Our talented and diverse staff is composed of researchers, former teachers and administrators, and data experts who work alongside our district and state partners. As a group, we aim to identify areas of need and find opportunities for success in our local context.
The Providence Public School District (PPSD) serves approximately 22,000 students across 37 schools – 21 elementary schools, 7 middle schools, 9 high schools and 2 public district charter schools. PPSD employs more than 3,200 professionals who work in these schools and provide support to students across the district.
Our partnership with PPSD began in 2019 and is one that is committed to generating learning through a steady flow of communication and hypothesis-testing across researchers and practitioners. We meet regularly with stakeholders across several departments including operations, human resources, research and planning, and network and school teams to ensure that we’re addressing questions of interest to the district. The core of our work focuses on ongoing analyses of human capital and student attendance data to build actionable knowledge and policy recommendations.
As the partnership has become more established, we’ve become a trusted source to support in the development of different tools and quick turnaround tasks to inform pressing policy decisions.
The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) oversees the work of Rhode Island’s 66 districts, serving around 140,000 students. We work in partnership with a variety of teams in the department, including the Office of Educator Excellence, the Office of Data and Technology Services, and the Office of Instruction, Assessment and Curriculum.
Our work with RIDE spans both formal projects and ongoing support around key state priorities. Through a state longitudinal data system (SLDS) grant provided by the Institute of Education Sciences, we are working to reduce disparities in outcomes across student groups by broadening access among local school and district leaders to both traditional and more novel types of school improvement data and supporting evidence-based solutions to focused, data-driven challenges. In addition to the SLDS project, we are working with RIDE to better understand covid-recovery spending and challenges around teacher diversity and staffing. Ultimately, the partnership seeks to generate knowledge around questions of equity by jointly working on goal setting, intervention development, idea-sharing, and rigorous evaluation and analysis.
The Research to Practice Network is a network of Rhode Island school districts focused on designing and implementing high-dosage tutoring programs, using the Tutoring Design Principles brief as a foundation. The work draws on the best available evidence on strategies that have worked in other places and network convenings are a venue for decision-makers to engage in a sense-making process around research findings, generate intervention designs that vary with local context, work collaboratively to identify and overcome challenges, and share data for continuous improvement. Because our districts conduct this work informed by cross-group learning and data collection, we expect that our partners will become increasingly successful over time, building a cohort of practitioners who share the knowledge that researchers often lack about moving from theory to programmatic improvement.
