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Evidence-Based Practice
VUE Number 6, Winter 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Evidence-Based Practice: Building Capacity for Informed Professional Judgment
By Warren Simmons
Executive Director, Annenberg Institute for School Reform
> Author's Biography
> Full article [PDF: 11 pages]
The current emphasis in education reform is on scientific research that answers the question "What works?" However, this approach often fails to provide useful guidance for school practitioners. To improve student outcomes, researchers and practitioners must collaborate on research that explains why a particular practice meets students' needs and what conditions are needed to enable the practice to work.
Education reforms over the past two decades have tended to emphasize will rather than skill. The assumptions behind standards-based reform seem to be that educators know what to do, but that they lack the incentives and the flexibility to take appropriate steps to improve performance. As Richard Elmore and Robert Rothman (1999) observed, the implied theory of action underlying standards-based reform held that if schools were given more resources and flexibility in exchange for being held accountable for getting all students to meet high standards, teachers and principals would have the motivation needed to foster continuous improvement in student achievement.
While the prevalence of schoolfunding litigation casts doubt on whether resources are adequate for improvement, serious questions have also been raised about whether or not practitioners — particularly, those in urban settings — have the knowledge needed to improve conditions of learning and thereby raise student outcomes. Most notably, highly qualified teachers are in short supply. Dysfunctional human resource systems and chronic funding shortfalls leave many urban school districts poorly prepared to compete for skilled teachers. These same human resource systems also operate to assign novice or struggling teachers to urban schools serving students with the greatest academic and economic needs (DeStefano & Foley 2003).
Research as a Capacity-Building Tool
Standards-based reform, however, has not been entirely blind to the need for greater expertise to guide school and classroom improvement. America 2000, the education reform proposed by President George Bush in 1990, created the New American Schools (NAS) Development Corporation to sponsor a set of research-based whole-school reform designs that schools could adopt to help students reach high standards.
This approach assumed that schools lacking the internal expertise to promote student achievement could be improved significantly by acquiring a carefully articulated design that was research based. In 1998, Congress affirmed this reasoning by passing legislation authorizing $150 million to provide schools with the resources needed to implement what were then called research-based comprehensive school reform designs. By this time, the eleven original models created by NAS had been joined by over forty designs possessing various forms of research that demonstrated their efficacy and/or origins in a particular line of research.
Archives
Evidence-Based Practice
VUE Number 6, Winter 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Evidence-Based Practice: Building Capacity for Informed Professional Judgment
By Warren Simmons
Executive Director, Annenberg Institute for School Reform
> Author's Biography
> Full article [PDF: 11 pages]
The current emphasis in education reform is on scientific research that answers the question "What works?" However, this approach often fails to provide useful guidance for school practitioners. To improve student outcomes, researchers and practitioners must collaborate on research that explains why a particular practice meets students' needs and what conditions are needed to enable the practice to work.
Education reforms over the past two decades have tended to emphasize will rather than skill. The assumptions behind standards-based reform seem to be that educators know what to do, but that they lack the incentives and the flexibility to take appropriate steps to improve performance. As Richard Elmore and Robert Rothman (1999) observed, the implied theory of action underlying standards-based reform held that if schools were given more resources and flexibility in exchange for being held accountable for getting all students to meet high standards, teachers and principals would have the motivation needed to foster continuous improvement in student achievement.
While the prevalence of schoolfunding litigation casts doubt on whether resources are adequate for improvement, serious questions have also been raised about whether or not practitioners — particularly, those in urban settings — have the knowledge needed to improve conditions of learning and thereby raise student outcomes. Most notably, highly qualified teachers are in short supply. Dysfunctional human resource systems and chronic funding shortfalls leave many urban school districts poorly prepared to compete for skilled teachers. These same human resource systems also operate to assign novice or struggling teachers to urban schools serving students with the greatest academic and economic needs (DeStefano & Foley 2003).
Research as a Capacity-Building Tool
Standards-based reform, however, has not been entirely blind to the need for greater expertise to guide school and classroom improvement. America 2000, the education reform proposed by President George Bush in 1990, created the New American Schools (NAS) Development Corporation to sponsor a set of research-based whole-school reform designs that schools could adopt to help students reach high standards.
This approach assumed that schools lacking the internal expertise to promote student achievement could be improved significantly by acquiring a carefully articulated design that was research based. In 1998, Congress affirmed this reasoning by passing legislation authorizing $150 million to provide schools with the resources needed to implement what were then called research-based comprehensive school reform designs. By this time, the eleven original models created by NAS had been joined by over forty designs possessing various forms of research that demonstrated their efficacy and/or origins in a particular line of research.
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