If you want to improve education, figure out what actually works, says researcher John Hattie. In 2015, Hattie published a paper entitled “What Doesn’t Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction,” in which he picked apart some common (but ineffective) approaches to improving education, which he says “distract from other, potentially better, solutions.” Among them: The rigorous implementation of achievement standards for schools and the frequent administration of standardized tests to determine students’ performance, which Hattie denounces as wrongheaded. Schools that accept struggling students are often perceived as failures, whereas other schools with more rigorous vetting of its incoming students are ten steps ahead because they select the cream of the crop and therefore have to exert minimal effort to maintain high achievement standards, while frequent standardized testing does not give teachers the kind of feedback they need to improve their teaching methods.

Hattie also says that “too much attention is often paid to parents’ desire to choose which school their child attends, when the evidence shows that the classroom they attend is more important. Indeed, there is increasing pressure on parents and children alike to keep up with constantly intensifying competition to land a spot in the best educational institutions, and the pressure begins to present itself earlier on in the child’s life as more people seek higher education, Ryan Avent writes for The Economist’s sister magazine 1843: “Woe unto the Manhattan parents who waited until the birth of their young one to put her name on the list for that top preschool, which feeds so many of its ‘graduates’ to that perfect primary school, which is a pipeline to the secondary school to the prep school to the university that is meant to bring nirvana and perfect happiness and good fortune to the people who complete the path.” Avent reaches a similar conclusion to Hattie’s, but from a parenting point of view: In the race to prepare their children as well as possible to land a spot at the top universities, high-earning and highly educated parents are investing more of their time into their children, which in and of itself is beneficial, regardless of admissions outcomes.

NPR’s Anya Kamenetz (expectedly) focuses her discussion about the implications of Hattie’s research on the United States, but there are certainly lessons to be learned for Egypt, particularly as education reform continues to be one of the most pressing issues our society continues to face. For example, Hattie’s research suggests that smaller class sizes and greater amounts of injected money actually don’t add up to a better educational experience, which flies in the face of the wisdom behind the private schools that are viewed as the best educational institutions in the country. The researcher says that the crux of the issue here is the teacher’s approach to teaching, which he found is unlikely to change in relation to the size of the classroom. Instead, Hattie finds that altering teaching methods — which, arguably, are not contingent upon school choice, class size, or money spent on each child — by taking steps such as focusing on individualized growth, providing students with immediate and effective feedback, and encouraging classroom discussions, would be far more effective in improving a child’s educational experience.