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.”