Our Research – Center for Education Policy
Our Projects
The Beyond Test Scores Project
The Beyond Test Scores Project works with educators and communities across the United States to build fairer, more accurate, and more comprehensive measures of school quality. BTS also works with policy leaders and educational researchers to use data more responsibly and more democratically.
The Civic Thinking Project
The Civic Thinking Project seeks to strengthen the relationship between public education and a thriving democracy. By identifying essential civic skills and habits of mind, as well as the curricular resources that can support those outcomes, the CTP is working to expand our collective understanding of what it means to be prepared for citizenship.
Computer Science for All Research-Practice Partnership
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the CSforALL RPP aims to ensure that an equity-centered computer science curriculum is adopted, implemented, revised, and strengthened throughout the elementary grades in the Springfield Public Schools. In partnership with district leaders and teachers, CSforALL examines the quality and effects of approaches intended to amplify and increase the rate and depth of the diffusion equity-centered CS/CT. In particular, the project focuses on the examination of collaboration and the quality and effects of teacher-led professional learning communities.
The Education Commonwealth Project
The Education Commonwealth Project works to challenge and expand the way student learning and school quality are assessed, advancing an approach to measurement and accountability that is valid, democratic, and equitable. ECP supports schools and communities with free and open-source tools, and broadly seeks to foster state- and national-level change.
The Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment
The Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment is a partnership of eight public school districts and their local teacher unions, joined together to create a fair and effective accountability system that offers a more dynamic picture of student learning and school quality than a single standardized test. MCIEA seeks to increase achievement for all students, close prevailing opportunity gaps among subgroups, and prepare a diversity of students for college, career, and life.
When “Merit” Shifts
With support from the National Science Foundation, this project examines the racial climate at two public selective schools following a change in admission policy that led to greater racial and socio-economic diversity. This school-based ethnography will contribute to national debates about educational opportunity for historically marginalized students by understanding what happens when educational spaces defined by “merit” and exclusion also attempt to embrace diversity.
Understanding the Dynamics of Research-Practice Partnerships
This project arises out of efforts to organize a design-based Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) between a diverse urban school district and faculty at a public research university. Using interviews with stakeholders on the district and university sides of the partnership, this research will identify factors that push RPPs towards transactional relationships and will identify strategies for nurturing partnerships characterized by genuine two-way collaboration