Will Brehm  0:00
Brad Olsen, welcome to FreshEd.

Brad Olsen  0:04
Thanks, Will.

Will Brehm  0:33
So, congratulations on your new report. It’s a fascinating topic to think about scalability in low- and middle-income countries about education projects and interventions, particularly for me as an academic, where I’m a bit kind of skeptical about the possibility of doing such a thing. But I guess from your end, from Brooking’s end, working with governments, working with education policymakers around the world, why are educators and policymakers so concerned with finding quote, unquote, what works in education, and then trying to like scale it across a country?

Brad Olsen  1:50
You know, I think education improvement is so incredibly hard, and it’s so complex. It’s complex in large part because it’s connected to everything else. And successes are very rare. So, when we do find something that works, I think we can’t help ourselves. So, there’s this desire to spread it around so that it takes hold, and more deeply, and maybe more broadly, has the kind of effect on learners and families and communities. And so, there’s this notion that if something works in one place, it may very well work in another place. I think that also sort of comes about as a result of 50 or 70 years of us moving into these sorts of global structures and global partnerships that formed after the Second World War. And so, in some ways, education is less local than it used to be. And there’s this notion now that we can move these educational innovations that work from place to place.

Will Brehm  2:40
It sort of assumes also that things currently don’t work, right? Like that education is in crisis and so, sort of politically it becomes a, you can sort of say, “We’re going to try and fix this, we know what works” and it becomes this education is sort of perpetually in crisis, but we can solve the problem, we can solve the crisis.

Brad Olsen  2:58
Yeah. I think there are two sides for me about that one. There’s the cynic in me, I think about Ivan Illich, who once said, “A problem can be defined as an imputed lack, which inevitably turns into more money and more power for the supposed problem solver”. And I think in some ways, this notion of a learning crisis is just that, and I don’t really even always like using the term learning crisis. I think maybe there’s an opportunity crisis here. And I think that we also sometimes think about education through the lens of the medical model, where you diagnose what’s wrong, and then try and fix it, rather than looking for what’s working, and then build it up. And so, I do think that’s true. On the other hand, however, by most metrics, we’re not doing a great job by offering deep and genuine development and learning to young people, especially in historically marginalized places, and in low- and middle-income countries. So, I kind of think that both are true.

Will Brehm  3:52
It’s two things that have to sort of coexist, and that are hard to keep in the mind at the same time, but we sort of have to do it. Are there success stories of sort of finding things that quote, unquote, work, and that can scale? And I think that second part is probably the most important. Not just a solution to an educational problem in a local community are one school but something that has sort of gone from that local community and scaled to a much wider community, maybe a national community, or maybe even the international community. Taking successful interventions across countries

Brad Olsen  4:26
I think that not everything that works can be scaled, and not everything that’s scalable ought to be scaled. And then I also think it’s interesting to talk about what it is that we might discuss scaling. I mean, because it can be an innovation. As an innovation, it can be a micro innovation, which might be something relatively small and focused on problems of practice in the school. It can be a macro innovation, like redistributing the way funding occurs and an entire country. And I also think that an innovation can be an idea or an approach. When you ask are there success stories or what might have worked, you know, Larry Cuban writes about how in the beginning of the 20th century, the decision to unbolt the classroom chair from the floor was a huge innovation that changed the face of pedagogy and started in one location and has taken hold in many other locations. So, it might be something as simple as that. I might think about in the 1960s, and collective bargaining for teachers as being an idea that started in a few places, and then spread. Those aren’t typically considered scaling in innovations, but I think it helps us broaden what we think about when we think of innovations, and when we think of scaling. Defined more traditionally, I might look to something like teaching at the right level, which is a well-known pedagogical methodology that was developed about 15 years ago in India and has scaled to reach now almost 60 million learners in India and Africa. And that’s an innovation that gets a lot of attention for being scaled relatively successfully.

Will Brehm  5:58
And what about the opposite? What about interventions that were attempted to be scaled, and then simply, absolutely failed and could not actually scale? What’s a good example of those?

