Education

Making Policy Work

May 22, 2007 1 min read
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Education policy would greatly aid in the improvement of U.S. students’ scholastic achievements if it borrowed a page from medicine and used more research-based evidence to evaluate programs and best practices, writes Jon Baron in this Education Week Commentary. Baron cites examples of programs that have been identified by well-designed randomized-control trials as being highly effective.

According to Baron, “The very existence of a few research-proven educational programs ... suggests that a concerted government effort to apply the rigorous methods used in medicine to education policy could fundamentally increase the effectiveness of such policy.”

What do you think? Should education policy be more research-based? Could medicine provide a model?

A version of this news article first appeared in the TalkBack blog.

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