Education journalism is chock full of stories touting some brand new idea that could fix schools. Artificial intelligence is the current obsession. Philanthropic funders often say they want to see fewer stories about problems and more stories about solutions. But the truth is that lifting student achievement is really hard and the vast majority of innovations don’t end up working.

A February 2024 report about a research-and-development program inside the Department of Education makes this truth crystal clear. The failure rate was 74 percent. Under this program, called Investing in Innovation or i3, the federal government gave out $1.4 billion between 2010 and 2016 to education nonprofits and researchers for the purpose of developing and testing new ideas in the classroom. But only 26 percent of the innovations yielded any positive benefits for students and no negative harms, according to the program’s final report.

Most of the 172 grants tested ideas about improving instruction or turning around low-performing schools. Almost 150 of them reported results with more than 20 still unfinished. Of the completed ones, a quarter of the innovations hadn’t been properly tested. Doing rigorous research isn’t easy; you need to set up a group of comparison students who don’t get the intervention and track everyone’s progress. Of the 112 properly evaluated grants, the most common result was a null finding, meaning that the intervention didn’t make a difference. Only a small handful left students worse off. The results for each program are hidden in pages 55 through 64 of a separate appendices document, but I have created a pdf of them for you.

The low success rate for new ideas is “psychologically disappointing,” said Barbara Goodson, lead author of the report and an expert in educational research at the consulting firm Abt Global. “You would hope that all this [innovation] would pan out for students and that we would know better how to make education.

Read the full article about education by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report .