Brad Olsen  6:10
I’m reluctant to name names but I’ve got this sort of poetic image in my head of like the highway or the road of educational improvement, it’s just littered with failures. And sometimes those are innovations that pilot well, and that mistakenly are believed to be scalable, or that could have scaled but didn’t get scaled, right. Or, I think about an innovation that’s implemented and works well in one location, but then doesn’t work in other locations because folks forgot that context matters. Or I think about how many promising scaling initiatives there are that die as soon as the funding goes away, and they just stop. And so, I do think that it’s hard to be successful when you are scaling impact of an innovation. And it takes an inordinate amount of time. And Larry Cooley has said that it takes upwards of 15 years to scale a promising innovation in public policy, and rarely are there the funding opportunities, and the governmental support that lasts long enough to give something like that a chance.

Will Brehm  7:13
And I guess this sort of brings us to the heart of your report, where you really start trying to figure out some of these, I guess, external factors that begin to impact how we might understand what works and how we might understand what could scale and how it could scale. And we have to sort of think of these different factors to really understand the possibilities of scaling. And you start with sort of demystifying some of this public policy process where you say, these educational processes that many different countries – and particularly low- and middle-income countries – make is sometimes thought as this technocratic exercise where it’s rational and linear and if we just get the right inputs, and we create the right processes, then we can definitely create the right outcomes that we want. But you sort of say, it’s a lot messier than that. Is it?

Brad Olsen  7:58
I feel like there’s a lot of really interesting things in that set of questions and that question. So, maybe I’m going to back up a little bit and make sure that we’re kind of clear on what we talk about when we talk about scaling because in the private sector scaling is a different ballgame. You know, there’s a product, you put it out there, you cross your fingers, and it gets taken up, or it doesn’t. And I think in the public policies sectors, things like health and education is a lot more complex. And part of the reason it’s more complex is that government is typically involved. Not always, but many education innovations, in order for them to scale successfully, are designed ultimately to be taken over by government or incorporated into the government system in the field, we sometimes call that institutionalization. And so, when you start talking about the need for institutionalizing an innovation, then scaling is suddenly about how can we create a pathway by which this promising innovation ultimately gets built into the government system, the curricular system, the assessment system, the teaching standards, as well as of course, the sort of cultural and local human aspects of the thing. And so, one of the things that we focus on is less about scaling the innovation, and more about scaling impact. It’s the innovations impact that matters. And so, I understand that scaling the innovation is the means. But I think the end is about the impact of the innovation being scaled and to scale something doesn’t necessarily mean to make it bigger or to scale it up or out. It could be something that gets scaled deeply, or it goes from inside out or outside in. So, there are these multiple ways to think about it. But an answer to your question. I think that in many cases, the work of scaling a promising education innovation at some point requires that a government be willing to adopt, adapt and support it at scale. And so that’s something that this report looked into. We tried to understand what scaling looks like from the perspective of the government decision makers.

Will Brehm  9:59
And so, that would sort of necessarily mean that national politics is a major factor in what can be adopted by the governments into their sort of long-term plans and long-term policies?

Brad Olsen  10:11
Yeah. And so, this gets into the complexity of what it means for government decision making around adopting and adapting innovations for scale. We might think that it’s this technical, rational process and that a government goes out and it collects information from various stakeholders, and it identifies its education needs, and then it works with others to create a strategic plan, that plan often lasts for five years, and then the government, maybe it’s the Minister of Education, or various technical advisors, they go around, and they look inside the country and outside the country for solutions that fit the needs. And then they figure out which solutions will work best, and they pilot them, and they implement them, and they support them at scale. That sounds great! It doesn’t happen that way. What we found is that some of that is true. But alongside that occurring is an awful lot of idiosyncratic, nonlinear, nonrational negotiation. And so those negotiations have to do with the fact that decision makers don’t have enough information always, they rarely have enough time, there are multiple constituencies and groups that they’re negotiating with in order to think through which innovations are going to be considered. I hope that we might have a chance to talk about the global donor community because they are a large influence in all of this. Even individually, decision makers have their own idiosyncrasies. I talked to someone who coined a term called “bureaucratic careerist”, which is that some decision makers know that if they reject the status quo, and push for something brand new, whether or not it actually works, that’s a way to advance in the bureaucracy and to move one’s career forward. I think about group think and how groups of people can get very excited about a thing. And then I also think, and this is where I think you’re headed is the notion of national politics. And so sometimes, this is about the fact that an election year is coming up and you may not want to bolden the administration’s political competitors, there is a desire for visible and easy wins in education, and some innovations and scaling opportunities provide more of that than others. But what we did was, in this report, when we looked at how does decision making actually occur, what we found is that it’s rarely about the promise of the actual innovation or the scaling strategy of the innovation and it’s more about how that innovation fits into this broader decision-making landscape. And so, then what we did was we looked at that decision making landscape, and we broke it up into five different dimensions. And these are five things that contribute to make this sort of complex, in large part non rational landscape within which government makes their decisions about which education innovations to support at scale.

