For the past 15 years, I’ve done my annual ranking of Edu-Scholars. The point is to spotlight the scholars who are influencing policy and practice, in ways good and bad. Well, consultants Tom Coyne and Susan Miller recently wrote me to argue that the Edu-Scholar metrics overlook the ways in which scholars impact schools through partnerships and consulting arrangements. Coyne consults on education improvement, after a long tenure leading the Global Center of Excellence for Corporate Growth and Turnarounds as a partner at the MAC Group. Miller, a former school board member, is a senior director at the consulting firm Woolpert, where she advises school districts on performance, finances, and more. Here’s what they had to say.
—Rick

Dear Rick,

We read your annual RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings and were, as usual, struck by the research and public influence represented by so many of the scholars on your list.

Your list makes clear that there are a lot of academics working on issues that really matter to schools and students. But we were also struck by how much of their influence is judged by writing and speaking rather than helping educators solve practical problems on the ground. We know far too many practitioners who are skeptical of quality research because it’s just not anchored in the realities of schools or school systems, which today face a crisis of unprecedented complexity.

For example, in the aftermath of COVID-19, many districts confronted the urgent need to reverse substantial student learning losses. They were faced with multiple papers from respected researchers recommending different interventions, like individual and small-group tutoring, acceleration, and online offerings. Most of them described their methods, evidence base, and effect sizes. But none of these studies focused on how a district should allocate scarce resources to maximize the rate of proficiency improvement.

We know that the how matters. In the 1990s, Tom was a consultant at the MAC Group in London. MAC was founded by a number of Harvard Business School professors who wanted to increase their income beyond speaking fees and individual consulting fees and expand the impact of their research on corporate performance.

Their solution was to hire a core group of full-time consultants like Tom, whose job was to combine the academic partners’ scientific insights with consulting methods to create interventions that delivered substantial and sustained improvements in performance for large corporate clients. Just as important, this model accelerated the learning of both our consultants and academic partners.

Since moving on from MAC, Tom has invested all his volunteer time in K–12 performance improvement for more than 20 years. After a career in investment banking, Susan now consults with school districts on strategy and implementation issues. She also served as a board director of the Jefferson County schools in Colorado during COVID-19, when a budget crisis forced the sudden closure of 21 schools. After decades of working on both the consulting and implementation sides of education, we’ve seen four big differences between consulting in the private sector and the K–12 sector.

First, most consulting engagements in K–12 are focused on one functional area, like curriculum or facilities. Few general management consultants are taking on cross-functional interventions to help superintendents and boards address the increasingly complex crises they face. For example, how should a district integrate and coordinate interventions to improve academic results, reduce classroom disruptions, stem enrollment losses, address low utilization in some schools, improve air quality in others, and adjust budgets following the end of federal COVID aid?

Second, in some K–12 districts, administrative staff believe they know what needs to be done and how to do it; all they lack are the resources. As a result, they treat consultants as subcontractors and fail to leverage their expertise to challenge and expand the district’s thinking. Closely related and in contrast to private-sector consulting clients, districts are much less rigorous in assessing and learning from the actual versus promised results of consulting engagements.

Third, close relationships between academics, consultants, and district clients are rare. While district staff may sometimes see interesting research findings, they don’t have the time to think about how to apply them systematically. For that, they need consultants who have strong relationships with academics. Think of these consultants as engineers who work with academic scientists to integrate and apply their research findings to improve client performance.

Fourth, too few K–12 consultants have relationships with academics and think tanks. Too many academics seem content to produce and publish their research without getting into the messier business of working with consultants or districts to systematically implement and test their research’s ability to make substantial, scaled, and sustained performance improvements. Building an academic-consultant-district relationship isn’t easy, but it is possible and increasingly critical.

To meet the enormous challenge facing K–12 today, academics, consultants, and school districts need to learn to work together more closely. Here are some practical suggestions for the way forward:

When considering what consultants to hire, districts should start asking about the most interesting academic insights those consultants have seen and how they have applied them in their previous roles—bonus points for hiring consultants who partner with researchers on client engagements.

Likewise, consultants serving K–12 need to do a better job of incorporating academic insights into their client engagements, with a much stronger focus on comparing effect sizes from their projects with those reported by academics—bonus points for building long-term intellectual and economic relationships with academics, as we did at MAC.

Finally, journal editors and tenure committees shouldn’t penalize academics for doing more to apply their insights to generate substantial and sustained performance improvements in K–12, even though these interventions will almost always fall short of the carefully controlled experiments they prefer—bonus points for funders who support closer relationships between researchers and consulting firms.