How did America get to be the wealthiest and most powerful country on Earth?
To explain, let me tell you about visiting a remote mountain village in Slovakia. I arrived in the evening, as the ancient central square filled up with people. Every man, woman, and child had a cell phone. Invented in America.
In the local hospital, I’m sure that most medicines were invented in America, which does more medical research than all other nations combined. Local farmers probably planted seeds and used methods developed in the U.S. Everywhere in the world, everyone watches American movies, listens to American music, and on and on.
America’s brand, the source of our wealth, is innovation.
America has long led the world in creating wealth by creating new ideas and putting them in practice. Technology? Medicine? Agriculture? America dominates the world in each of these fields, and many more. The reason is that America innovates, constantly finding new ways to solve problems, cure diseases, grow better crops, and generally do things less expensively. I am often at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where the halls are full of patients from every part of the globe. They come to Johns Hopkins because of its reputation for innovation.
In education, we face daunting problems, especially in educating disadvantaged students. So to solve these problems, you’d naturally expect that we’d turn to the principle that has led to our success in so many fields – innovation.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed by Congress and signed into law in December, 2015, has taken just this view. In it, for the first time ever, is a definition of the evidence required for a program or practice to be considered “strong,” “moderate,” or “promising.” These definitions encourage educators to adopt proven programs, but for this to work, we have to have a steady stream of proven innovations appearing each year. This function is fulfilled by another part of ESSA, the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant program. The EIR provision, which was included in ESSA with bipartisan support, provides a tiered evidence approach to research that will constantly add to the body of programs that meet the ESSA evidence requirements. Proposals are invited for “early phase,” “mid-phase,” and “expansion” grants to support the development, validation, and scale-up of successful innovations that originate at the state and local levels. Based on the U.S. Department of Education’s recent EIR grant application process, it appears (as is expected from a tiered evidence design) that lots of early stage grants of up to $3 million will be made, fewer mid-stage grants of up to $8 million, and very few expansion grants of up to $15 million, all over 5 years. Anyone can apply for an early-stage grant, but applicants must already have some evidence to support their program to get a mid-stage grant, and a lot of very rigorous evidence to apply for an expansion grant. All three types of grants require third-party evaluations – which will serve to improve programs all along the spectrum of effectiveness – but mid-stage and expansion grants require large, randomized evaluations, and expansion grants additionally require national dissemination.
The structure of EIR grants is intended to make the innovation process wide open to educators at all levels of state and local governments, non-profits, businesses, and universities. It is also designed to give applicants the freedom to suggest the nature of the program they want to create, thus allowing for a broad range of field-driven ideas that arise to meet recognized needs. EIR does encourage innovation in rural schools, which must receive at least 25% of the funding, but otherwise there is considerable freedom, drawing diverse innovators to the process.
EIR is an excellent investment. If only a few of the programs it supports end up showing positive outcomes and scaling up to serve many students across the U.S., then EIR funding will make a crucial difference to the educational success of hundreds of thousands or millions of students, improving outcomes on a scale that matters at modest cost.
EIR provides an opportunity for America to solve its education problems just as it has solved problems in many other fields: through innovation. That is what America does when it needs rapid and widespread success, as it so clearly does in education. In every subject and grade level, we can innovate our way to the top. EIR is providing the resources and structure to do it.
This blog is sponsored by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation