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San Francisco’s schools and Stanford University teamed up to focus research that provides real-world answers that are put into practice. 

 

San Francisco Unified School District’s Assistant Superintendent Bill Sanderson needed data. It was 2010, and the district’s board of education had just passed a resolution to pilot an ethnic studies course in a set of its high schools. The goals for the course were ambitious: Reduce the achievement gap and increase graduation rates. The school board was considering longer term plans to make this course a graduation requirement. Sanderson needed data that would tell him whether the ethnic studies course achieved its intended goals. 

For years, researchers have been working in school districts conducting studies that produce findings. Some of the studies address pressing policy and practice questions like the example above. But most of this research is read primarily by researchers; it rarely affects policy. Because educational research and the practice of education are centered in very different institutions with different expectations, incentives, and cultures, the connections have been tenuous at best.  

Cynthia Coburn and Mary Stein document the challenges of researchers and practitioners in their 2010 book, Research and Practice in Education: Building Alliances, Bridging the Divide (Rowman & Littlefield). Coburn and Stein describe how incentives for professors and researchers clash. Time constraints and political pressure often prompt practitioners to use research to reinforce but not necessarily inform their decisions. The incentive structure for researchers drives them toward research that is valued by peer-reviewed journals and the academic community rather than research that has a high likelihood of being used by practitioners. Even when educational research can be used to guide educational policy and practice, decision makers may not be aware of it or the relevance may not be obvious.  

Because educational research and the practice of education are centered in very different institutions with different expectations, incentives, and cultures, the connections have been tenuous at best. 

Meanwhile, there is increasing demand for data-based decision making — careful analysis of information on what works and what doesn’t. While a steady march toward improvement requires education leaders to learn from successes and mistakes and to share those lessons learned with the field broadly, practitioners do not usually have the capacity to conduct research. A shift toward using systematic research to guide practice thus requires new kinds of connections between the institutions in which researchers and practitioners work. It means creating new partnerships, new skills, knowledge, practices, and structures within these institutions, and a new, shared culture. 

This article shares almost a decade of experience doing just that. The two institutions are the Graduate School of Education (GSE) at Stanford University and the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). We have developed a partnership between the two institutions, created new incentives for researchers and practitioners, and worked collaboratively to understand each other’s culture and develop trust. Our goals are to conduct research responsive to specific problems of practice facing the district, develop knowledge that has broad application, and develop capacity within the district and within the university to serve in these bridging roles.  

To achieve these goals, we first set up a process to identify matches between SFUSD’s strategic priorities and the research interests of Stanford professors. As an example, we return to Assistant Superintendent Sanderson’s pressing question about the ethnic studies course in San Francisco. Sanderson was connected to Stanford GSE Professor Thomas Dee, an economist, and postdoctoral fellow Emily Penner, who had the expertise needed to design a study that examined the effect of the ethnic studies course piloted in a set of schools. Dee and Penner’s analyses suggested that the ethnic studies courses showed great promise; students in the pilot courses improved their GPAs and attendance significantly more than similar students not enrolled in the course. When San Francisco’s school board commissioners needed to vote on whether to expand the ethnic studies course to all high schools, possibly laying the groundwork for making the course a graduation requirement, Sanderson and the SFUSD district leaders had the data and analyses they needed to inform their decision. 

With numerous examples of researchers and practitioners like Sanderson, Dee, and Penner working together on mutually beneficial research projects, we are hoping the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership can be an exemplar for other university and district partnerships. While other partnerships exist across the nation, the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership has a number of unique features that we hope can inform other similar  efforts. 

Researcher incentives 

The Stanford-SFUSD Partnership attempts to influence the culture of the Graduate School of Education — to give faculty a taste of conducting research in partnership with practitioners and seeing their findings used in important decisions while at the same time contributing to a knowledge base. To achieve this goal, Stanford Graduate School of Education offers strategically targeted research funding. In 2014-15, six projects received funding, including Sanderson, Dee, and Penner’s on the ethnic studies curriculum. To get their projects funded under the program, proposals from Stanford GSE professors must address three qualities that have turned out to be critical to the success of the partnership. 

#1. Alignment 

Research projects must be aligned to district needs. A unique feature of this partnership is that SFUSD sets the research agenda for most Stanford-SFUSD projects. Over time, SFUSD has developed the ability to articulate their research needs within the district and share them with Stanford researchers. SFUSD now describes their research guidelines within their district application to conduct research and the district reminds administrators of these guidelines each year at an internal presentation to the superintendent’s cabinet. Additionally, the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership hosts an annual meeting where the superintendent and deputy superintendent of instruction articulate the most pressing research needs for the district. Stanford researchers and SFUSD administrators attend this annual meeting where they discuss newly minted research findings through joint presentations.  

With SFUSD administrators regularly participating in jointly developed research projects with Stanford researchers, a substantial number of SFUSD administrators have developed a heightened ability to articulate researchable questions. This is evidenced in the district’s ability to integrate references to research when making policy decisions. For example, SFUSD’s math department references research by researchers like Stanford Professor Jo Boaler and others in their rationale for changing the district policy for their course sequence in math (SFUSD, 2014). The SFUSD administrators have learned how to use research as evidence to guide and support their policy decisions and to identify their research needs. 

#2. Generalizability  

The research project needs to produce data that is likely to be relevant beyond SFUSD, to have some generalizability. Stanford researchers are asked to pursue research topics in a way that will be valuable to other urban school districts as well as the larger academic community that holds high standards of validity and generalizability for research.  

