The concept of evidence, the demand for evidence-based practice and decision-making has for years dominated educational research. Concomitantly, the randomized controlled trials (RCT) that originally gained ground within the field of medicine have become the gold standard for empirical research and political reform within educational sciences, at…

Over the past half-century, billions of dollars have been spent across the nation on efforts to transform low-performing public schools -- most of them urban, most of them low-income, and most of them disproportionately enrolled with students of color -- into models of success. It hasn't worked. The failure of attempts to remedy the state of urban…

Recently, there has been a growing interest in learning approaches that combine two phases: an initial problem-solving phase followed by an instruction phase (PS-I). Two often cited examples of instructional approaches following the PS-I scheme include Productive Failure and Invention. Despite the growing interest in PS-I approaches, to the best…

Why did our idea not work out? How did a program fail? Why did we get unintended consequences? Who is to blame? Could it be that our best just isn't good enough? There are many reasons policies, programs and projects fail. Failure can be informative if shared. This means that professionals should report on failures as well as successes. However,…

Over the last two decades, federal and state policy makers have launched a number of ambitious, large-scale education reform initiatives--No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core State Standards, and others--only to see them sputter and fail. In 2017, the authors convened a number of leading scholars to explore why those initiatives…

Education standards do not flop spectacularly. Their failure gives rise to nothing like the black-and-white films of early aeronautical experiments: no missiles exploding on launch pads or planes tumbling from the sky. But 10 years after 46 of the 50 states adopted the Common Core standards, the lack of evidence that they have improved student…

Despite our best efforts as evaluators, program implementation failures abound. A wide variety of valuable methodologies have been adopted to explain and evaluate the "why" of these failures. Yet, typically these methodologies have been employed concurrently (e.g., project monitoring) or to the post-hoc assessment of program activities.…

"The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (NCLB) made schools accountable for student performance through standardized testing. Some claim high-stakes testing is an inexpensive vehicle through which to raise educational standards, however, these studies typically count only the administrative costs of test development, test delivery, and…

A high percentage of ERP projects are classified as failures, leaving organizations with only partially functioning systems or, worse yet, with no ERP systems at all. Those that do succeed usually take significantly longer than expected and encounter staggering budget overruns. This Information Capsule summarizes 10 high profile ERP implementation…

The Common Core State Standards, released in 2010, were rapidly adopted by more than 40 states. Champions maintained that these rigorous standards would transform American education, but the initiative went on to encounter a bumpy path. A decade on, what are we to make of this ambitious effort? What kind of impact, if any, has it had on the…

This paper seeks to analyze Teach for America (TFA) in terms of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence in an attempt to expose the ways in which this organization perpetuates structures of inequality in the existing social order. The paper begins with a general description of TFA, followed by an overview of several studies in support…

Background: Recent reviews suggest that many plausible programs are found to have at best small impacts not commensurate with their cost, and often have no detectable positive impacts at all. Even programs with initial rigorous impact evaluation (RIE) that show them to be effective often fail a second test with an expanded population or at…

The co-occurrence of reading disorder (RD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has received increasing attention. This review summarizes the epidemiology, treatment strategies, psychosocial impact, and economic burden associated with the co-occurrence of these conditions. Common genetic and neuropsychological deficits may partially…

The importance of social capital as a resource for rural development, especially in the context of projects involving joint participation of state and civil society, is widely recognized today. This paper analyzes the obstacles confronted by local players--small farmers and government organizations--in the development of an irrigation area through…

In 2007, spurred by University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (UChicago CCSR) research reports, leadership at the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began a new targeted approach to reducing course failure in the ninth grade. The research suggested that the transition between eighth and ninth grade played a critical role in shaping…