The Goals

Our mission is to form partnerships with states and districts in order to learn the lessons that the newly available data have yet to reveal. The Center does this by:

• Assembling teams of leading policy analysts and social scientists to work with school data. The new state and local data that is now becoming available will allow researchers associated with the Center to answer a number of questions that have previously been intractable. Many of the current policy stalemates depend upon empirical magnitudes about which relatively little is known but which can now be estimated using the new administrative data states and districts are collecting. For example: How well do students of alternatively certified teachers fare in school? What is the impact of greater parental choice on public education systems? Is professional development for teachers worth the billions of dollars spent on it each year? We hope to make progress by bringing the best new evidence to bear on such questions.
• Creating new venues in which practitioners, policymakers, and researchers can regularly interact. Researchers are often a step (or two or three) behind policymakers, attempting to evaluate initiatives after the fact. However, if state and district policymakers had greater familiarity with the pre-requisites for doing careful evaluation and if education researchers had a better understanding of the implementation challenges, more policy initiatives could be undertaken in ways which lend themselves to evaluation later.
• To bring about this change, the Center holds regular events designed to bring together key players from both the policy and research worlds. These events help the Center ensure that its research agenda is focused on the right questions and help practitioners and policymakers design interventions in ways that make it possible to evaluate their effectiveness.
• Developing mechanisms for ensuring that researchers can be held accountable for their findings, without compromising privacy. Many in the education research community (including us) are excited about the future potential of education research to break existing stalemates and to open up whole new areas for research. However, we would caution that this hoped-for "golden age" of education research is by no means inevitable.
• Indeed, the future of education research could regress rather than progress. Commonly, one group of trusted researchers has exclusive access to a particular states or districts data. Unfortunately, when data access is exclusive, it is difficult for skeptics to replicate findings. Not surprisingly, such research often fails to persuade.
• We will work with states and districts to make standard analysis files available that protect the confidentiality of students and teachers while shielding states and districts from the gargantuan task of documenting data for research purposes and providing information on the local context. Such data will allow for replication and, as a result, a more fruitful and lively debate about research findings.
• Cultivating a new generation of scholars focused on policy impact. The Center is working to create a collaborative network among a group of up-and-coming scholars and doctoral students at Harvard University and across universities. The Center provides scholars access to rich sources of data that they can use to address vital questions in education policy research. We work to ensure that these scholars design their research questions with feedback from policymakers and practitioners and that the questions they pursue are relevant. We are also raising funds for post-doctoral fellowships to bring leading scholars to Cambridge to work with us and our students.