Education Week - January 30, 2013 - 22

EDUCATION WEEK

JANUARY 30, 2013

www.edweek.org

Evidence Pushed as Grant Prerequisite With Congress’ Return,
Key Education Panels
Firm Up Membership
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 19

ministration with the launch in
2009 of the relatively small, yet
important, $650 million Investing
in Innovation contest. Known as
i3, it rewarded not just promising
ideas but projects with strong evidence of past success. The contest
was the first effort in years by the
department to award grants based,
in part, on results proved by sound
research.
And last year, the Office of Management and Budget issued a
memo to federal agencies directing them to include with their
fiscal 2014 budget requests their
“most innovative uses of evidence
and evaluation.” A lack of emphasis on evidence has been considered a problem across agencies,
not just education, particularly
when it comes to social policy.
The proposed edgar changes
are out for public comment until
Feb. 12; the timeline for getting
them on the books depends on
how many comments are received.
Once they are finalized, the
rules would:
• Create tiers of evidence. This
recognizes that depending on the
competition and its goals, more or
less evidence may be appropriate.
• Standardize definitions of what
it means to have “strong” or “moderate” evidence, or “evidence of
promise” and “strong theory.”
• Define what kind of evidence
a project must produce at the

end of a grant period. This seeks
to ensure some projects produce
strong evidence that meets the
What Works Clearinghouse’s
evidence standards, in which the
gold standard is an experiment
that randomly assigns students
to either an intervention or a
control group. (The online clearinghouse is an initiative of the
Education Department to vet education research against rigorous
standards.)
• Extend the official project time
frame for a grant winner. This
would enable some winners to collect data on a project’s impact long
after the grant officially ends.

Link to Outcomes
Several groups that monitor the
use of evidence in federal grantmaking, including Mr. Baron’s
coalition, are urging Education
Department officials to make one
change in their proposal: to make
clear that strong evidence should
be linked to outcomes that matter—such as high school graduation rates—and not an outcome
that may be statistically significant but not related to improving
student achievement.
The department said it will
consider, and respond to all comments, once the deadline passes.
The Investing in Innovation program “was a way of seeing how
this could actually work,” said Jim
Shelton, the department’s assis-

tant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement, referring to
evidence-based grantmaking. “Now,
we want to institutionalize the evidence framework for use by other
programs now and in the future.”
Robert E. Slavin, the director
of the Center for Research and
Reform in Education at Johns
Hopkins University, in Baltimore,
pointed out that in any federal
contests, there are often bonus
points—also called competitive
preferences—given for focusing a
grant proposal on a rural area, or
for doing something in the stem
(science, technology, engineering,
and math) subjects, for example.
“Oftentimes the difference between a successful proposal and an
unsuccessful proposal is a couple
of points,” said Mr. Slavin, whose
school improvement organization
Success for All has won two i3
grants and is involved in a third.
“These competitive preferences
can be hugely important. Well why
not ask whether projects actually
work?”
Success for All has been so successful in winning i3 grants in
part because it started building
an evidence base for its work
when it was founded in 1987, Mr.
Slavin said.
“Part of what we were trying to
do is build a good program,” he
said, “but also build the idea that
rigorously evaluated programs
were a way forward for education
in general.”

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“The federal government can
set broad goals, but the secretary
of education should not become a
national school board chairman
instructing 100,000 public schools
how to achieve those goals or deciding whether each of those schools
and its teachers are succeeding or
failing,” wrote Mr. Alexander in a
Commentary essay for Education
Week last year, as part of a package
of opinion pieces marking the 10th
anniversary of the nclb law.
Mr. Alexander was one of just
three Republicans to support a
bipartisan esea-renewal bill that
passed the Senate education committee in 2011—but not before
making big changes to the measure. He was able to strip language
from the legislation that would
have called for states to design
teacher evaluations based in part
on student outcomes because he believes it is not the federal government’s job to require such policies.
And, during the panel’s markup
of the bill, he persuaded his colleagues to adopt new language
that would allow states to opt
out of the four controversial turnaround models created under
the federal School Improvement
Grant program and instead select
their own turnaround options.
Sen. Alexander outlined some of
his priorities for the new Congress
in a speech on the Senate floor
this month. They included making
changes to “maintenance of effort,”
a provision in education laws such
as the esea and the Individuals
with Disabilities Education Act that
requires school districts to keep
their own spending at a certain
level in order to tap federal funds.
And he made it clear he still
wants the federal government
to steer clear of mandating new
teacher evaluations, even though
Republican leaders on the House
education committee support such
a requirement.
Also on the Senate side, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, a longtime member of the Senate education panel, and a former
social worker with an interest in
mental-health issues, is taking over
as chairwoman of the full Appropriations Committee, where she’ll
have significant say over spending
in areas including education.
Sen. Mikulski is also the leader of
a Senate panel that deals with education policy, a subcomittee of the
Senate Health, Education, Labor,
and Pensions Committee.

Conservative Shift
Meanwhile, the selection of Rep.
Rokita to oversee the House education subcommittee on K-12 policy
gives the Indiana Republican a
prime opportunity to influence the
direction of the long-delayed esea
reauthorization and other pending
education legislation.

Last winter, when the House
education committee marked up
bills for renewing the esea law, Mr.
Rokita stood out as one of the most
conservative members of a very
conservative group of lawmakers.
He introduced an amendment to
reduce the number of employees in
the U.S. Department of Education,
which was added to the bill.
What’s more, he put forth—then
withdrew—a potentially gamechanging provision that would have
allowed states to opt out of federal
education programs and return the
money to taxpayers.
Mr. Rokita explained his philosophy on the federal role in an email
last week to Education Week, say-

“

We can
do better by
restoring local
control and
allowing reform
to happen from
the bottom up,
instead of forcing
it from the top
down.”
U.S. REP. TODD ROKITA
R-Indiana

ing that the Education Department runs more than 80 K-12 programs, most of which he considers
duplicative or ineffective.
“The answer is not more money
or more programs,” he wrote. “Even
though federal funding has tripled
since 1965, student achievement
has not improved. We can do better
by restoring local control and allowing reform to happen from the
bottom up, instead of forcing it from
the top down.
Rep. Rokita, who as a former Indiana secretary of state has a lot of
political experience, was elected to
Congress in 2010 as part of a conservative wave that returned the
House of Representatives to gop
control.
During his two years so far on
Capitol Hill, Mr. Rokita hasn’t
sponsored any education bills. But
he’s co-sponsored quite a few, including a bipartisan piece of charter school legislation that passed
the House and a bill to slim down
the Education Department by eliminating more than 40 programs.
He’s also supported the proposed
A-Plus Act, which would allow
states to opt out of federal accountability measures, and a bill to
make English the official language
of the United States, which could
have implications for the education
of English-language learners.

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Education Week - January 30, 2013

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