Professor Thomas (Tom) Kane’s research has influenced education policymaking in many areas, from postsecondary financial aid to college admissions, and teacher evaluation and recruitment to—more recently—helping students recover from the pandemic.

One focus of his research has been answering the apparently simple question: What makes one teacher more effective than another? With the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Tom set out to answer that question, directing the Measure of Effective Teaching (MET) Project. The MET team collected videos of 3,000 teachers at work in classrooms in six different school districts across the United States. From this, they identified the teachers and teaching practices associated with the largest gains in student achievement. After measuring differences in teaching practice, they randomly assigned teachers to different groups of students to see if the relationships were causal. Sure enough, the teachers who had been identified as demonstrating better practices and having better student results in the first year also had students performing better than average following random assignment, demonstrating that it is possible to identify more effective teachers.

For Tom, the greatest obstacle to sustained improvement in education is that we don’t systematically evaluate reform proposals on a small scale before rolling them out broadly. Just as we can’t always predict how pharmaceuticals will affect the human body, the ways students learn—and the ways teachers change their teaching—are too complicated to anticipate every obstacle and unintended side effect.  Ideas that sound good on paper often do not work—the key is creating a research infrastructure to support widespread, continuous trials of reform ideas. School systems need the capacity to learn themselves.

Tom is the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University, which recently collaborated with Stanford University’s Education Opportunity Project to develop The Education Recovery Scorecard. The project allows US school districts to compare pandemic learning losses and find out where the greatest damage lies—and where to guide and support local recovery efforts.