The Consortium on Chicago School Research will welcome more than 100 education researchers and school district leaders from across the country to the conference “Conducting Research to Build the Capacity of Urban Educators,” on Thursday, Feb. 24 and Friday, Feb. 25. The two–day conference is designed to expand efforts to utilize education research for the improvement of schools nationally.
CCSR, part of the Urban Education Institute at the University, has led the nation in developing a model for “capacity–building research,” defined as research that helps school districts solve their most pressing problems of practice. For the past two decades, CCSR has conducted capacity–building research on Chicago Public Schools that has driven reform both locally and nationally around a number of key issues, including dropout prevention, college access, and the organizational factors that lead to school improvement.
Conference participants include other research consortia modeled after CCSR, research partnerships, and Regional Education Laboratories, overseen by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.
“As school district decision–making becomes more decentralized, practitioners are in greater need of data and research that improve their capacity to develop effective improvement strategies,” said Paul Goren, the Lewis–Sebring Director of CCSR. “Education reformers must be able to learn from past and current initiatives, to build on past lessons, and to place new evidence in the larger context of what matters for school improvement,” he said.
In order for research to be effective, scholars need to move beyond producing summary judgments of specific initiatives and begin working with educators over time to understand core problems of practice and to engage in the search for solutions, Goren said.
Research operations similar to CCSR have been established in San Diego; New York; Newark, N.J.; Baltimore; Kansas City, Mo; and in Texas. The Kansas City organization works with city and suburban districts around Kansas City, and the Texas group works with school districts throughout the state.
Although their structures vary, all of these consortia are organized to provide actionable information for school improvement grounded in deep, ongoing relationships with a specific district or group of districts.
Over the years, CCSR has been effective in studying reform and recommending changes for the Chicago Public Schools because it has developed a working relationship with educators, said David Stevens, Associate Director of CCSR.
“We are partners with the people who have to solve the problems — not outside experts,” he said.
One goal of the conference is to discuss the feasibility of establishing a national network of consortia, which would serve an important role in future education research and reform, Stevens said.
The conference will explore the common challenges that education research organizations face such as how to establish partnerships with district staff while maintaining objectivity; how to make highly technical work intelligible for a general audience; how to raise awareness about important findings among practitioners whose time is already at a premium; and how to secure support from funders who do not always recognize the value of education research.
James Kemple, executive director of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, is among the conference organizers. The alliance, which has borrowed features from CCSR, is studying ways in which New York students have difficulty in completing high school and ways in which their academic achievement lags in the middle grades, he said. The alliance is also researching how schools could help improve teacher quality and use data more effectively.
“All of the consortia face different local situations. It’s not as if there is one cookie–cutter model,” Kemple said. “We hope the conference will provide a chance for the more mature consortia, such as CCSR, to share some of their lessons and also help consortia find ways to building relationships with their own school districts and state systems,” he said.
—Prof. Kunle Odunsi
