Is Our Education System Actually Backed By Research? - Matthew Courtney (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Matthew Courtney’s talk titled “Is Our Education System Actually Backed By Research?” at TEDxGainesville 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

It was a typical Tuesday morning in Miss Fortune’s 5th grade class when Officer Anderson came through the door. He was standing more than 6 feet tall in his navy blue uniform with his shiny brass badge, and he’d come over from the local police department to talk to our class. Behind him, he pulled a wagon filled with red workbooks, t-shirts, and pennant flags that said, “Dare to keep kids off drugs.” This was the first of what would be a series of visits by Officer Anderson throughout the school year as he implemented the DARE program.

The DARE Program

Now, for those of you who grew up in the U.S. in the 80s or 90s, you probably had a similar experience, but for those of you who didn’t, let’s recap. The DARE program was founded in 1983 when a group of community leaders in Los Angeles came together to try to design a curriculum that they hoped would prevent kids from becoming substance users. The program quickly spread across the United States, teaching kids about the different kinds of drugs, the dangers of using illicit substances, and role-playing those classic “just say no” style scenarios.

As a nation, we spent over a billion dollars a year on this program and countless instructional hours. It was wildly popular until the late 1990s when a team of researchers looked around and said, “Hey, does this thing even work?” Turns out it did not. Those researchers took a careful look at the DARE program, and they found no evidence that it prevented kids from becoming substance users.

In fact, one study from 1998 showed that for some kids, it actually increased their substance use. Now, I don’t know about all of you, but to me, it seems pretty ridiculous that we would spend billions of dollars and hundreds and hundreds of instructional hours delivering a program in our nation’s schools before anybody bothered to ask if it was even a good idea in the first place. But here we are.

A Larger Problem

I wish that I could tell you that the failure of the DARE program represents just a singular event in our history, but I can’t. In reality, it’s just a symptom of a larger problem with the way we do school here in the United States. It’s a pattern that has repeated itself time and time again.

As it stands today, the world of education practice and education research exist on two parallel paths, but very few bridges exist to connect them. When research does become connected to practice, it is often far too late. Long after decisions have been made, instruction has been provided, and kids have been progressed on to the next level.

If we want to strengthen our education system for the future and really fortify it for a rapidly changing global economy, we must take steps to bring these two parts of the field together. We must take steps to usher in an era of evidence-based education. Now, to understand how we got here, we have to first go all the way back to the early 1800s, when the new American school system was just beginning to form.

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The Early American Education System

From its earliest days, education practice and education research were treated as two distinct things. If you wanted to be a teacher, you went to what were called normal schools, where you received two years of instruction on essential curriculum knowledge and the best teaching strategies of the day. And if you wanted to be a researcher in this new field of education science, then you did that full-time at one of just a handful of prestigious research universities.

This early arrangement made sense at first, because it allowed our early American education system to really pump out credentialed teachers for the growing number of schoolhouses across the country, while providing a little breathing room for this new field of education science to emerge and grow. But in the long run, it totally screwed us, because the fissure between these two parts of the profession would just grow further and further and further apart, until we reach a space where today, the two fields are largely considered to be completely different disciplines.

Given this history, it’s easy to see how a situation like the DARE program can play out. Classroom educators, who haven’t been given the time or resources to do their own research or perform their own analysis, find themselves delivering curriculums and programs that have been developed and studied by folks who really have no connection to the modern day classroom. And there’s just too few opportunities to connect the ivory towers of academia with the practical realities of public schooling.

Systemic Barriers

We’re all victims of an intentionally designed system that really just doesn’t make sense anymore. And that system, by the way, it comes with some pretty stubborn barriers that are actually holding us apart. On the practitioner side, there’s three primary barriers: time, access, and training.

Classroom educators who want to use research to inform instruction don’t have time to do so during the workday. They don’t have access to research that’s often published behind expensive paywalls, and they haven’t been very well trained on how to take a research finding from over here and apply it to a problem of practice right in front of them. And there’s barriers to research production, too.

Research funding is far too limited, and therefore super competitive. Research priorities ebb and flow at the social and political whims of the day. And a phenomenon called publication bias suppresses research that is arbitrarily determined to be unimportant.

