Establishing a SERP-SFUSD Site: A Proposal

Improving student achievement is high on the agenda of policy makers at all levels of government, of businesses that require a competitive labor force, and of parents of school age children. Never before has the cost of a failed education been higher for individuals, families, businesses, and the economic strength and well-being of our nation. And yet the primary engine of innovation and improvement in other sectors – research and development – is vastly underutilized in education.

The problem is not intrinsic to the complexity of the education sector. Like education, medicine is characterized by complex social interactions, organizational complexity, and individual differences in responses to interventions. Yet despite its many challenges, medicine has witnessed far greater innovation than has education. Nor is there an absence of relevant knowledge for improvement in education. Three deep mines of knowledge could be tapped:

• advances in fields relevant to education (cognitive science, developmental psychology, organizational theory)
• cases of excellence in educational practice (both teaching and management); and
• innovative programs in educational practice and policy that have demonstrated effectiveness in research trials.

But the education sector does not make productive use of available knowledge for improvement in practice. Unlike medicine, there is no institution comparable to the teaching hospital in which practitioners and researchers collaborate on problem solving research, development, and implementation so that the challenges of using innovation to improve practice can be addressed. As a result, researchers often fail to bring important understandings to the stage of usability, and practitioners have no way either to influence the research priorities, or to analyze and systematize their own wisdom of practice. The physical and intellectual separation of the worlds of research and practice also means that researchers have little opportunity to observe and try to understand the variety of practices and outcomes that emerge in classroom and school settings. Yet a great many of the advances in other fields have their roots not in laboratories, but in the observation of outcomes in practice settings. And diffusion in education is hampered by the absence of a coordinating entity that ensures that knowledge builds systematically over time and across settings.

SERP’s ambitious mission is to create this missing infrastructure by establishing a set of field sites: school districts that enter into sustained partnerships with researchers to engage in collaborative problem solving and continuous improvement rooted in, and supported by, research, development and experiments in implementation. Work across field sites, research protocols, and data collection efforts will be coordinated by SERP with a long term goal of creating a set of tools and programs, and a scientific knowledge base for the improvement of practice, that will systematically build and accumulate across field sites and over time.

A successful SERP field site model has been established in the Boston public schools, where school district leadership and classroom practitioners are partnering with some of the nation’s most highly regarded literacy researchers to improve middle school reading comprehension in the content areas. By bringing top research and development talent into regular problem-solving discussions with the district’s leadership, significant progress has been made in short order in defining a long term agenda, developing the necessary assessments and interventions to begin work on instructional improvement, and tackling the long-term problems of more effective data collection, analysis, and use. We are now proposing to extend the Boston model to a second field site with the San Francisco Unified School District.

With a planning grant from the Bechtel Foundation, the SERP Institute entered into a set of exploratory discussions that have led to the following conclusions and commitments:

1. The SFUSD leadership, including the District Superintendent, the Chief Academic Officer, and the Executive Director for Teaching and Learning, have committed to all SERP field site requirements, including participation in monthly “Core Group” meetings with the research leadership to ensure that the field site work is tightly integrated into the fabric of district life, and that data sharing, parental permissions, and other challenges of conducting research in schools are managed efficiently.
2. The district leadership has identified middle school mathematics and science, and the literacy and language challenges of learning those subjects, as the areas for focus.
3. The school board has endorsed the SERP-SFUSD partnership “200%”, and can be relied upon to help sustain the partnership during periods of leadership transition.
4. The Mayor has expressed his support for the partnership, and a willingness to play a more active role should the partnership request it.
5. Outstanding members of the research and development community have agreed to make the field site work their primary research and development agenda in the years ahead. Among those who would play leadership roles in the work, including interacting with district practitioners on a regular basis, are:

