Introduced in 2002 as part of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) was one of the best ideas in federal education policy—and one of its worst executions in recent memory.
Conceived as a digital library of high-quality research designed to help educators navigate the chaotic landscape of education R&D, the WWC has become a symbol of bureaucratic paralysis disguised as scientific rigor. Along with almost everything else in IES, the WWC is currently on indefinite hold. One can only hope that this will lead to its rebirth in a more useful form.
The WWC’s mission was simple, essential, and urgent: help educators and policymakers separate the evidence-based wheat from the pseudoscientific chaff of so much education research. The WWC was supposed to save schools and teachers time and money and protect students from snake-oil solutions masquerading as innovations.
That’s not what we got.
The WWC does not state whether any program is useful or likely to work. Instead, it summarizes the “strength of the evidence” of the research it reviews. Studies that use randomized control trials and quasi-experimental designs are favored over other types of research. In turn, the decision-making burden about whether something works gets pushed back onto already-overwhelmed educators, rendering the WWC effectively useless.
It gets worse. According to the WWC itself, a literacy intervention can receive a “promising” rating—even if the program’s only statistically significant result was in math. The WWC recommendation? Dig into the data yourself.
All too often, the WWC’s emphasis on the “quality” and the “rigor” of research leads readers astray more than it points them in the right direction.
Take the case of “three-cueing,” a method of reading instruction that has been proven to be less effective than alternatives at raising childhood literacy rates. In 2023, while many states were abandoning three-cueing in favor of more evidence-based methods, the WWC published a positive report on an intervention that relied on three-cueing. The WWC’s analysis was based on two studies, only one of which met WWC standards without reservations.
The WWC’s conclusion? The three-cueing intervention had positive effects on reading achievement! No context. No caveats. No mention of the national shift away from this approach, or the fact that it had been discredited in large part due to decades of research funded by IES research centers. Given the centrality of reading and literacy to so much of IES’s work, this endorsement by the WWC is worse than useless—it’s dangerous.
Even the WWC’s “Practice Guides”—publications that do offer concrete recommendations to practitioners (and which are among IES’s most practical outputs)—suffer from the same wishy-washy positioning. Some recommendations appear disconnected from any solid evidence base, and most could easily be arrived at via common sense. Educators are left to wonder: Is this good advice or just the least controversial recommendations that a panel could agree on?
The WWC needs a reboot. It must evolve from a passive aggregator into an active arbiter designed for use by stakeholders, not just researchers. This should involve:
- Communicating clear, evidence-informed recommendations that help teachers and schools find interventions that are most likely to improve outcomes for their students. Accordingly, a new and improved WWC should move away from a false “it works” standard toward ones that reflect conditional probabilities (based on different types of students, different learning environments, etc.), rather than certainties.
- Translating findings into actionable insights, not academic hedging. This should include launching real outreach efforts, rather than hiding behind journal articles and dense PDFs that are impossible for educators to turn into informed action.
- Prioritizing usability: Educators don’t need effect size tables; they need useful, understandable summaries and concrete guidance that they can act upon. WWC products should be useful, usable, and used.
- Helping to shape the research agenda by flagging areas where evidence is weak or missing—and pushing IES’s research centers, the National Center for Education Research and the National Center for Special Education Research, to fund studies that address such gaps.
Above all, the WWC must stop pretending that neutrality is a virtue. Its unwillingness to take a position—even in the face of overwhelming evidence—isn’t scientific restraint. It’s institutional cowardice.
In a field desperate for clarity, the WWC has become a warehouse of irrelevant findings rather than the guide it was intended to be. If we want evidence to drive practice in education, we can’t settle for a clearinghouse that clears up nothing.
Editor’s note: This was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.