And all of this means that there are really serious issues in education that just haven’t been studied very deeply yet. Now, I’ve been working in this space for more than a decade, and I’ve seen evidence-based practice initiatives come and go.

I’ve even written a few of them myself.

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The Path Forward

But I stand before you today convinced, now more than ever, that the path toward an evidence-based future for our system lies not in systemic reform or dramatic legislative changes, where most of our current efforts lie, but rather at the individual level, through the individual adoption of a professional responsibility to make it happen. Man, our teachers and leaders are incredible professionals. Their work blows me away every day.

And when we give teachers and leaders the time, access, and training that they need to apply research knowledge to their decision-making, we empower them to make better decisions faster that lead to lasting instructional improvements. Through my work, I have helped hundreds of educators become evidence-informed practitioners, and I’ve seen some really amazing transformations. Take for example, the transportation director, who was struggling with student safety during the morning commute due to a high number of illegal school bus passes.

The data alone wasn’t getting him anywhere with local leaders, and so he brought the research literature to the table. By showing his county attorney that the prosecution of illegal school bus passes had improved student safety elsewhere, he got them to change local policy, and he improved student safety in his own district. Or consider the team of three classroom teachers who were challenged with frequent disruptions to whole group instruction.

These awesome teachers, they put their heads together, and they created their own homegrown solution. They piloted it in their own classrooms and collected data in a rigorous and systemic way. They shared the analysis out with their peers, and before long, every teacher in their school was using their homegrown solution.

Success Stories

And that led to measurable improvements to student participation school-wide, and also to staff morale, a notably hard indicator to move. And then there’s the instructional coach, who came to me at the start of the pandemic and said, “I don’t know how to help my teachers. I’ve never taught under these conditions before.”

Well, none of us had. It was everyone’s first global pandemic. But the research literature contained valuable information about how to deliver remote instruction, about how to help kids cope with feelings of grief and loss, about how to rebuild a community after a period of disaster or tragedy.

And she was able to synthesize all that together to create new strategies that helped her teachers help their kids in real time. These evidence-empowered educators are leading the way toward a brighter future for our system. They’re showing us that when given the time and resources to be successful, that educators at every level can apply research knowledge to the problems right in front of them and make them go away.

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The Medical Profession as a Model

Now, I know for some of you, this sounds like a heavy lift, but we won’t be the first profession to facilitate a grassroots evidence-based transformation on our own. In fact, the medical profession underwent a similar transition over the course of the last century. Like teaching, medicine used to be a field that began with a little formal schooling and then went on toward mentoring and apprenticeships.

But over time, our medical practitioners stepped up and said, “This isn’t good enough for us.” Medical training programs became more rigorous, and in the 1960s, medical coursework became very science-focused. In the 1980s, a commitment to, quote, “advancing scientific knowledge” made its way into the American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics for every doctor.

And in the 1990s, the term “evidence-based medicine” came onto the scene. And while a lot has happened since then, you would be hard-pressed today to find a doctor who isn’t using research to solve patient problems. These medical practitioners stepped up, they took ownership of their profession, and they facilitated a change by making sure that each of their local decisions and conversations were rooted in sound research.

A Call to Action

And our teachers can do the same. We can have an evidence-based education system where decisions are made with intention over intuition, where new teaching strategies aren’t just written about and theorized, but are tested, applied, and improved upon, and where the literal wall between research and practice has been torn down forever. And our educators can make that happen by adopting an individual, professional responsibility to use research to inform decisions.

So teachers, connect with a researcher on social media, invite them into your classroom and start to build a relationship. Principals, find a knowledge broker who can help you overcome those systemic access barriers. Superintendents, open the doors of your district to research-practice partnerships with your local universities and research organizations.

Researchers, come attend some practitioner-oriented events. Let your next study be inspired by their expertise and experience. Oh, and parents, there’s a job for all of you, too. Go to your school boards and demand that your teachers and leaders be given the time and resources they need to make thoughtful, intentional, evidence-based decisions for your kids.

Conclusion

We stand on the precipice of a new era in education, an era of evidence-based education. And it doesn’t have to be just a dream. It can be our reality.

It’s a reality that each of us can usher in, one professional at a time. Thank you.

Is Our Education System Actually Backed By Research? – Matthew Courtney (Transcript)