Education Policy and Program Evaluation

Harvard HGSE

Most policy changes—in education as in every other field-- do not work as intended. Human behavior is complex; it is just too hard to anticipate whether students, parents and teachers will react in the intended way. Thus, policymakers must recognize opportunities to learn: to identify comparison groups for their initiatives, to implement new programs in ways which lend themselves to evaluation and to be consumers of efficacy research done in other…