• David Pearson, Dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Education. Dean Pearson’s recent research, in collaboration with scholars at the Lawrence Hall of Science, has focused on the literacy challenges of science education. He is well positioned to recruit members of the Berkeley faculty with expertise in science and math education, teacher training, assessment, and the organization of schools.
• Phil Daro, Consultant on Mathematics Education and School Reform, has experience working at every level of the education system. He has worked closely with numerous school districts in California and across the country, and has designed outstanding mathematics curricula and assessment materials.
• Kenji Hakuta, Academic Dean of the Stanford University School of Education, is among the nation’s leading scholars in the field of education of students who are English language learners—an issue of high importance in San Francisco. Like Pearson, Hakuta is very well positioned to recruit and coordinate the work of faculty from inside and outside the School of Education at Stanford.Numerous other discussions suggest a strong interest in participating in the SERP collaborative R&D from area experts in each of the relevant fields, and over several institutions. It is clear that if the infrastructure is funded, the talent and interest are abundant.

Proposed Plan of Work: The first five years

The field site will function in accordance with key SERP principles designed to ensure genuine collaboration in which the district participants play a lead role in shaping the priorities of the work, the rigor of the research is in the control of the participating researchers, and the tools and interventions developed by the design team are responsive to both. The work will be conduced in three research and development phases, with timelines as indicated:

• Phase I: establish the structure and norms of collaboration for the field site, clarify the problem, and design the tools for research and intervention. During this phase, sharing of student data will be arranged and patterns in the data analyzed, an audit of exiting practices in middle school math, science and literacy will be conducted, and an initial set of surveys will be done to map the terrain of teacher beliefs, and capture the internal accountability and coherence of individual schools. Phase I will begin in January of 2007 and will come to a close in August, 2007.
• Phase II: pilot initial assessments, co-develop and-or pilot the interventions identified in Phase I. Identify additional interventions to be designed or adapted. Phase II will commence in the fall of 2007 and run through the summer of 2009.
• Phase III: take promising interventions to scale across the district (and in other field sites) and evaluate outcomes in the SFUSD and beyond. Pilot additional interventions designed in Phase II. Phase III will begin in September of 2009 and run through the summer of 2011.

San Francisco provides an ideal setting for a partnership in which researchers collaborate with teachers and administrators to address the challenges of educating students to high standards in science and mathematics. The location provides access to the talented researchers at Berkeley and Stanford. More importantly, the field site work will create an opportunity to mentor and create a new generation of outstanding education researchers. For example, the SERP research network in SFUSD could easily attract many talented science PhDs to the science education research field from the large pool of such young people at UCSF (600 graduate students and 1200 postdocs), by building on the vigorous Science Education Partnership (SEP) that has existed between UCSF and SFUSD for nearly 20 years.

Among the important researchable questions that will be addressed is how best to generate new science and math talent, while motivating and inspiring young people to aim at science and engineering careers. However, the details of the research and development program can not be specified in advance for a simple reason: it is central to SERP that the work be shaped by the interaction of researchers, developers, and practitioners — interactions that can only begin in a serious way once the project is launched. Indeed, the premise of SERP is that the very reason research has had so little influence on practice is that it has been done in isolation from those who are expected to “use” the research. The experience in Boston confirms that the type of engagement planned with practitioners changes researchers’ understanding of problems and their potential solutions — just as engagement with researchers helps refine, and sometimes recast, the understanding of practitioners.

The SERP Institute requests partial support from the Bechtel Foundation for establishment of the San Francisco field site, and a program of work to improve middle school science, mathematics, and literacy in these two content areas. Funding will cover release research time during the summer for 6 prominent researchers at any given time, research assistance for each of those researchers, post-doctoral fellows who will spend much of their time conducting research in classrooms, a skilled data manager, and convening of regular Core Group and Design Team meetings. The design and adaptation of interventions, as well as the development of instruments to carefully measure the effect of each intervention effort on student learning, is central to the SERP effort. Therefore, a portion of the funding is set aside for these critical design tasks.

The SERP Institute in Washington, DC will coordinate and manage the work, link the work in San Francisco to ongoing work in Boston and elsewhere, and nurture relationships with businesses and community organizations in the area that will be necessary to ensure field site longevity. The SERP Institute will also carry responsibility for communicating the findings of the research and development programs to other districts across the country, as well as for facilitating the spread of new programs and practices.