This is an interesting article. I like the "pet ideas" at the end.  Often our hunches and qualitative data are the toughest to make consistent, replicate and keep in place.  These pet ideas are worded well.  ~Tracie 

Why It’s So Hard to Replicate Successful Programs

(Originally titled “Trust But Verify”)

            “School improvement programs that work in some places don’t work in others,” say David Berliner and Gene Glass (Arizona State University) in this Educational Leadership article. Why? “Education… is a complex, intricate endeavor that entails inputs we can’t control (for instance, family wealth, parents’ education, community support, and special needs of children); variables we can’t easily identify or measure (such as competing school and district initiatives, classroom culture, peer influence, teacher beliefs, and principal leadership); and outputs we can neither predict nor easily measure (such as resilience, grit, practical intelligence, social intelligence, and creativity). No wonder we can’t find a silver bullet for school problems, say Berliner and Glass – education is more complex than rocket science!

            In addition to the complexity of schools, three other problems make it hard to transplant seemingly successful programs:

            • The fine print in research findings – How strong were the original results? Under what conditions did the program work? Were there any negative effects?

            • The problem of replicability – It’s much more difficult to do “gold-standard” replication studies in education than in medicine; fewer than 1 percent of educational research studies have been replicated.

            • The problem of fading effects – A program that was successful in one situation may not work in another because teachers, students, school culture, and assessment instruments are different. And bringing a program to scale across many schools poses even bigger challenges.

            So what are school leaders to do? Read research very carefully, be cautious applying it, do small trials before going to scale, and always pay close attention to the local situation, say Berliner and Glass. They also offer some general lessons:

-    Get teachers on board. “Not much works well if teachers have things imposed on them that they don’t believe in,” say the authors.

-    Less is more. It’s a mistake to implement several new programs and ideas at once.

-    Put new programs through a formative evaluation and if they are successful, use the data to fine-tune them.

In a sidebar, Berliner and Glass mention several of their “pet ideas” that they believe may travel well:

-    Recognize that teachers often work in teams.

-    “Make sure the evaluation system has no consequences for teachers associated with student test scores,” say the authors, “but do include multiple classroom observations and an evaluation of classroom artifacts – tests, papers, projects, and the like.”

-    Make sure that no school day for students starts earlier than 8:30 a.m.

-    Provide libraries staffed with librarians and counseling offices staffed with enough counselors so they can get to know students personally.

-    Get students reading more and be very skeptical of packaged programs that claim to improve reading.

-    Eliminate tracking in grades K-6.

-    Eliminate retention in all grades.

“Trust But Verify” by David Berliner and Gene Glass in Educational Leadership, February 2015 (Vol. 72, #5, p. 10-14), http://bit.ly/1IFarSn; the authors can be reached at berliner@asu.edu and glass@asu.edu.