With the recent passage of the third stimulus package, bringing total education stabilization funds to over $180 billion, Congress has created a rare opportunity for states and districts to invest in creating a more responsive, resilient, and dynamic education system. We know the education system we had before the pandemic was not working for all students. Now is our chance to fundamentally change it. 

Much of the focus in allocating stimulus funds has been around the specific interventions states and districts should spend it on (see here for the full stimulus bill; Section 2001(e) covers Education). This strategy is a mistake that will cost students critical opportunities to grow. Rather than spending one-time funds on the latest panaceas, states and districts can ensure enduring improvements by investing in an improvement infrastructure that will enable them to remove barriers to student success and make decisions informed by evidence aligned to their students and schools. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are a key part of this infrastructure; by leveraging them, states and districts can build it more quickly, efficiently, and effectively.

The problem with a panacea-driven approach.

The vaccination strategy to end the pandemic illustrates the risks of a panacea-driven approach. The rapid development of effective vaccines was a success. But that was just one necessary condition for ending the pandemic. To save lives, the vaccines need to be disseminated effectively, stored and administered in the way they’ve been shown to be effective, and administered to enough of the population to protect those most vulnerable to the virus – indeed, an infrastructure is necessary in order for the vaccine to actually lead us out of the pandemic. All three of these conditions have proven challenging, slowing the process of ending the pandemic.

These conditions are not unique to vaccines. Solving a widespread problem in any field requires that those on the ground have access to the solution, the capacity to implement it well, and an understanding of to whom the solution should be applied. Solving the challenges currently facing educators is no different. The education system needs effective ways to disseminate knowledge to educators about which interventions are and are not effective for which students, educators need the bandwidth to implement effective interventions as designed, and the capacity to choose the right interventions for their students. None of these conditions have been met in the U.S. education system. 

Moreover, there is a fourth condition that was met in the case of the Covid-19 vaccine that has not been met in education. While public health relies on a robust system for testing vaccines to determine which ones work, education has no comprehensive and rapid system for generating evidence of effectiveness. As a result, states and districts could easily spend $180 billion on popular interventions that might not actually catch students up, and have nothing to show for their efforts when the money runs out.

For one-time stimulus funds to have a large and lasting impact on teaching and learning, state and district leaders should use them to invest in building an improvement infrastructure that will allow educators to meet the challenges of this moment and support their ongoing evolution into nimble, resilient institutions that can better serve our children, particularly the most vulnerable, who have fallen even further behind over the last year.

What would an improvement infrastructure look like?

First, states can use stabilization funds to build systems to mobilize the knowledge that exists and the knowledge that will be generated by districts so it is available to all educators throughout the state. Educators should have a catalogue of what works, what doesn’t, and in what contexts at their fingertips. States can succeed where the What Works Clearinghouse has failed in this effort. 

Second, states and districts can use stabilization funds to create opportunities and support systems for education leaders to engage actively with the knowledge being mobilized. By providing tools and training, they can ensure educators have the ability to select interventions that meet their students’ needs, implement them well, and use results to make decisions about what to do next. Likewise, states and districts can increase educators’ bandwidth and opportunity to select, implement, and decide well by reducing other demands on their time.

Finally, states and districts can begin laying the groundwork for a culture of experimentation to emerge, using stabilization funds to implement and evaluate pilots of the programs and practices educators adopt, rather than rushed full-scale adoptions. Feeding the results of pilots back to the field using the knowledge mobilization systems states create would reinforce this culture, helping educators internalize the value their experimentation provides to the field.

This is not to imply that stimulus funding is by itself sufficient to create the conditions for improvement. Culture change takes time and is limited by more than funding. Other barriers, such as compliance requirements that create competing demands for educators’ time and discourage experimentation, need to be addressed as well. Innovation would benefit from more collaborative state-district relationships that are not inherently resource issues. But this moment offers an opportunity to leverage the urgency for change and the rare influx of funding to get the ball rolling and inspire institutional change.

The role of RPPs.

The two main counter arguments against using stimulus funds on infrastructure are that 1) it’s too difficult or expensive and 2) it means choosing long term gains over urgently-needed help. Neither is true. RPPs offer both proof that improvement infrastructure can be developed at a reasonable cost and an existing infrastructure that states and districts can leverage in institutionalizing improvement more comprehensively.

First, there are many examples of RPPs using, generating, and disseminating evidence in cost effective ways. In authoring the Improving Improvement series for NNERPP Extra, Jennifer Ash and I have begun detailing a few of them. For example, the National Center for Rural Education Research Networks (NCRERN) and the Impact Florida Covid Recovery Cadre (the CRC) are using, generating, and disseminating evidence from rapid-cycle RCTs. Both are supporting districts’ efforts to address students’ needs during the pandemic. If states paid for these and similar efforts, it would cost a very small fraction of what the states received in ESSER II funding. ESSER III funding makes them a rounding error. The same is true if the districts, rather than their states, were to fund the work.

Secondly, investing in an improvement infrastructure does not require forgoing urgently needed interventions. It does mean ensuring we do not forgo evidence in the name urgency. As coronavirus deaths mounted, the Federal Drug Administration waited to approve broad administration of vaccines until they were confident they would work for American citizens – because forgoing evidence in the name of urgency can lead to greater harm. Similarly,  investing in improvement means being systematic and thoughtful about selecting evidence-based interventions, customizing them for context, implementing them well, generating local evidence to inform decisions about whether to continue or not, and sharing that evidence so others can decide whether to try them. These are precisely the kinds of activities that can be taken up with an RPP.

The CRC mentioned above offers a case in point. Created in the summer of 2020 to address Algebra needs amplified by the pandemic, these Florida districts rapidly identified evidence-based interventions aligned to their root causes, are currently implementing them, and will learn if they were effective within the month (see more on this work in our most recent Improving Improvement article). The results will be rapidly disseminated not just amongst the four participants but also to over a dozen districts in the Impact Florida network and more widely to Proving Ground’s network of over 60 districts nationwide. 

This approach could be adopted by and incorporated into the state-district relationship to accelerate the construction of an improvement infrastructure. Proving Ground is currently working with a few states to do exactly that. The basic framework is that the states will support their districts by creating intrastate continuous-improvement networks of districts collectively engaged in both solving shared challenges and building capacity to solve future problems. Rather than try to build state capacity on short notice, the states will leverage Proving Ground’s existing infrastructure and expertise to support the networks in the short term while Proving Ground will help build the states’ capacity in the long term. Similarly, other established RPPs can leverage existing expertise and relationships to accelerate the creation of an improvement infrastructure. 

It is therefore both practical and impactful to use RPPs as the cornerstone of enduring improvement efforts. By acting strategically and collaboratively now, states and districts can transform education improvement infrastructure across the country. With this new, evidence-generating infrastructure in place, educators will be in a position to spend far more of their time doing what they do best: finding new and better ways to prepare students for life after public education.

Dave Hersh, a former teacher, is the Director for Proving Ground at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, and the former Chief of Finance and Analytics for Camden City Schools in New Jersey.

Suggested citation: Hersh, D. (2021). The Role of RPPs in an Education Improvement Infrastructure. RPPs Can Help States and Districts use Stimulus Funds to Build a Rapid Improvement Infrastructure [Editorial]. NNERPP Extra, 3(1), 25-27.