Two decades after the launch of the federal What Works Clearinghouse, experts say the education project has helped drive the evidence-based policy movement, but there鈥檚 still a ways to go: Teachers and school leaders still struggle to find evidence-based interventions in schools.
Begun in 2002, the clearinghouse鈥檚 goal was to help inform educators about programs and approaches with research they could use to improve student learning. But it had a rocky start, fielding widespread complaints that it was too slow to release actionable findings.
Over time, though, the clearinghouse became more widely respected鈥攖he inspiration, in fact, for a host of other education research efforts, even as it illuminated several core tensions in education research that exist today over timeliness, the difficulty of translating research into practice, and the emergence of new technologies.
鈥淭he What Works Clearinghouse has served a really critical role in the overall education R&D ecosystem,鈥� said Melissa Moritz, the senior advisor for the Alliance for Learning Innovation and a former deputy director for STEM education at the U.S. Department of Education under the Obama administration. 鈥淚t provides a one-stop shop where you are confident in the rigor of the evidence and the evaluation, and that鈥檚 really needed.
鈥淏ut we also know it has limits; it鈥檚 not the one thing needed to really transform and ensure that everything that we do in classrooms and schools has an evidence base,鈥� she continued.
How the clearinghouse has evolved over time
The federal clearinghouse was launched just as the newly signed No Child Left Behind Act first put an emphasis on schools鈥� use of empirical research to guide teaching and learning, and as the research wing of the U.S. Department of Education began to fund controlled studies in education, a field previously dominated by case studies and observational research.
Since then, the WWC has been reinvented several times in response to the steadily growing need for research support for school and district leaders. It gained more prominence in 2016, after the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act. ESSA relaxed the narrow approaches for school improvement allowed under NCLB. ESSA allowed school districts to adopt any evidence-based school improvement approach they chose.
In some ways, its growing stature can be measured by the wide array of other data and research clearinghouses it helped to spur, including the , which reviews interventions designed to boost high school graduation; the , a teacher-focused site that collects research meta-analyses on education topics; and , which curates programs in education, health, crime and other social topics that have shown significant benefits in rigorous studies.
The spread of these clearinghouses makes it easier for educators to find evidence in specific topic areas, but has also sown confusion, as there are no consistent standards for 鈥溾�� across different clearinghouses.
The WWC has been at the receiving end of such criticism, too. In 2017, the National Institute for Direct Instruction for not considering whether programs were fully implemented in effectiveness studies before giving them an effectiveness rating.
And former officials wonder whether, in its emphasis on discrete programs, the clearinghouse neglected the bigger picture.
John Q. Easton, former IES director under the Obama administration, said he had concerns that the WWC鈥檚 focus on the effectiveness of individual interventions or practices could mislead educators and school leaders to think 鈥渙verall school improvement is likely with this very narrow approach,鈥� Easton said.
鈥淭he research that I鈥檝e conducted with Tony Bryk and others suggests the need for strong principal leadership that encourages teacher collaboration to develop a strong student-focused culture, and a continuous improvement view toward strong and rigorous instruction,鈥� Easton said.
Can the What Works Clearinghouse keep up with AI and new challenges?
Today, researchers feel the clearinghouse still needs to be more nimble and evolve more quickly.
鈥淭echnology is changing so rapidly and these classroom tools are changing so rapidly that it鈥檚 really hard for the field to keep up with that to understand the impacts on teaching and learning,鈥� said Sara Schapiro, director of the Alliance for Learning Innovation. 鈥淭here are a lot of ed-tech tools, a lot of generative AI being thrown into the field that they don鈥檛 quite know how to get their arms around yet, using this sort of structure.鈥�
Federal officials say they鈥檝e heard the message loud and clear.
During the pandemic, the National Center on Education Statistics and the U.S. Census began collecting quick-turnaround data to track how schools responded to the crisis. Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, which runs the clearinghouse, said the agency plans to use a similar approach for the WWC, using regular, rapid scans of existing research to both update practice guides more frequently and identify evidence gaps in particular areas, such as AI-based tools.
Whatever next steps the clearinghouse takes, researchers say that educators will still face obstacles to sorting through the morass of claims about what works in the classroom.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 envy the job of the superintendents and curriculum leads and districts,鈥� Schapiro said. 鈥淭hey have to sort through products being sold to them with claims of evidence, and then needing to then go into each of those products and evaluate for themselves: What evidence were they using? Was there a third party researcher provided, or were they using internally run research? Were they using the What Works Clearinghouse?
鈥淭hose things would be hard to tease out product by product,鈥� she said, 鈥渁nd it speaks to a greater need at the federal level to help school and district staff sort through the noise.鈥�
