Chapter 6

In 2019, Mark Schneider, the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, fired a flare of caution into the sky warning of leaders’ lack of clarity and candor about the cost of educating kids. “As a field, we have been way, way behind the curve in terms of telling people how much things cost.” One test of Mr. Schneider’s assertion is to look at some of the best authors’ writing about school improvement and examine the place of economic analysis in their works. Let’s look at two: the Carnegie Foundation team that has championed continuous improvement, and John Hattie who has advanced the cause of making learning visible through comparative measures of impact. If there’s one book that is the bible of continuous improvement for K–12 educators, it is Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better. It ranks 12th in Amazon’s ranking of education administration books, a notable achievement. All four of its authors—Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow and Paul G. LeMahieu—are leaders within the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Certainly, in a book this influential, written by four people as highly esteemed, you’d expect to see economic analysis used somewhere in its pages. Yet nowhere could I find even a reference to economic analysis. Not in the index. Not in the glossary. Not in the body of the book and its ample real-world examples. This is a book I’ve read and value highly. It has advanced the cause of smarter management. Some of our clients have gone through the Carnegie Foundation training in California and praise Learning to Improve highly. Yet what does it say about the profession of education management when a book this highly regarded disregards the cost-consequences of improvements? Rather than rush to judgment, I looked at another book that is on the “must read” list for those studying school improvement: Visible Learning by John Hattie. He dared to do what no one had done before: compare the relative effect of over a hundred different approaches to improving student learning. He found over 800 studies and used meta-analysis methods to find a common denominator of effect size to estimate the impact of each. Since the book came out in 2008, Hattie has written well over a dozen spin-off books, each of them applying his comparative effectiveness method to specific domains within K–12 (e.g., early literacy, math, special education, etc.). Visible Learning soared in popularity and now ranks 188th on Amazon’s education administration best-seller list. But does the cost of achieving gains appear in this book? In its 392 pages, it appears only in passing. Yet it is central to the decision-making that faces every education leader. It is an obvious constraint. What’s the “bang” that they’ll obtain for every “buck” they spend? This is a universal and unavoidable question….