New center to focus on education reform

Hanushek

A new research center has been established at the College's W. Allen Wallis Institute of Political Economy to build a body of evidence that can guide educational improvements at elementary and secondary schools.

With $1.25 million in foundation grants, the Center for Research in Education Outcomes will support and advance the role of evaluation in educational programs. With access to such analysis, policymakers can develop sound decisions about the education of children.

Eric Hanushek--professor of economics, political science, and public policy at the College, and director of its Wallis Institute--will be the center's principal investigator. He is known nationally as a staunch advocate of grounding policy decisions in empirical analysis.

"It is surprising how little is learned from the large amount of change and experimentation currently going on in schools," said Hanushek. "Because of the lack of evaluation, schools, parents, and policymakers do not know enough to develop an effective program of improvement."

Concerns by Hanushek and others about the difficulties of learning the impact of educational policies and practices without strong evaluation studies led to the creation of the center.

Raymond

"Other fields of public policy or health care services have a strong history of rigorous examination of programs," said Margaret Raymond, senior scientist and associate professor of political science and public policy, and director of the center. "Citizens have every right to expect publicly funded programs to prove their effectiveness, and for funders to use information about program performance in allocating resources."

The center will actively monitor current and proposed program innovations to select promising initiatives that can be replicated. In programs without an assessment component, the center will broker the development of evaluation designs and assist in identifying researchers and funders.

The Center for Research in Education Outcomes--which will operate under the oversight of an advisory board--plans to help state and local agencies around the country in evaluating their education programs. Through its Web site at www.rochester.edu/CREDO, the center will provide user-friendly guides to create and distribute evaluation data.