The proverb ‘penny wise, pound foolish’ was first recorded back in the eighteenth century. It represents how people can focus on being stingy with small amounts of money, but you may be wasteful with larger sums.  

When it comes to specifically spending on research and development (R&D), you can make short-term savings, but they may blind you to much bigger losses you failed to make because you missed out on vital learning from your R&D activity.

In the US right now, the Trump administration – and its much-vaunted DOGE department (Department of Government Efficiency) has created a bonfire of educational research and development. 

The Institute of Educational Sciences is one such organisation whose trials and funding have been hacked away almost overnight. The claim is that hundreds of millions have been saved. We can all agree that this isn’t a matter of pennies – and that such funding matters to any country – no matter how wealthy. But then you dig underneath the bonfire of budget cuts and you start to wonder whether blowing away R&D capacity for the US Department for Education makes sense.

You are left asking, are the actions ‘penny wise, pound foolish’. 

Will making R&D cuts make education better? 

When you dig beneath the headlines of the U.S. cost saving measures, the details are a bit murky. But currently, it appears that the cuts end the following (a small portion of a huge number of trials, assessments, and more):

  • The international TIMMS survey ‘Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study’ (TIMSS). This is a highly respected international marker. It allows countries like the U.S. to benchmark themselves internationally. 
  • The international Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS).
  • The school survey and crime and safety. A 4800-school survey on important insights across the education sector.
  • The NAEP assessment. A national assessment on reading and maths for 133 year olds that offers important insights into progress across US states (with worrying recent outcomes).
  • The High School and Beyond Longitudinal Study. A large -cale study running from 1980 which has unlocked lots of important educational findings.
  • The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2022-23. Another long-running research effort to improve early childhood education. 

[It is not wholly clear exactly what research & assessment will ultimately be cut]

Some of the claims from the US indicate that American education has been on the downturn whilst this research has been happening. Recent national US evidence has shown reading scores in continued decline (but ironically, those very assessments – the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – is the highest profile project of the IES). 

But to end research – or even blame such results – on research being undertaken at the same time, is to mistake correlation for causation. Ending assessments that show national and international trends merely buries the evidence in the name of making savings. Will these cuts make anything better? The answers are murky, problematic, and the plans are not yet in existence.

Expensive research programmes can ultimately save lots of money and time. 

Lets’ start with: ‘Scared Straight’. As we know, crime and safety is always high on the agenda in the United States for good reason (and why their national school survey is valuable). One of the most popular approaches in the past was the ‘Scared Straight’ programme.

Put simply, it put young people at the risk of offending in prisons, with hardened offenders, to scare them straight. 

The problem: spending millions of dollars in this way things worse. Repeated randomised controls trials have showed that such approaches worsened delinquency compared to doing nothing with similar youths. Such research saved both money on the programme and the countless amount needed to rehabilitate young offenders. 

More recently, a mental health crisis has gripped most western countries. Policy makers look to schools for solutions. One such solution has been the low-cost approach of mindfulness. 

Cue the high quality randomised controlled trial – the ‘MYRIAD’ trial (‘My Resilience in Adolescence Trial) conducted in the UK. Was mindfulness a scalable solution? No. At least it isn't yet.

The research indicated that the approach saw marginally worse scores for well-being and risk of depression both at post intervention and 1-year follow-up. More engagement saw worse social-emotional-behavioural outcomes. We may find out, with more R&D, that different conditions make this approach work better, but unless we conduct more research, we could spend billions in policies that could have been saved with much, much cheaper trials.

New governments have a habit of wanting their spending to have newness so they can claim all the successes, but too often this leads to ending valuable research too soon.

Our intuitions that are excited about new, innovative approaches, like those above, can mean that we can make national policies that waste money and precious time because we ate attracted to the latest trend or fad. Not all R&D is equally as useful, and yet we need to invest in it in the short term to learn how to save more pounds in the future.

One of the paradoxes a bout good R&D as it is more likely to find failure. As Karl Popper stated, it is “one of those very few human activities – perhaps the only one – on which errors are systematically criticised and fairly often, in time, corrected.” Good science is a story of repeated failures and not just breakthrough successes. But we don’t like failure, so we ignore it.

Failed R&D projects or expensive assessment looks like a waste of money. But the paradox is that short term waste can mask the truth of long-term savings.

It nails the ‘penny wise, pound foolish’ proverb.

If we don’t invest in R&D we are effectively flying blind. Eliminating a survey or an assessment doesn’t eliminate the problem. It may be that the US bonfire of educational research budget cuts lays the path for even better, more innovative practice – but only if we appreciate how R&D fends off our urge to be penny wise and pound foolish.