have had their contracts terminated. “It just feels like we’re going back into the dark ages,” one told The 74.

How concerned should we be? Some of that research is undoubtedly worthwhile, including the data that enables officials to choose representative samples of students for the reading and math tests the department is required to give every two years. But some may be useless—or even misleading. The fact that one kind of intervention has been studied more than another might not mean it’s better; it might just mean it’s easier to study. Research has been good at tracking students’ lack of progress. It hasn’t been so good at enabling us to do something about that.

Even when research is illuminating, it often has little impact on what happens in classrooms. For decades, the DOE’s Institute of Education Sciences has operated the What Works Clearinghouse, or WWC, intended to help connect educators to education research. It publishes “Practice Guides” that synthesize research and distill it into recommendations. That sounds useful, but a lot of the research doesn’t show significant benefits. In addition, some conclusions in the Practice Guides have been criticized as misleading, erroneous, or politically motivated.

In any event, the guides can be dense, and a lot of the recommendations are too vague to be useful for practicing teachers. A guide to teaching secondary students to write, for example, recommends that students be advised to “use different kinds of sentences” but doesn’t provide much information on how to teach them to do that. Commentators and academics may cite the guides as a gold standard, but it’s far from clear teachers read them.

Some have predicted that reduced support for the WWC will “leave district leaders unequipped to navigate the billion-dollar world of school-based products and services.” But even with the WWC, district leaders haven’t been well equipped for