“If you said to me, are we making progress on [U.S. education reform] or not, I could talk for a long time, but I wouldn’t be able to give you a number.” --Bill Gates with David Rubenstein, Sanders Theater, September 21, 2013
In the three decades since the release of the Nation at Risk report, the U.S. education reform effort has failed to achieve lift-off. Why is that so? Regardless of the reform strategy—whether new standards, or accountability, or small schools, or parental choice, or teacher effectiveness—there is an underlying weakness in the U.S. education system which has hampered every effort up to now: most consequential decisions are made by district and state leaders, yet these leaders lack the infrastructure to learn quickly what’s working and what’s not. They launch new initiatives with no detailed analysis of their effects. At best, they track aggregate measures such as overall proficiency and graduation rates, which can hide the consequences for the specific schools, or grades or subjects actually affected by their initiatives. And, when there is turnover, new leaders are forced to re-invent the wheel, blind to the mistakes and successes of their predecessors. For their part, philanthropists fund new initiatives in their local schools, and never know whether their funds have made a difference for children.
We are not lacking innovation in U.S. education. We lack the ability to learn from our innovations.
Over the last decade, the U.S. Department of Education has built a robust infrastructure for evaluating programs at the federal level. The National Center for Education Evaluation has funded more than 34 large-scale impact evaluations since 2002. These cost an average of $12 million and have taken 5.6 years to complete. Such a system might be sufficient in