Improving Educational Equity through Research-Practice Partnerships
by Maria I. Khan, Kristen C. Wilcox, Jessie Tobin & Aaron Leo
NYKids has been working to address many of the adverse effects of the pandemic through our COVID-19 research study as well as supporting and developing research-practice partnerships (RPPs) as discussed in previous blogs.
RPPs are defined as “long-term mutualistic collaborations between practitioners and researchers intentionally organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving district outcomes.”
Through the support of the American Institutes for Research (AIR), our team has engaged in a RPP with Tech Valley High School and Chatham Central School District. The goal of this partnership is to advance educational equity during the pandemic recovery.
Improving Educational Equity through Local and National Partnerships
Addressing educational equity has been the core of the AIR/NYKids/TVHS/Chatham partnership from its beginnings in 2021 We have used a variety of improvement science-based processes and tools and sought to accelerate our learning through two levels of collaboration.
Level 1 – Local RPP network: At this level, NYKids supports partner schools through setting agendas, sharing improvement tools, identifying action steps, and creating time and space for discussion of data. Early in our work at the local level we developed the shared aim (i.e. target for our work) below:
We will address the barriers to learning and engagement for children, staff, and community members through our diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and mental health initiatives.
Our partner schools, TVHS and Chatham, identified priority areas to achieve this aim and used improvement tools (including driver diagrams articulating their theory of improvement) to identify high leverage drivers towards the changes they seek.
Level 2: National network: The second level of our RPP provided opportunity for sharing strategies and lessons learned in addressing equity in the context of the pandemic with other institutions in four states. This network has also offered opportunity to participate in research on the impacts of our improvement work, as well as others’ improvement work, on students and families.
Throughout this process, our AIR partners have engaged in periodic check-ins and shared resources and tools. One example of these tools is the COVID-19 longitudinal database which contains datasets across sectors such as education, health, housing, social services, employment and access to technology. This database offers one way to use data to inform asset use and needs.
A Peek at RPP Progress
Local RPP members, in a recent meeting shared the following progress:
- The development of appropriate metrics to judge early progress toward aims (e.g., student interviews, parent surveys)
- Individual and organizational changes such as research use in initiative development and implementation
Sharing this work at the Upcoming Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Conference:
Maria I. Khan and Kristen C. Wilcox will be sharing highlights from this research titled, “Improving Educational Equity through Research-Practice Partnerships and University-School Collaborations in the Post-Pandemic” at The Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Annual Conference; February 18th – 22nd in Washington D.C.
We also have another paper accepted for presentation at CIES: “Remote Schooling during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Impacts on Children in a High Poverty, High Diversity School”
Find us at CIES (access is available both remotely and in-person) to learn more about NYKids and RPPs. We thank you for your interest in NYKids. Please follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to stay updated with our work and reach out to nykids@albany.edu if you have any questions and/or suggestions or would like to participate in a RPP with us.