Will Brehm  12:56
I mean, it’s like a total mess. Like, how on earth is this sort of, you know, the metaphor that is commonly used is like this sausage being made, right? It’s just being mushed together, and there’s all these special interests, and there’s these sort of small p politics of individuals trying to work through bureaucracy. And then there’s the national politics and thinking about the elections that are coming up around the corner. And all of this is sort of shaping and impacting what’s possible or not within a particular country or contexts at a particular time as well, right? Because it could change over time. You brought up donors, because I think, in low- and middle-income countries, donors are such a big stakeholder and have a lot of power or drive the agenda. And so, how does the donor community fit into this messy process that you’re beginning to unpack?

Brad Olsen  13:41
You know that community is one of the strands of the messiness. But you know, the messiness isn’t all bad. When we get to that von Bismarck quote about sausage, this is how democracy works. And part of that messiness, I think, is honorable because what it does is it allows for the democratic processes to work. And it also, in theory at least, ensures that the education innovations that are ultimately adopted are the ones that have an actual usefulness in the location. Having said that, however, the global donor community is really interesting, and I think it’s really complex. First of all, there are different kinds of donors, there are bilateral donors, there are multilateral donors, there are donors that focus exclusively on education, there are donors that focus on multiple things, and I think that there’s a lot to say about that. I think part of it is that on the one hand, there are critics who will suggest that donors bring their preferred educational solutions and impose them on a country and that those aren’t always the best solutions for that country. That there’s a kind of one size fits all mentality. Supporters, on the other hand, will say listen, these donor organizations have been doing this work for decades, they’ve been doing careful research. If it gets to this point where they’re offering it to a country, it must be pretty good. My own view is kind of in the middle of those two extremes. But I also don’t think it’s quite as simple as a one size fits all, I think that there is an attempt to try and match what a donor organization has to offer with what a particular country might actually need. And I think that one of the findings from our report is that a lot of these low- and middle-income country governments have more power than they think. And what seems to be true is that those administrations that have a clear and coherent system for decision making have a lot of strength, and they’re able to work very well with the donor community and push back when they don’t think the donor community is offering something that works for their needs. And so, the more coherent and the more together a decision-making system is in a country, I think, the more power that it has. But I think it’s certainly true that donors do bring their preferred education and innovations, and one of the things that we found is that process, if not careful, will sideline some of the homegrown educational innovations or solutions that might be amazingly promising and amazingly powerful, but haven’t been researched and validated over multiple years and haven’t found their way into that global basket. And so, I think about the fact that some of those homegrown locally designed innovations might have some real benefit. Because they come organically out of local contexts, they already have a sort of grassroots support, they may very likely already have equity considerations such as rural location needs, or gender equity, or a focus on the unique characteristics of the learner population built into the innovation. I think there’s also something to be said for focusing on the local expertise and the local capacity. And so, I’d like to think that there’s some real promise within those but one of the things that we found is the national level of government decision makers don’t really even have those homegrown innovations on their radar. Instead, they’re looking at these global and international or regional ones that are being passed around from country to country. And I think the last thing I want to say on this is that it appears that over these last several years, the list of available innovations in this kind of global donor basket is narrowing. And so rather than offering more and more educational innovations and solutions, I think that there are fewer and fewer. It almost seems like a crowdsourcing process. And I’m not sure that all innovations will necessarily work in all contexts.

