We Knew Fire was Hot

This insight highlights a paper by Ludger Woessmann on testing which shows that the best possible methods should be used for identifying causal impacts of system interventions of whatever type, wherever possible. The RISE programme starts from the premise that there is little or no promise in additional research efforts that examine the impact of specific, known, inputs into education processes, like class size or textbooks. Additionally, one needs to embed individual results in a framework in order to understand how to extend them to new contexts. The emphasis should be on endogenous, context specific, systems for improvement, rather than imposition of external “best practice”.