A Unique Opportunity for Education Policy Makers

When it comes to solving problems and measuring impact, public education organizations primarily rely on two approaches—using civil service to hire personnel directly or using competitive procurement to hire outside experts on contract. These two approaches can limit such organizations' efforts to gain insights, to incorporate cutting-edge research into policy and practice, and to develop innovative solutions quickly, nimbly and affordably. In this commentary, I discuss how public education organizations can use research-practice partnerships (RPPs), especially partnerships with public higher education institutions, to tackle new, unique, and complicated education problems and thereby help children.

Consider how traditional approaches can inadvertently limit public education organizations. In civil service, most jobs are full-time, classified positions with very specific descriptions that are subject to a range of restrictions to protect the rights of employees. It can be hard to gain new insights without procuring outside experts whose rates are significantly higher than most government pay scales. Similarly, public education organizations may have a research director or team, but they usually don't have the capacity to analyze all the available data or measure the impact of everything the organization does. For new initiatives or pilot programs, public education organizations rarely have the internal research or analytical capacity to conduct rigorous, real-time research on interventions as they are implementing them. Instead, they typically rely on outside research. Doing so entails a lengthy grant application or procurement process and requires an extended time period to collect and analyze data and produce findings. Finally, with procurement, a public organization must specify both the problem and proposed solution up front, establish constraints, and require bidders to define precisely what they will do and provide and how much it will cost. This can inhibit an iterative design process where prototypes can be tested and improved. To top it off, the procurement process itself can take a year or more. Procurement may work well for well-established projects and services, but it proves more challenging when a state is designing a new service, intervention, or tool, especially one that will be used by a large and diverse set of users.

In contrast, RPPs, particularly those involving public higher education institutions, offer a unique opportunity for policy makers to expediently and cost-effectively gain expertise, integrate real-time research into their policies and practices, and design and build innovative solutions in an iterative manner that better meets their needs.

First, RPPs allow public education organizations to gain cutting-edge expertise without having to hire full-time staff or procure expensive consultants, which may not be economically feasible. When I was assistant superintendent of early childhood for the Louisiana Department of Education, we established a multi-year partnership with Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia School of Education. In an ambitious transformation of its birth-to-five early childhood system, Louisiana unified its child care, Head Start, and school-based prekindergarten systems. Specifically, over five years, Louisiana established uniform expectations across programs, supported local networks in every community, measured interactions in every classroom, offered incentives for quality improvement at the classroom level, and coordinated enrollment locally to make it easier for families to choose the best option for their children. Louisiana's approach, which was different from that of most other states, entailed significant change for early childhood educators and for the department. Operating from the hypothesis that teacher-child interactions are what matters most for child outcomes, Louisiana rapidly gathered classroom data from thousands of child care, Head Start, and school sites across the state.

It would have been hard to hire staff or craft a contract with specific targets when we were unsure what the data would reveal and when no other state or entity had done what we were doing. In exchange for our collaborating on research projects (and the grant proposals that preceded them), helping them safely and securely access appropriate data, and offering their graduate students valuable internship opportunities, UVA helped Louisiana make sense of large volumes of new classroom data, offered insights on how to encourage improvement, designed new approaches to engage families through enrollment, and...