This piece originally appeared on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute blog.
Congress is currently considering legislation to update the way that the federal government funds education research and development. A new federal report has revealed big room for improvement in the way that Washington funds education research and development (R & D): A $1 billion Obama-era program yielded few improvements in student outcomes.
From 2010 to 2016, the Department of Education spent $1.4 billion in R & D initiatives through the Investing in Innovation (i3) program. The program was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which passed during the first year of the Obama administration. The plan was to provide grants to school districts, colleges, and non-profits to create or expand innovative education interventions and to evaluate those models to identify best practices that could be implemented across the country.
At the time, this was a plausible theory of change for improving the return on investment from federal education R & D spending. Over the last half century, the federal government has funded research aiming to identify best practices that can be implemented in the classroom. But evidence-based practices identified by research have often been ignored by public school districts and the education schools that train America’s teachers. A tragic example of this trend has been the many school districts that ignored overwhelming evidence in support of the science of reading over the past two decades.
