Regulation Downsides, RCT Limitations, and Reporters Answering Questions

There’s a certain irony right now when it comes to accreditation, I argue in my latest piece for Education Next with Raphael Gang , the director of K–12 education at Stand Together Trust .

In Washington, the Trump administration is trying to lower barriers to entry in higher education by calling for targeted reviews of accreditors’ policies and practices. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in a growing number of states are introducing laws requiring new K–12 schools to meet a variety of input-based requirements before they become eligible for Education Savings Account (ESA) dollars. The most visible proposed rule? Get accredited.

In the piece, we give a detailed lay of the evolving landscape—and the reasons to not be excited by the accreditation and other input-based requirements states are moving toward. But we end on a note of optimism by describing the innovation that an accreditor, the Middle States Association led by Christian Talbot , has been pioneering: a Next Generation Accreditation protocol for innovative school models.

We conclude that the regulations that new schools should be required to meet in exchange for public dollars is sure to remain an active debate in the months and years ahead. ESAs are poised to continue to grow—and their growth will surely stimulate renewed efforts designed to protect the status quo. As entities like Middle States are thrust into the role of quasi-regulator, can they innovate? Can they stay focused on their original goal of improvement and keep the spirit of the ESA bills alive? With less restrictive legislation, smart innovation by accreditors, and trusting partnerships on the ground, we believe these agencies can ensure that new entrants with diverse and differentiated schooling models are able to get started, access public dollars, and serve family demand.

Check out the whole article at “Start-Up Culture Comes to K–12 Accreditation.”

On Research and Humility

Two items for you to ponder.

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s blog, Tabarrok has a great piece on “AI and the FDA.” The lines that grabbed me were at the end:

“RCTs were a major advance, but they are in some sense primitive. … RCTs tell us about average treatment effects, but the more we treat patients as unique, the less relevant those averages become.”

My thoughts exactly. Although RCTs are thought of by many as the “gold-standard” in education research, as I’ve long argued (since 2008 in Disrupting Class!), although they are a step forward in many cases, stopping with an RCT also leaves the research cycle as incomplete. In 2016, for example, Julia Freeland Fisher and I wrote a brief arguing that “RCTs unearth what is most likely to work, but do not offer precise guidance.” Exactly Tabarrok’s point.

Education research sadly still hasn’t really grappled as a field with the implications of this argument, however. Perhaps a new academic journal is needed that publishes researchers who take well-designed RCTs and document anomalies to their findings to help improve our understanding of why an intervention works in one case but not another.

Second, I recommend my friend Michael Goldstein and Sean Geraghty’s piece for Flypaper over at the The Thomas B. Fordham Institute titled “How to help students when they need it most—when they aren’t at school.” It’s a nice complement to the research point and shows the value of digging into the messy reality of individual “N of 1” case studies to understand the limits of a proposed intervention that has good research and even RCTs behind it, to say nothing of the value of human variability and the messiness of individuals being, well, human.

Reporter’s Roundtable on Future U.

Over at the Future U Podcast this week, Jeff Selingo and I brought back one of our favorite show formats—the Reporter’s Roundtable. Joining us were higher education reporters Douglas Belkin from The Wall Street Journal , Hilary Burns from The Boston Globe Media , and Karin Fischer from The Chronicle of Higher Education .

We covered how the Trump administration’s many executive orders, research grant cancellations, and crackdowns on international students might change the higher ed landscape in the U.S. and globally—both in the short- and long-term. Check it out at “Reporters Roundtable: How Trump Is Shaking Up Higher Ed.”

Thanks as always for reading, writing, and listening.