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IES Grant

Title: The School District of Philadelphia-Penn Graduate School of Education Researcher-Practitioner Partnership in Education Research
Center: NCER Year: 2014
Principal Investigator: Desimone, Laura Awardee: University of Pennsylvania
Program: Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships in Education Research      [Program Details]
Award Period: 2 years (7/1/2014 – 6/30/2016) Award Amount: $399,818
Type: Researcher-Practitioner Partnership Award Number: R305H140097
Description:

Co-Principal Investigator: Wolford, Tonya

Partnership Institutions: School District of Philadelphia (SDP), University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE)

Purpose: Through this partnership, SDP and Penn GSE worked to build a structured, formalized research alliance between the two organizations. Creating the alliance would build the capacity of both organizations; improve research-to-practice links; enable the study the district's approaches to school reform, and establish a foundation for future, larger scale collaborative impact studies.

Project Activities: The research activities focused on Promise Academies and other District-run turnaround schools, Renaissance Charter Schools, new innovative school designs, and a group of comparison schools. The partners used the 2-year project period to build partnership infrastructure and to execute a research plan. The partnership infrastructure included working groups to execute the research plan and capacity-building mechanisms such as mini-conferences, student placements, and course practicums. The partners also proposed steps to institutionalize the partnership to withstand changes in leadership, by including partnership activities in the scope of work of each organization and designating partnership space at each organization.

Key Outcomes:

  • The partnership team produced a framework for planning, building, implementing, and monitoring partnerships based on their experiences in a partnership between a university-based school of education at a major research university and the research office of a big-city school district (Desimone et al., 2016).

Structured Abstract

Setting: The activities and research took place in the School District of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.

Sample: Approximately 137,512 students in 212 public schools and 16,000 students in twenty charter schools in grades K–12 were included. Approximately 82% of its students were classified as being economically disadvantaged; 7% of students were classified as English Language Learners and 14% as having disabilities; 18% are Hispanic/Latino; 57% were African American, 14% were Caucasian/Euro- Americans, 6% were Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 4% identify as multiracial or other.

Education Issue: SDP struggles with low student academic performance. As of the 2012–2013 school year, the year prior to the launch of this project, only 13% of the SDP-operated schools were making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), an accountability measure used each year to determine the achievement of individual schools and the school district. Approximately 57% of SDP schools were identified as needing school improvement because they failed to meet the AYP standards several years in a row. One of the district's key reform strategies was to create a portfolio of successful schools by piloting new schools, identifying struggling schools for district-managed turnaround, and turning chronically underperforming schools over to charter operators. The partnership's research plan focused on better understanding and supporting the improvement of the SDP's schools, in particular, district-managed turnarounds (Promise Academies), charter-managed restarts (Renaissance Schools), as well as innovative new school models that were being piloted in the district. Specifically, researchers focused on developing measures for evaluating school improvement and design a rigorous impact evaluation of these schools. As of 2014–2015, there were twelve Promise Academies, twenty restarts, and three new schools. Several innovative school models were launched in 2015–16.

Research Design and Methods: The project team carried out a mixed method study that used both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The quantitative component included descriptive statistics while the qualitative measures included interviews, surveys, and field observations.

Key Measures: Key measures included student achievement in math and literacy, instructional quality, and instructional leadership.

Data Analytic Strategy: The research team identified preliminary achievement trends in turnaround, restart, and new schools and studied the quality of their implementation of school improvement plans, identifying strengths and weaknesses and outlining possibilities for improvement. The research team used interviews, surveys, and observations to collect data on school context, instructional quality, and instructional leadership. Researchers created and implemented mechanisms for district educators and decision-makers to discuss and plan how to use findings from the study to inform decision making about adaptation and improvement, as well as to serve as the foundation for designing a larger scale impact study that would directly compare and test the efficacy of the various school improvement models, for instance, Promise Academies compared to Renaissance charters run by various charter operators.

Publications and Products

ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.

Select Publications:

Desimone, L. M., Wolford, T., & Hill, K. L. (2016). Research-practice: A practical conceptual framework. AERA Open, 2(4), 2332858416679599. Hill, K., and Desimone, L. (2018). Job-embedded Learning: How School Leaders can use Job-embedded Learning as a Mechanism for School Improvement. In S. Zepeda & J. A. Ponticell. (Eds.), Handbook of educational supervision (pp. 101–130). Wiley-Blackwell. Hill, K., Desimone, L.D., Wolford, T., and Reitano, A. (2017). Assessing school turnaround: using an integrative framework to identify levers for success. In C.V. Meyers & M.J. Darwin (Eds.), Enduring myths that inhibit school turnaround (pp. 173–192). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.


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