Education Research

A strong opinion:

I don’t have an informed opinion on the standard of observational research in education, but if the standard is high, there can’t still be lots of low-hanging fruit in the form of cost-neutral interventions whose benefit is obvious without comparative evaluation.

I think that this position is on the strong side given the long lags between exposure (i.e. education) and outcomes (i.e. adult competencies).  But it does point out that easy and cheap interventions that are massively easy to measure are unlikely if there has been any sort of careful research.  So perhaps the randomization idea isn't all bad?