David Plank: State needs to know what works in school

Several months ago, some of the nation's most respected education researchers released a comprehensive review of California's ailing K-12 public schools and recommendations for raising student achievement levels back to tops in the country. One of the core findings of these "Getting Down to Facts" studies was that solving the state's education woes begins with increasing our knowledge of what works and what doesn't.

In California's current system, everyone from policymakers to parents lacks the information necessary to make informed decisions about education policies and practices. Moreover, reforms have not been designed in ways that allow us to learn from experience about how to best design and implement policy.

Elected officials, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, agreed: Creating a better data collection system that follows students, allows good program evaluation and tells us whether our funds are being spent wisely is a critical first step toward raising student achievement.

Now, only four months later, with the state budget in limbo, that momentum has been lost. The budget fails to provide the most basic and essential funding needed to create a data system necessary to gauge which reforms will ultimately improve our schools.

Why is funding data collection so urgent?

The answer lies in this quick pop quiz: How many students drop out of California public schools each year? Which interventions successfully lift student achievement levels? Which ones fail? What programs most effectively train teachers?

All of these questions and many more, have the same answer: We don't know.

The irony, of course, is that improving our schools is all about improving learning. But our own understanding of what it takes to achieve this goal is stunted by the state's failure to provide useful and reliable data. Politicians clamor for accountability, but without a decent data system they remain in the dark about whether the education dollars they invest yield any results. Researchers have only limited data to analyze, and all of us who want to provide a better education for California's children are literally flying blind.

As usual, there's plenty of blame to go around. The governor rightly included funding for a data system in his May budget, but it was eliminated. That's the fault of the Legislature.

But the governor isn't off the hook. If next year will truly be "the year of education reform," as he said a few months ago, then he should fight to keep these essential dollars in the budget and create positive momentum for what promise to be tough education reform battles next year.

It's not too late to generate that momentum. The Legislature and governor can still demonstrate their leadership by committing an additional $2 million to get California's data system into motion and pave the way for reform efforts in 2008. Few expenditures of such a small size could have such a big impact on California's schoolchildren.

Politicians like to invoke President Kennedy's mission to send a man to the moon as evidence of the power of public and political will to get ambitious projects off the ground. The invocation certainly applies in the case of broad-scale education reform.

And while fixing our public schools isn't space travel, there definitely is a science to education reform -- a science grounded in hard evidence and data.

Our ignorance is voluntary. Let us decide to find out what's working in our public schools and what's not. We would never send a man to the moon in a space capsule if we didn't first have a full grasp of every sprocket and lever in that capsule and how -- and if -- it works. How can we in good conscience send our children to school each day without a better understanding and measure of how to most effectively prepare them for the future? That, at least, is not rocket science.

About the writer:

• David Plank is executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education; PACE is a research center based at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. Russlynn Ali is executive director of The Education Trust-West, the West Coast partner of the national policy organization.