Featured Grantee

New research has the potential not only to shape the school finance debate in years ahead, but improve policies and ultimately reduce inequalities in student opportunities and outcomes.

For over three decades, research has shown that young people transitioning to adulthood from foster care in the United States have fared very poorly compared to their peers who have not been in care. This is the case across measures of well-being including educational attainment, employment and earnings, material hardship, and criminal justice system involvement. […]

Photovoice provides a platform for members of communities to share their narratives and articulate the assets and needs of their neighborhoods. This method can enable youth to promote critical conversations and move their neighbors toward collective identification of problems and solutions.

By expanding and equalizing youth civic engagement, we can begin improve youth outcomes. Research helps by making diagnoses and solutions more rigorous and precise, but youth must be part of the conversation.

Fred Wulczyn and Amy Dworsky are investigating how the outcomes of youth in congregate care settings vary by state, and whether and how this variability contributes to racial and ethnic differences in rates of youth running away from foster care.

By refining and integrating multiple theories, Chorpita has designed a model that focuses on supervisor and supervisee interactions, to help them more readily access, understand, and apply research evidence in the pursuit of improving outcomes for young people.

While research-practice partnerships have emerged as a promising means of creating and applying relevant research evidence in settings where young people grow and learn, we’ve lacked definition in terms of what constitutes an effective partnership and how RPPs, funders, and other stakeholders might gauge and demonstrate such effectiveness. Offering a clear picture of the common […]

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco is the Wasserman Dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. His research in cultural psychology and psychological anthropology focuses on mass migration, globalization, and education. We talked with Dr. Suárez-Orozco about the subject of his recent Foundation-sponsored grant, “Humanitarianism and Mass Migration,” through which he convened a two-day workshop at […]

Grantee Amy Halberstadt is examining the extent to which practices that reduce racial bias among teachers can respond to gaps in academic and disciplinary outcomes between Black and White students. The project builds on earlier pilot work and is ultimately intended to inform the design of a future intervention to interrupt teachers’ explicit and implicit […]

By bringing racial justice to the work I’m already doing, I can make it matter.

Reflecting on the odds of upward mobility in light of a widening opportunity gap in the United States, Harvard’s Robert Putnam states simply: “Any notion that you can ‘pull yourself up by your boot straps’ sounds ridiculous now.”

It’s important to recognize that the form of research contributes to the social sense-making process, and can create a body of shared understandings based on research principles. Research designed for use, with specific guidance for practice, can embed common ideas in state school improvement delivery systems.

Despite widespread efforts by intermediaries to shape education by conveying research to policymakers, a recent study finds that very few of these policymakers report using research when making decisions. As other studies have found instances where research can shape policy and practice in a variety ways, what explains this contradiction? And what does it mean for efforts to improve the use of research evidence?