When COVID struck, scientists rushed to stem the pandemic in a coordinated effort that led to the creation of new vaccines in record time, saving millions of lives. These vaccines resulted from decades of investment by the federal government in mRNA research. Investing in research and development is a time-tested and effective way to solve big, complex problems. Why not invest in education research and development? After all, R&D drives innovation in fields like health care, tech, energy and agriculture.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about education. The U.S. has never adequately invested in education R&D, so persistent problems remain unsolved and the system is largely unable to handle unexpected emergencies, like COVID. Although strong research does exist, few education leaders use it to guide their decisions on behalf of kids.

As former state education commissioners in Tennessee and Mississippi, we know that education R&D, when consulted and applied in classrooms, can yield huge academic gains for students.

Education Research and Development to Bolster Literacy

Take literacy, for example.

For generations, Mississippi students ranked at or near the bottom in national reading scores, and Tennessee didn’t fare much better. In the late 1990s, the federal government poured millions of dollars into researching the most effective ways to teach young people how to read. But like a lot of good education research, those findings did little to change what was happening in classrooms and teachers colleges.

As education leaders, we knew we had to act on the findings, which supported systematic and explicit phonics-based instruction. It’s malpractice to look at stagnant achievement year after year and say, “Let’s keep doing the same thing.”

So we aligned our states’ approaches to what the research said was most effective. In Mississippi, that meant training teachers on the science of reading. In eight years, Mississippi’s national literacy ranking for fourth graders improved 29 places, from 49th to 21st.

Read the full article about education research and development by Penny Schwinn and Carey Wright at The 74.