A new paper looks to be the “Moneyball” of education, using an analytical approach to improve federal education policy, just as analytics revolutionized baseball in the 2000s.
“Most policymakers support the idea of using good data and evidence to make federal spending smarter — especially when it comes to investments in America’s children,” the paper, co-authored by Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and Bethany Little of EducationCounsel, said. “The trick is determining just what good data and smarter spending actually mean, and to make sure people use them and don’t just talk about them…The aim is to identify a set of proposals that have some bipartisan appeal and can make a practical difference.”
The paper recommended Congress support pilot projects that allow flexibility in how funds are used if project administrators use data to track their progress. It also recommended common accounting procedures that would support more effective cost-benefit analyses. With improved data, the federal government could eventually require robust cost-benefit analyses for federal grant requests.
In general, education programs should be more evidence-based. “If federal policymakers seek to ensure that federal funds are being spent cost- effectively, they should seek to put the available evidence to good use,” the paper said. It recommended that Congress more closely connect federal education grants to recipients using it for activities supported by evidence.
Not only does more data make it easier to know what’s working best in education, it also provides for more transparency.
Each recommendation comes with a few different conditions. First, policy changes should be revenue neutral, and any increases in spending in one area of education should be offset somewhere else. The point is not to judge whether the federal government should spend more or less on education, but how to better spend those dollars regardless of the total level. Furthermore, the federal government must not dictate to states or local districts how to spend funds, but merely encourage the use of data and evaluation in schools. Also, not every factor should be simplified into “working” or “not working,” and there are factors worth taking into account that are not measurable.
