Education is a lot more complex than most people understand it to be.  Even within the field few people actually have any understanding of how the brain and learning interact.  Everything from diet, to time of instruction, to setting, to materials, to methods, to testing is all important.  A classic example of which is how do you build a useful test?  Well if you want to know how much learning took place you need to test them both before and after instruction.  But you also need to test people twice without instruction to see if the tests give information away. You need a mix of problem difficulty to find out if someone understands the basics and at the same time, to see if they understood the minor details.  etc.  You then need to look at the test not just in terms of overall score but also how well they did on each type of problem.<p>PS: Education might seem like a flaky field and much of the discussions are devoid of good science.  At the same time there is a lot of great research that has been which has real and important implications.