Learning What Works

The goal is to expand many isolated pockets of excellence to a universal standard where innovative, high performance schools are the norm. How can these successes be translated into a system that offers every Canadian student the opportunity to reach full potential?

Across Canada, decisions which impact student learning are made daily. Their tab exceeds $56 billion a year. Yet we collect limited evidence on how well those initiatives are working to improve achievement. We pay even less attention to adjusting strategies or curriculum as a result of this data. And seldom do the findings get shared with other educators or other jurisdictions.

Program assessment is costly and often faces internal resistance. An even when commendable and costly initiatives as SAIP or TIMMS succeed in capturing both hard and contextual data around student achievement across the system, it is not readily apparent that the results are being used to directly guide practice and policy to improve learning in the classroom. As with most education research, the bulk of the funding goes into data collection, a small amount to analysis and even less to dissemination.

Education leadership has little tradition of rigorous oversight. Too many initiatives at a policy level are politically-driven rather than performance-driven. In the absence of solid research, ideology or expedience takes precedence. The goal of improving system performance can only be reached when governments adopt a long-term approach: results-oriented, evidence-based, linking program funding to learning success. Better oversight will mean thoughtful evaluation of system resources and inputs in terms of their impact on learning goals.

Some Recommendations:
This suggests the following guiding principles for education in the next century:

1. A new prominence should be given to research. We must assemble data and sites that provide evidence of approaches that work, and share research on strategies which demonstrably improve student learning.
2. Governments will need to set priorities and targets for future learning gains, gather evidence on which programs significantly improve student learning, and reallocate funding to support what works.
3. Educational leaders at all levels must think in terms of how to encourage schools to focus on goal-setting for improved learning and how to share knowledge about exemplary programs and practices.