Will Brehm  17:25
Why do you think national governments are more concerned with what’s going on at that regional and global level than what might be happening at the local level, where you’re saying that there’s actually a lot of promising intervention across the country? Why the focus on the global and the regional by these national policymakers?

Brad Olsen  17:42
I don’t know for sure, and our research only got two parts of that, but I think that there might be a few things going on. And one of them is let’s not forget that those global baskets of reforms often come with money and technical assistance, and it’s really hard to give up someone who’s offering some funding and some assistance as a development partner. I think another thing is, when I was in graduate school, I learned the term regional isomorphism. And I don’t know if you know that term, but it’s this fancy term to say that locations tend to begin to resemble the locations around them. And I think we found that to be true in this research, that there is kind of like, what we say in the states “Keeping Up with the Joneses” that you kind of want to look as good as or better than your neighbor. And part of that might be taking on some of these new educational innovations that are crossing the region or crossing the globe and if you don’t take them on, maybe you might be perceived as being behind the curve. And I think that becomes particularly important when we might talk about educational technology. So, maybe in some ways, it’s less about whether the innovation is actually the right innovation and whether it’s actually going to lead to sustained impact, and more about how it positions the decision makers vis-a-vis either their nearby countries, or the sort of global partnerships of which they’re apart, and they don’t want to get left behind. I also think that these are complicated issues. And in a lot of cases, these decision makers are not staying around in their position for years and years; there’s an awful lot of turnover. The technocrats below them have really deep knowledge but they don’t always have the decision-making power. The ones who have the decision-making power don’t always have the time to get to know the sort of deep contours of the work, they might also be seeing their job or their role as a steppingstone to something else. And so, the whole thing is transitory in a way where I think reform continuity is required if we’re going to invest in deep and sustainable changes.

Will Brehm  19:44
And in that sort of process about creating deep and sustainable changes, do you think scholars of comparative education play a role? When I read the history of comparative education, you see this focus on educational transfer, policy borrowing and lending, and it’s been a study for decades. There have been people writing about it probably since the 1960s or so in the academic field of comparative education, and that says nothing about what happened before, and all the different people writing about and looking at systems from abroad and talking about how they work. And I guess comparative education is one of the, like Michael Sadler said in 1900, “you can’t take a plant and pick it out of a garden in one country and expect it to grow somewhere else”, and that was over 100 years ago. Is there a way in which comparative educationalists can actually help understand what’s going on in some of this sort of what scales and this sort of complex dynamic between national polities and the international community of donors sort of pushing certain agendas, etc. as you’ve explained?

