To Serve Better — Improving improvements
NCRERN's work with the state of Ohio is highlighted in the Harvard Gazette.
Lots of ideas work fine in theory but not so much in the real world.
Ask education researchers Thomas Kane, Jennifer Ash, Dave Hersh, Chris Avery and their teams, who’ve come to this wisdom after years of mixed results in finding concrete ways to improve education in American schools.
“Progress will come from surprises,” said Kane, faculty director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR). He recalled one instance when “there was a study of textbooks where we were really confident — we’re going to find these big differences for people using more or less effective textbooks — and there was just no difference.”
So in 2015 Kane and a group of other education researchers at Harvard decided to create Proving Ground, a project that brings tools instead of hypotheses to school districts around the country, including three urban school districts in Ohio. The key is that instead of prescribing solutions, the team helps districts analyze their own data to decide which issues might be most beneficial to address.
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