Source: Education Week
What’s more important to a superintendent: a math program shown to give a bigger boost to students’ math skills in the next two years or one that gives a smaller improvement but fits the district’s budget for five years? Questions like that have become steadily more common as school leaders grapple with years of shrinking budgets. Still, it can be difficult to understand the expenses that lie beneath an intervention’s sticker price or the resources that may mean the difference between a promising intervention working on paper and working in the classroom. That’s why foundations, policymakers, and even the U.S. Department of Education’s research agency are pushing for more tools and research to help educators understand the costs of education programs.