Brad Olsen  20:55
I think so. It’s a really interesting question because I think I feel the need to answer it almost on a personal level, as well as a professional level. On a professional level, I think there’s absolutely a role for them to play. And I don’t find that it’s getting as much traction as maybe it should. I was an academic for almost 20 years before I entered this space a few years ago. And I think about how different those two worlds are. And maybe that has something to do with the fact that academics come out of their own theoretical schools of thought. And I think policymakers and folks in the development space come out of a very different school of thought. And so, a lot of the researchers and the academics bring critical perspectives to this work, whereas a lot of the folks in development space come out of economics and political science and so they sort of think about these things differently. And I say this about myself, as a former academic, we academics are really good at critiquing things. And I think that’s easy to do. But I think when you’re actually in the development space, you actually want to make a difference. And so, it’s harder to be critical. And the goal is to try and find a way to make something work. And I think that may have something to do with it. But let me also take an attempt to answer this question on a personal level because I do struggle with this. I think these are really complex ideas and education is arguably the most important thing that the world should be focusing on because it’s such a tough time right now in the globe. And if we’re going to solve some of these pressing problems, it seems to me the way to do it is to rely on the energy and the expertise of youth so that they can make things better. And schooling and education writ large are a large part of that. And so, if we don’t get it, right, I think we’re in real trouble. But I don’t know, I think that this notion of education transfer, this idea that we can take a few good ideas and that we can sprinkle them around. And not to suggest that they get replicated with fidelity, but that they could actually get translated and transferred and transformed and do some real good, I think of the concept by Berman and McLaughlin of “mutual adaptation”, that the innovation will change the people but at the same time the people will change the innovation, and that’s okay with me and this notion of a plant that you brought in, you know, sure the plant might grow differently, but it can still grow. But we’ve got to be careful what we’re planting. I mean, I come from California, where someone took some eucalyptus from Australia decades ago, and because he wanted to get rid of all the excess water in his farm, and then we have a terrible problem with eucalyptus in California. So, it depends on what the plant is, it depends on why you’re bringing it to the new location, and it depends on what it’s ultimately going to do. And I say that because one of the things that I feel like we ought to be talking about, and that comparative education can really help us with is what are the purposes of education in different locations, because education has a different meaning, and it has a different purpose in different places, and comparative education that can help us with that. And if we’re not careful, this education transfer paradigm might suggest that all education is the same, and therefore all education solutions are the same, and they’ll work the same way in different locations. But the truth of the matter is the national identity of different places, the national history of places, the various expertise and assets and needs, the cultural dimensions of a place, all of those are different. And so, it’s not simply, I don’t think, about taking an innovation and fitting it to the uniqueness of the context but it also might be asking those deep questions about why are we doing education? And what is education for in our location?

Will Brehm  24:36
Does the donor community typically do that at all, do you think? Like, ask that deeper question of what is education for, what is the purpose of education in this particular context?

Brad Olsen  24:47
I think they do. I think it depends on whom we’re talking about. I think that there are a lot of people who are asking those questions. In our research, what we found is that there are a lot of folks who perceive that the donor organizations, although they might mean incredibly well, are in fact bureaucracies. And so, while the individuals might be asking these great questions, and really trying to move into the space in some thoughtful ways, a bureaucracy, by definition, can make that a little troublesome. And so, I think that’s part of what is happening.

Will Brehm  25:20
One of the things that I read in the report, and it sort of rung true with my own experiences working in different countries in sort of education development is this sort of persistent call for more data. We can do this better, we can have better educational transfer, we can implement interventions better, we can scale interventions better if only we had better data. Why is that such a common sort of refrain, do you think?

Brad Olsen  25:46
It is definitely a common refrain, and I think that there’s some truth to it. I mean, one of the things that we found in our research is that a lot of the government level decisions get made related to electoral politics, or the decision maker is drawing on his or her own experience in education, and then just using that as a kind of common-sense wisdom, or their various political machinations. In this research, we learned of many examples where governments would make decisions about where to put educational resources based on political considerations or as a payback for something. We know about the notion of ghost schools and ghost teachers. So, I think for some of those reasons, there’s a desire to replace the idiosyncratic and the political with actual data because that will make for better decisions. And on the one hand, I think there’s some truth to that. I’m going to go three hands on this one, I think. So, on one hand, I think that’s true. On my other hand, I think that there are an awful lot of real limitations to being able to get the right kind of data and get it fast enough, especially in many of these low- and middle-income countries, especially from hard-to-reach locations, especially when politics sometimes would not want to have particular data collected or disaggregated. And then I think, instead of a third hand, I’ll go a foot here; the idea here is that even if we were able to get sufficient data and sufficiently accurate and reliable data, I’m not sure that that’s the be all end all of decision making. I think that there’s a repertoire of sources of strategic thinking around education and it includes ethical questions, and it includes these philosophical questions about the purpose of education. I also think no matter how great the data are, there are still individuals who will be relying on their own personalities, their own political relationships, their idiosyncrasies. And so, I think the research suggests that what would be great is to increase the use of the right kind of data as a sort of part of a decision-making repertoire that has a lot of consensus and open and candid conversations about these philosophical and ethical questions around education. And that uses the right kind of data in both descriptive and analytical ways to try and get it right. And then once those decisions are made, I think another role for data is to be able to test whether those decisions and what follows from those decisions is actually making the kind of change that people hope. And there’s nothing wrong with pivoting and adapting and changing along the way, as the data suggests, well, gosh, we got this one wrong, let’s do it a little bit differently. I think one of the things that we found from this work is that scaling and decision making are all about learning by doing,