We have many examples of research conducted within the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership that has been subsequently published in peer-reviewed, academic journals. One example is doctoral student Avishag Reisman and Stanford Professor Sam Wineburg’s study of the Reading Like a Historian curriculum in two high schools. The study showed statistically significant gains in high school student achievement in history and English language arts (Reisman, 2012a, 2012b; Reisman & Wineburg, 2012). With these robust findings from the study in SFUSD, schools and districts across the nation, including Los Angeles Unified School District, are adopting the curriculum with confidence (Watanabe, 2014). While some of the Stanford-SFUSD projects identify the site of the study, as in the case of the Reading Like a Historian study, most Stanford-SFUSD Partnership studies published in academic journals maintain the anonymity of the district, which is key to a trusting partnership. 

#3. Shared ownership 

The Stanford faculty and SFUSD personnel need to be centrally involved in the design and interpretation of the study. We have found that by having the research deeply embedded in the practice and policy needs of the district and someone from the district directly involved in it, the research is more likely to be used in district decision making.  

Collaborations often develop as a consequence of researchers and practitioners having opportunities to get to know each other. 

Collaborations often develop as a consequence of researchers and practitioners having opportunities to get to know each other. An example is a study that grew out of a conversation between Stanford Professor Susanna Loeb and SFUSD Chief of Early Education Carla Bryant. In one of their conversations, Bryant expressed an interest in an intervention related to parent engagement. Loeb was interested in testing the use of text messaging to influence parents’ interactions with children.  

The study that emerged was of an intervention designed to engage parents in pre-K students’ literacy development through text messaging of literacy tips. Loeb and her Ph.D. student, Ben York, worked closely with Bryant’s SFUSD team to operationalize the study. After seeing the positive effects on children’s literacy skills from the first year, the group signed up for a second year of the study, this time focused on kindergarten parents.  

This line of research has been in every respect a collaboration among researchers and practitioners with the different kinds of expertise needed to ensure the effectiveness of both the intervention and the research. The study was recently published as a white paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (York & Loeb, 2014). National attention garnered by the study’s findings (Rich, 2014) has led to cities across the nation signing up to participate in the next phase of York and Loeb’s intervention. 

Prepare the future academic 

Many school districts throughout the country are endeavoring to base practice and policy decisions on systematic analysis of data. But many do not have personnel with the necessary research skills, and researchers in universities are not typically prepared to work effectively with district personnel. That creates a need for people who can straddle research and practice institutions — who have research skills and a deep understanding of the world of practice. The Stanford-SFUSD Partnership is designed to address this need.  

The partnership provides the Stanford GSE with a training ground for its doctoral students working on their advanced degrees. Doctoral students have opportunities to engage in research designed to address problems in the district and to learn how to cultivate strong relationships with practitioners. In addition to involving doctoral students in the various partnership research projects, a team of Stanford students is embedded in the district working as research assistants in SFUSD’s research department. Doctoral students experience the world of district decision making as they work alongside practitioners. From working on redesigning report cards to reflect research on social-emotional learning to an analysis of kindergarten readiness skills, the Stanford doctoral students are being trained to work effectively in district contexts while they cultivate their own career development. 

With almost a decade of developing the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership, we have learned the value of providing incentives for research directly relevant to the challenges encountered in our partner district, but that also helps build a knowledge base that has broad applicability. We also have learned the importance of ensuring that critical partners in the district are meaningfully involved in research projects, and that projects include a training component that builds capacity for these kinds of partnerships in both the district and the university settings.  

The partnership provides SFUSD with valuable research capacity needed to inform key decisions and also produces research recognized for its advanced findings and rigorous methodology. The mutual benefit is what has made this partnership successful and sustainable. This win-win relationship allows a graduate school of education and a large urban school district to strategically leverage their relationship to advance their institutional goals.  It also helps both institutions maintain their relevance by taking a leadership role in the advances in knowledge and skill needed to enhance educational experiences for students across the nation.  

References 

Reisman, A. (2012a). Reading like a historian: A document-based history curriculum interventions in urban high schools. Cognition and Instruction, 30 (1), 86-112. 

Reisman, A. (2012b). The document-based lesson: Bringing disciplinary inquiry into high school history classrooms with adolescent struggling readers. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44 (2), 233-264. 

Reisman, A. & Wineburg, S. (2012). Text complexity in the history classroom: Teaching to and beyond the Common Core. Social Studies Review, 51. 

Rich, M. (2014, November 20). To help language skills of children, a study finds, text their parents with tips. New York Times. http://nyti.ms/1pJXxuU 

San Francisco Unified School District. (SFUSD). (2014, February). From middle school to high school: Mathematics course sequence for the CCSS-M. San Francisco, CA: Author. http://bit.ly/1WoMrpk 

Watanabe, T. (2014, November 26). L.A. Unified adopts free history curriculum from Stanford University. Los Angeles Times. http://lat.ms/22H0BpA  

York, A.N. & Loeb, S. (2014). One step at a time: The effects of an early-literacy text messaging program for parents of preschoolers (Working paper No. 20659). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. 

 

Citation: Wentworth, L., Carranza, R., & Stipek, D. (2016). A university and district partnership closes the research-to-classroom gap. Phi Delta Kappan, 97 (8), 66-69. 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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Deborah Stipek

DEBORAH STIPEK is former dean and professor of Stanford University Graduate School of Education, Stanford, Calif. 

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Laura Wentworth

LAURA WENTWORTH is director of the Stanford University-San Francisco Unified School District Partnership, a program of California Education Partners, San Francisco, Calif.

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Richard Carranza

RICHARD CARRANZA is superintendent of San Francisco Unified School District, San Francisco, Calif.