January 2004 — Exclusive Series: SBR
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Determining 'What Works' - An Interview With Dr. Grover 'Russ' Whitehurst
S. Department of Education. But in some sense, the Institute of Education Sciences is a vendor. We're developing a product here. If it is useful, if it is powerful, then we will expect people will use it. But we don't have any promises that people will use it. We haven't already premarketed it, and we haven't sold it to other offices or programs. Sure, I think it will go that way, but it depends on how well the What Works Clearinghouse d'es its job. We don't have a product yet.
T.H.E.: Let me ask you specifically about Title II D. It's my understanding that there's no SBR requirement in Title II D.
WHITEHURST: That's correct, as I recall.
T.H.E.: So, if a technology product is a particular application in a curriculum area, it would be held accountable to meet SBR standards established in that area. And theoretically, if it can't be bought with Title I funds because it d'esn't meet SBR standards, it might be able to be bought with Title II D funds.
WHITEHURST: Might be. I think it depends not only on the title of NCLB that the funds are deriving from, but also on the particular regulation and guidance that's employed by the component of the U.S. Department of Education that's either judging the block grants from the states or the applications from individual school districts. Eventually, one imagines that every program office in the department will be on the same page; it takes awhile to get there. So [for] a technology program, for example, that's being used as a component of Reading First, one would expect that at some point there's going to be a requirement that there be evidence of effectiveness of the sort that meets the standards of the What Works Clearinghouse. For other types of use of technology, it's hard to imagine what that evidence would even look like. [If you use] technology money to buy servers, what d'es that mean that they're 'effective'?
T.H.E.: They don't crash?
WHITEHURST: [Laughs] Fair enough. But there's a lot of investment that can be thought of as infrastructure investment.
T.H.E.: A typical way in which districts purchase technology is that they use Title I funds to buy computer labs for underperforming kids to get basic skills practice. They use Title I money to buy the equipment, the software and pay for the salaries of the paraprofessionals who oversee the labs. Given that scenario, what part of that do you think, or could you imagine, would be covered by SBR?
WHITEHURST: Software — the application. If the What Works Clearinghouse produces products that are useful in the ways that I've previously described, there will increasingly be pressure on the vendors of the software applications to demonstrate that they actually enhance children's skills in the ways that are claimed. That pressure, I think, is going to come from a variety of sources, and it's as likely to come at the local level and from the state level as it is from the federal level.
T.H.E.: What about the practice of having computer labs and using paraprofessionals?
WHITEHURST: I think those are very researchable questions. [But] it's more difficult for me to think of a funding mechanism or a funding decision that flows from the U.S. Department of Education that's going to have a direct impact on that.