Will Brehm  28:45
Within that repertoire, one of the interesting things that has happened, maybe since COVID, but probably before – it’s probably been ongoing. I remember, like Apple putting in computers into schools, when I was a youth – is edtech. Edtech has sort of -you see it everywhere in schools. You see government’s trying to buy more of it, use it. It became the sort of solution to solve the educational problems during COVID in many ways. So, how does edtech fit into interventions in education that can or cannot scale? Because on the one hand, it seems like it’s scaled tremendously.

Brad Olsen  29:22
Yeah, education technology is certainly as you say, has been around for a while. But I think it took a giant leap forward during the pandemic, for reasons that I think are relatively obvious. And one of the things that we found in our research is that the higher income countries have been inundated with ad tech for several years. And there’s now pressure on some of these low- and middle-income countries to embrace ad tech. And that pressure comes from the fact that in what gets problematically called the Global North ad tech is so ubiquitous, and that’s been placing pressure err on again problematically termed the global south to embrace it otherwise they’ll feel left behind. This gets back a little bit to that notion of regional isomorphism, that I think some of these countries want to signal that they are modern nations. And going digital is one of the ways to do that. So, there’s a lot of pressure there. We also found that there is external demand for going digital in these countries from sectors other than education. So, the President, families, the ministry for information and communication technologies, the media will be pushing education to go digital in the schools and in the schooling. Also, you’ve got tech companies that see low- and middle-income countries as emerging markets, and they are aggressively marketing their products in those countries. And then also, some of the donor organizations are prioritizing edtech as a viable solution. So, there are all of these pressures for governments in low- and middle-income countries to accept and adopt and embrace it and we found that to be true. But what’s really interesting is, we found that they’re willing to make those decisions without an awful lot of research. And that’s partly because there isn’t much useful and accessible research available. The research that is available isn’t specific to particular innovations, or in particular locations, or if it is, they are oftentimes studies that takes so long to be completed -these are RCTs and other studies- that by the time they’re finished, that particular innovation is no longer current. Also, some of the quicker, rapid cycles of research around innovations are actually conducted by the tech companies themselves. They haven’t always been rigorously reviewed. And then the other thing is, it’s really hard to read the results of those studies, frankly. I mean, I was talking with one person who was talking about his work, and it occurred to me-and I have a PhD in education-that I did not even understand what he was saying. And so, I think about what that means to actually offer the kind of research that can be pragmatic and practical and accessible and can help decision makers. We did a little bit of a look into education technology and the different aspects of it, and one of the things that we found is that the education technology with the most promise might be the least interesting educational technology. It’s not shiny and exciting like a digital device for the classroom, or a smartboard, or AI. I mean, again, we’re talking about low- and middle-income countries. A lot of times, it’s sort of the back of the housework like a database that organizes personnel and attendance to free up school leaders and teachers time so they can focus a little bit more on teaching. Or EMIS (educational management information systems) so that schools and districts and countries can sort of catalog and document how people are doing. And yet, the zeitgeist right now is for the shiny, specialized, sophisticated digital technology. And what might be more useful as some of these less interesting, but perhaps more foundational things. And I’m not saying that low- and middle-income countries should wait around for edtech. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. What I think I’m trying to say is that there’s a real need for us to do a better job of offering decision makers the right kind of information, so that they can make good decisions. Because when you choose to go in the direction of an educational technology solution, you are closing other options down. So, there’s an opportunity cost. These are countries that don’t have much education budget money anymore, especially after COVID. And sometimes there are infrastructural challenges. You think about the various kinds of equity divides here, who’s getting access to fast connectivity? Who’s getting access to digital devices in the home? Who’s getting access to the teachers who are actually learning how to use the devices? Who’s being left behind? So, I think there are a lot of complex issues that aren’t always being addressed in this rush to go digital. Well, the final thing I want to say about that, Will, is that I think about ed technology the way I think about most educational tools, which is that it’s a tool. And this goes back to countries asking themselves, what’s the purpose of their educational system? What are they trying to get out of it? How will their teachers use the educational technology? What pedagogical approaches and curricular goals are meant to be put in service of the technology? And then only once those things have been figured out, do I think it might be the right time for governments to go in search of particular ed tech tools that will help them move what they’ve already decided to be an education agenda forward.

