January 2004 — Exclusive Series: SBR
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Determining 'What Works' - An Interview With Dr. Grover 'Russ' Whitehurst
T.H.E.: Well, the sticky wicket here is what gets funded. If I am a district looking specifically at underperforming students and am using Title I monies to address their learning needs, can I do my own local study and say, 'Look I've proved that this works so I can use our Title I funds for this particular program,' or am I going to be limited to those Ps that the WWC has vetted?
WHITEHURST: I can't speak definitively to the regulations that the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education will deploy with respect to Title I funds. That's a separate office of the department. I can say conceptually what I believe the department should be doing as it makes discretionary grants to school districts, [which] is, if there is a list of products or practices that have strong evidence of effectiveness based on the What Works Clearinghouse, that there would be an expectation that grantees would choose from the list. Or, if they are using a product or practice that hasn't been evaluated — that's innovative, that's new, that may be homegrown — they produce along with their application for funding a plan for locally evaluating the effectiveness of that product.
Given that there's nothing about the proposed innovation that seems bizarre or unlikely to work, that it seems promising but there's just no evidence of its effectiveness, then either of those strategies should be successful. So, either you choose something that's been shown to work, or you do something new but promise to collect evidence to demonstrate whether it's effective or not.
T.H.E.: This is something you're saying you think conceptually should or might happen, not something that is happening?
WHITEHURST: Yes, because we don't have a What Works Clearinghouse that has products yet. The department's funding for Title I, Reading First and other programs occurs largely in the absence of any evidence of the sort that the What Works Clearinghouse will produce. So, the judgments to date have been largely based on the requirements of the legislation itself, and whether the state or the local education agency is proposing to do something that is generally aligned with whatever is required by the legislation. So it's a very different process that's more so based on alignment. The best example of that is Reading First, where basically to get your plan approved, you've got to demonstrate at the state level that you have a process in place by which school districts that are going to get Reading First funds will be vetted to determine if the programs they are going to be using will focus on fluency, phonics and the [other] required components of Reading First.
T.H.E.: So a federal program, like Reading First, right now relies on districts aligning their programs with the components of reading instruction that it has identified as effective, rather than districts having access to a 'what works' analysis of the research on specific reading interventions they might want to use?
WHITEHURST: Yes, that's right. By and large, alignment is all we've had, because in most cases [there's been an] absence of any definitive research on what's effective, and in the other cases it's just the pure need to cover the wide variety of practices that are out there.
