Teachers and principals are always looking for ways to better teach and support students—including searching for reliable information about interventions that have been proven to work in classrooms similar to their own. Unfortunately, these searches often come up empty, and education policy discussions on how to invest limited taxpayer dollars are too often driven by inadequate, incomplete, or biased information as a result of the lack of data on what works, when, where, and for whom.

What if Congress took a different approach? What if the federal government used one penny of every dollar it now spends on K-12 education—which I estimate to be about $40 billion—to develop evidence and knowledge so that the rest of that dollar could be spent wisely? This would free up approximately $400 million annually, which could enable a game-changing approach to how we spend federal education dollars.

Recently, I published a report with the group Results for America, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, to show how this could be done…

Read the full commentary available online at EdWeek here.