Will Brehm  34:48
It seems like this ed tech discussion sort of begins to sum up the overall argument you’re making right, where it’s the focus on data, where it’s looking at all these different stakeholders and the complexity of why certain solutions, quote unquote solutions sort of go to scale. And maybe ed tech sort of hits all the marks. Everyone sort of can gain from it, it’s good politically, it’s good business wise, some teachers might want to embrace it, but it doesn’t necessarily start asking some of these deeper questions that you’re sort of saying we need to begin to focus on. It’s quite a nice example that sort of encompasses a lot of these different external factors that you have been talking about today and in your report. And so, I guess as a final question, what do you hope that identifying these different external factors will do for an institution like Brookings, and the donor community more generally, but also for national governments in low- and middle-income countries? Why is it so important to understand these external factors?

Brad Olsen  35:49
Wasn’t it Aristotle, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”? I think that cliche is true, that knowledge is power. And whether we’re talking about a Brookings or whether we’re talking about teams that are engaged in scaling a particular promising education innovation, or whether we’re talking about the global donor community, or whether we’re talking about government decision makers, the more they understand all of this, the more they’re able to open up the black box and see how these things are actually working, the more I’d like to believe they can hang on to the dimensions of it that they’re happy with. And they can jettison or adjust the aspects that aren’t working for them and replace those with more viable ways of thinking about how to do all of this work. This work is so incredibly complex. And as the report says, so much of what happens is about the broader environment, and that broader environment is very difficult to harness. However, I think that the more folks know, the more strategic they can be about how to align and cohere the multiple parts within their sphere of influence to make good decisions, and to commit to the right kinds of educational solutions and support them over time so they make the right kind of difference for kids and families and communities, especially those in the most marginalized areas. And so, I’m pretty hopeful. I think that a life in education is about negotiating hope and despair. And today, you’re catching me on a hopeful day. I think that we can get this right. I think that there are a lot of people working to try and do it right. I think that the pandemic was a wakeup call for a lot of folks to say, you know, I don’t think we can just keep cosmetically tweaking the current system and tinkering with it. I think that some real whole and holistic restructuring is required. And so, the research that we’re doing is designed to give people more information, so that they can make better decisions. And so, I do think that the unexamined decision-making landscape is not worth supporting.

Will Brehm  37:48
Well, Brad Olson, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. You have given me hope as well. And thank you for writing the report. And I do hope many people read it because it really does capture and sort of pull together a lot of knowledge, I read about here and there but it’s just nice to sort of see it pulled together in one piece. So, thank you so much for joining FreshEd.

Brad Olsen  38:05
Will, thank you very much. I enjoyed the conversation.

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Related Author Publications/Projects

Government decision-making on education in low-and middle-income countries

Research on scaling the impact of innovations in education

Maximizing impact and navigating trade-offs when scaling education innovations

Emerging lessons from 14 team innovations in low-middle income countries

Scaling education innovations for impact in low-middle income countries during COVID

Adapting education innovations and their knock-on effects in the time of COVID

Teacher quality around the world

An investigation of teachers encouraged to reform grading practices in secondary schools

Mentioned Resources

Oversold and overused: Computers in the classroom – Larry Cuban

Teaching at the Right Level – India

Social entrepreneurship in education – Michael Sandler

Implementation as mutual adaptation: Change in classroom organization – McLaughlin

Recommended Resources

Blackboard Unions: THe AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980

Understanding educational transfer: Theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks

Implementation of educational innovation – Berman & McLaughlin

Pakistan’s education crisis (ghost schools) – The real story

The long run effects of teacher collective bargaining

Educational technology in developing countries: A systematic review

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com