Welcome to the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
The Institute’s impact over the past several decades inspires me. I’m honored to be filling the enormous shoes of Ted Sizer, Warren Simmons, and Susanna Loeb, all of whom have shaped the Institute and its legacy. As part of this work, I have been reflecting on the Institute’s early mission, what has changed, and what has stayed the same.
The Institute was truly launched in 1994, with a large grant from the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Foundation to “provoke and nurture the redesign of American schools,” with a mission to “document, analyze and publicize the nature and progress of that redesigning.” Our founding documents highlighted the research-practice divide, centering our work “along the often controversial and troubled ‘fault line’ between those two worlds.” They also anticipated the importance of cross-disciplinary inquiry and the capacity of research to improve education across the country, noting that we would provide “a neutral gathering place for all those concerned about schooling, a site for debate and investigation.”
Thirty years later, the Institute continues to fulfill this mission. Some things have changed and modernized – the “emerging sophisticated telecommunications systems” described in 1994 are quite different in 2024! While the early work focused specifically on differences along socio-economic lines, our current efforts engage centrally with equity and inequality more broadly, highlighting the important intersections of race/ethnicity, class, gender, language, immigrant status, geography, and other dimensions of students’ identities.
But, over three decades, much has remained the same. Our work continues to prioritize investigation and research, center equity, focus on impact and improvement, and engage with practice and communities. Through it all, we strive to shape the national conversation about effective and equitable educational practices.
We are especially keen to move the conversation beyond the typical either/or trade-offs and “fault lines” that are often present in education research. We want to center both/and solutions. How can we do partnership research that centers the needs of practitioners AND creates new lines of inquiry that push understanding in our field? How can we maintain intellectual rigor in our research AND answer questions of most importance to policy and practice? How can we attend to the lived experiences of the policymakers and practitioners with whom we work AND focus our attention most directly on improving, and making more equitable, the educational experiences of the youth they serve?
As we continue to evolve and develop as an Institute, we continue to lean into these tensions. I am excited about the work that we are doing and about how we continue to build our partnerships and collaborations with organizations and scholars at Brown and across the country to push forward, together, to equalize and improve educational opportunities for all students.
John Papay
Director
