As states take lead in fixing U.S. schools, Harvard will serve as a hub

When it comes to American public education, states wield a lot of power over policy — lately, more than they have in decades.

But that influence isn’t always accompanied by insight.

Sometimes, despite valiant efforts, superintendents and commissioners enact sweeping new policies affecting millions of students with little immediate feedback about whether and how they’re working.

Christina Grant knows that struggle: From 2021 to 2024, she served as state superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. And now she’s part of a University initiative designed to help fill the knowledge gap in partnership with a first cohort of states announced this week.

“It’s very different to be able to look under the hood with a particular policy — where you’re getting answers not in five years, but in a year or a year and a half,” Grant said. “You want to go from hearing about what worked with a particular program to knowing.”

Grant was named executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education last June, at a troubled time for American schools. Four years after COVID-19 closed classrooms, test scores and attendance still haven’t returned to their pre-pandemic highs.

Along with education economist Thomas Kane, CEPR’s faculty director, Grant began working toward the States Leading States Initiative, launched in January and backed by a $10 million grant from the Walton Foundation that will sustain it for its first four years.

This week, CEPR announced its first cohort of nine very different states that share a mix of curiosity and practicality about reversing those trends.

“We wanted diversity along a number of different axes. So: big states and small states, states with veteran education leadership and others where a new team is in place — and then diversity of political leadership: red states and blue,” said Scott Sargrad, who will lead the initiative.

Under the program, Harvard’s data analysts will work with state education bureaucracies in Rhode Island and Colorado but also Texas and Tennessee.

Sargrad comes to Harvard after two stints at the U.S. Department of Education, an agency that is facing an existential threat via an order from President Donald Trump to start closing operations. And that was before the current government shutdown.

With federal oversight of public schools — on the ebb since 2015 — at its lowest point in decades, States Leading States only looks more necessary to Kane.

“There’s a bit of a vacuum — and so the timing could not be better,” said Kane, who will be one educational economist on call for participating state leaders.

The stakes feel incredibly high to Kane: nothing less than “a culture change in K-12 education. We need to recognize that what sounds good on paper doesn’t always work, and that — when it comes to critical questions like lowering absenteeism — you have to be collecting evidence.”

“I can’t think of anything we could be doing that would make a bigger difference 10 or 20 years from now,” he said.

And the relationship won’t be limited to Zoom calls with CEPR’s offices on Church Street in Cambridge.

Instead, Grant said, “We’ll be placing Strategic Data Fellows inside these systems. So those will either be individuals who already work at the departments and they’ll go through our fellowship, or we’re going to work with departments to recruit, select, and place fellows” in those nine states.

The goal is to get beyond the superficial, slow, and suggestive data that sometimes guide education policy and replace them with something like randomized controlled trials — the gold standard for empirical research.

“We want to give our partners more confidence than they could get by looking at simple correlations,” Sargrad said. “‘Scores went up; scores went down’ — that’s something, but it’s not super-convincing.”

Crucially, the policies under study will come from the states themselves. Kane, for instance, expects to lend his expertise to Ohio’s in-school cellphone ban, summer reading and math camps in Alabama, and literacy coaches in Texas.

Tony Sanders, state superintendent of public schools in cohort member Illinois, is already looking forward to that objective inside look — whatever it reveals.

When it comes to policies that affect how children learn, Sanders argued, you have to be ruthlessly self-critical.

To illustrate, he borrowed a fable from tech entrepreneur Astro Teller.

“If you’re going to teach a monkey how to recite Shakespeare in the park, you need a monkey and you need a pedestal,” Sanders said. “Which do you do first?”

Inevitably, Sanders said, many settle on the simpler task: building the pedestal. But “at the end of the day, if you can’t find a monkey that can recite Shakespeare, all you’ve done is set up a pedestal in the park.”

Sanders already has a list of policies he wants his staff to assess with help from Harvard. Those include the development of a plan for numeracy, or mathematical facility, to travel alongside existing work on literacy, and a cellphone ban supported by Gov. JB Pritzker that’s still being debated by the state’s legislature.

Illinois’ proposed phone ban would likely be less stringent than the one already in force in Ohio — and States Leading States will be outfitted to compare the two. They won’t have to wait long: CEPR staff expect their first early findings on policies to publish next spring.

As a former administrator, Grant admits that there is a level of trust involved in admitting Harvard and its scholars into the workings of a large education bureaucracy, where they’re likely to encounter programs failing to meet their potential alongside ones that work.

“That’s why I’m proud of every single state that signed on,” Grant said. “They don’t want to be making changes that don’t move the needle. They’re excited to know, ‘Am I off-course? And if so, how do I get back on?’”