What We’re Learning from Investing in Innovation
Last month, the Department announced the latest Investing in Innovation (i3) Highest-Rated Applications. We’re proud to share that these 13 organizations have secured private-sector matching funds and officially become grantees. These grantees will build on a $1.2 billion federal investment in innovative and evidence-based projects working across the K-12 education sector. To reflect on what we’re learning through i3, Nadya Chinoy Dabby (Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation & Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education) joined Jim Shelton (Chief Impact Officer at 2U and former Deputy Secretary of Education) for a conversation about i3 and driving innovation in education. We hope you’ll add your thoughts to the conversation, which you can do so using the tag “i3.”
Innovation in education and why we need it
The U.S. Department of Education defines innovations as things that are not only much better than the status quo, but that can also grow to scale. Why do we need to drive more innovation in education?
Jim Shelton (JS): We’re seeing sustained improvement in education, but we need to make much more rapid progress to achieve the life-changing impact we’re aiming for. And until we have the full set of robust strategies that allow every student to achieve at a high level, we need to keep coming up with new approaches that are significantly better than the status quo.
In public education, we don’t have a systematic way of finding and vetting potential innovations and figuring out which of those effective practices deserve to be spread to many other children in need. Until we get good at that, we’re missing an opportunity to capitalize on the instinct for innovation that many of our educators have today. Inventions change the possibilities; real innovations change many lives.
Nadya Chinoy Dabby (NCD): Innovation is also how a sector leapfrogs its way forward writ-large. In education, the heart of the action happens at the state or local level, but those folks often don’t have the resources or the capacity to lead innovative efforts at scale. That’s partly why federal support for this work is so important. If you’re trying to figure out what those breakthroughs look like from a national perspective, there aren’t many players besides the federal government that are well-positioned to succeed. We shouldn’t be the sole, and maybe not even the main actor in this work. But in terms of building the infrastructure it actually takes for the education sector to have a true learning agenda, and a way to achieve scale, we are in a relatively unique position to take this on.
Designing i3
Going back in time, what kinds of impacts did you want to see across the education sector when you designed i3?
JS: We designed i3 to drive outcomes like higher graduation rates, improved literacy rates and better support for teachers. Many of the grants were sizeable, and we wanted them to have a meaningful impact on their target populations. We’re in the early stages of seeing evaluation results, but so far it looks like several projects have achieved that.
It was also important to create a precedent for evidence mattering in making decisions about funding. i3’s basic framework is: a little bit of money for a little bit of evidence, and a lot of money for a lot of evidence. We wanted to establish that not only within government, but also catalyze similar kinds of rigor with private funders.
The third component was to help rigorous evaluation of programs become the norm by finding more efficient and cost effective ways of doing evaluation in general. All of that translates into more money going to things that have evidence backing them up and more money going to great things that are going to stand up to rigor over time through innovation.
You’ve discussed Race to the Top driving the demand side and i3 creating the supply side. How did that pan out?
JS: For Race to the Top, the reality is that supply and demand, as an analogy, was a little bit off because of timing. We knew we were creating a demand for people to change their approaches to supporting students and teachers, and also trying to create a supply to answer some of those questions. But in general, the demand was going to far outstrip the supply of things — especially in the period where the interventions are still going through early funding and evaluation. So the big questions are still: what have we (those focused on addressing the demand) done to fill in some of the gaps? And are there a set of effective solutions that emerged for folks to draw on?
I think the answer to the latter is yes — but we still need a lot more investment to fill the remaining gaps.
One thing we didn’t focus enough on was the consumer side of evidence. By that I mean we wanted more people to look at evidence to make decisions about what they decided to buy or use in the field. To do that well, we need to complement the work of i3 with tools and resources to help education leaders make more informed decisions. For example, deepening the partnership with the Institute of Education Science’s What Works Clearinghouse and others who are paying attention to the results of things that are coming out of i3 and other evidence producing programs. From there, we can reasonably ask more educators to purchase and use things backed by rigorous evidence. Those kinds of initiatives are at least as important as producing more studies through things like i3.
Building on the work of i3
In the past year, we’ve seen a lot of new faces in the leadership of states’ education departments and school districts. As new folks come in and we have a growing body of research, how do you hope folks will continue learning and build on what we’re learning through i3 in their own contexts?
NCD: One of the things that I love most about my job is that I get to see a huge array of schools and districts — in some well-known and some very unexpected pockets of the country. Without fail, there is always something pretty remarkable going on. If one of the things that comes out of the i3 work is new folks thinking about how to harness that energy in a more structured way within a school, a district or state — that would be a huge step forward. We’re also thrilled that more folks will have the opportunity to do that through a new program that builds on i3 — and other language designed to encourage using evidence — in the new Every Students Succeeds Act.
Another part of this — although it may be further down the road — is we still need an intermediary infrastructure to help people understand what’s been done, what they can do, and how to learn from it and so forth. If we can figure out how to create that infrastructure, and this is one role that private funders could play, that would fill a huge gap and be an important legacy of this i3 work.
JS: At the Department, the What Works Clearinghouse serves a really important function by maintaining the highest quality bar in terms of level of evidence — but that means by definition a narrow portfolio of rigorously evaluated and validated practices are presented. Until we can significantly expand that portfolio, we also need a set of tools and resources that help folks find solutions that are backed by some research, but may not meet that highest bar. Professional judgment supported by the best available evidence will always be the best approach. It’s just that we’ll need to rely even more heavily on instincts and judgment in this period while the evidentiary base is being built. Even this limited introduction of discipline and rigor would generate an order of magnitude improvement in outcomes.
We also need folks that are in the business of explaining research in layman’s terms, so that those who are trying to make decisions can understand what the evidence means for them. Another key piece would be an overlay of educators who can talk about their experience of implementing a strategy, tool or approach.
Ultimately, my hope is that we not only help people see new solutions backed by evidence, but that this new way of thinking about the work in terms of being able to find solutions and having the infrastructure in place to learn becomes the norm. If more and more states and districts figure out how to do something like an i3 (funding based on evidence and that produce evidence of what works), we help the entire sector continually get better.
