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Additional Fellowship Information
Large urban public school districts play a significant role in the American education system. The largest 66 urban school systems in the country – comprising less than one half of one percent of the nearly seventeen thousand school districts that exist across the United States – educate about 15 percent of the nation’s K-12 public school students, approximately 30 percent of its African American and Latino students, 25 percent of its poor students, and over 30 percent of its English Language Learners. These districts also share similar and serious challenges, and any national attempt to improve achievement and to reduce racial and economic achievement gaps should involve these school districts as a focus for action.
Solutions to the problems facing these school systems, however, are not always obvious, and the existing research base is not yet sufficient to address them. To better understand the problems in urban education and to develop more effective and sustainable solutions, a program of scientific inquiry focusing on what works to improve academic outcomes in urban school districts is needed. Moreover, in order to produce such evidence and to move public education forward generally, the standards of evidence in education research must be raised. Additionally, a community of researchers and practitioners committed to producing a base of scientific knowledge that is both rigorously derived and directly relevant to improving achievement in urban school districts must be developed and nurtured.
With this in mind, the Council of the Great City Schools with support from the Institute for Education sciences, has established a Senior Fellowship in Urban Education to facilitate collaboration between large urban school districts and senior researchers in education research, and, ultimately, to produce a body of rigorous research that can provide practical guidance to some of the challenges large urban school districts face.
Fellowship Goals
Though a great deal of education research is produced every year, there is a genuine dearth of knowledge regarding how to address some of the fundamental challenges urban school districts face in educating children, working to close “achievement gaps” and striving to meet the challenges of No Child Left Behind.
Certainly, a great deal of research into urban education already exists. However, while there is a history of “process-related” research around the issues affecting urban contexts, there has arguably been much less good research that carefully identifies key program components and examines the effects of carefully designed interventions in important programmatic areas on key student outcomes such as academic achievement. Frankly, there has also been an absence of research that carefully documents implementation and identifies the conditions, resources, and necessary steps for effectively mounting initiatives in these programmatic areas.
The program is designed to help fill this gap by facilitating partnerships between scholars and practitioners focused on producing research that is both rigorous in nature and relevant to the specific challenges facing urban school districts. Importantly, in addition to the work that is done under the auspices of these specific fellowship awards, we hope to facilitate the creation of longer term partnerships that go well beyond the specific grant cycle. We believe such partnerships have the potential to produce better, more practically useful research in at least two ways. First, by deepening researchers’ understanding of the contexts within which they are working, the program may help them maximize the impact of their work in the places where it is needed the most. Second, by helping senior staff in urban districts become better consumers of research, we hope to increase the extent to which the available evidence is actually used to inform policy and practice, and the extent to which member districts continue to invest in research and collaborations that can yield both reliable evidence and practical guidance.
With this in mind, the primary goals for the Senior Urban Education Research Fellowship are:
- to promote high quality scientific inquiry into the questions and challenges facing urban school districts;
- to facilitate and encourage collaboration, communication, and ongoing partnerships between senior researchers and the leadership in urban school districts;
- to demonstrate how collaborations between scholars and urban districts can generate reliable results that are useful to both research and practice
- to produce a set of high quality studies that yield reliable guidance regarding the challenges and decisions urban school districts face;
- to contribute to an ongoing discussion regarding research priorities in urban education; and
- to promote the development of a “community of inquiry”, including both researchers and practitioners, committed to both a set of norms and principles regarding standards of evidence and a set of priorities for relevant, applied research in urban education.
The projects funded as a part of this fellowship must include as a core component significant collaboration and partnership between the fellows and the leadership of a large urban school district. In particular, the application will require a written letter of agreement between the researcher (or his or her institution) and the school district(s) participating in the project. Moreover, successful applications will clearly describe the level and manner of collaboration between the researcher and district personnel, and will dedicate a significant amount of time for ongoing, regular, interchange between the fellow and district personnel. In this vein, projects that “embed” the researcher within the district staff will be of particular interest. In assessing projects’ potential for successful implementation, the factors that will be considered include:
- Record of collaboration between the Senior Research Fellow and the urban school district (nature and extent of previous experience collaborating on research projects with school districts)
- Organizational capacity of the research institution to support the implementation of the Senior Research Fellow project
- District commitment to support the research project (i.e., letter of support)
- Release time to collaborate with Senior Research Fellow
- Dedicated point person with decision-making authority
- The existence of a working committee of key participants (i.e., university research team, district research support team)
- Shared vision/goals for mutually beneficial outcomes
- Clearly defined partnership roles
- Resources identified and committed to the project
Fellowship Structure
The Council is sponsoring three annual rounds of fellowships, beginning in June 2007. Each round of fellowships is to include three awards, and each fellowship award will include a $100,000 fellowship stipend, plus funding for a research assistant ($22,000) and for project support from local school district personnel ($67,000).
Successful applications must include written agreements between the fellows (or their institutions) and the participating districts, and must provide plans and resources for substantial collaboration between the two parties.
Research projects funded as part of this project may begin any time between June and October of 2007. Within 12 months of initiating research, fellows must submit an interim project report to their local school district partners and to the Council. These reports must provide concrete guidance to the local school district partners based on interim findings and document the progress of the research project up to that point. Research projects shall be completed within 18-24 months, with final reports delivered to district partners and the Council of the Great City Schools.
Project Parameters
Types of Projects
As outlined above, fellowships are designed to be 18-24 month research projects involving significant collaboration between senior researchers and practitioners in urban school districts. Potential projects that fall into three broad categories.
- First, researchers might be engaged in investigating and documenting important trends and patterns in urban education through secondary analyses of existing but underutilized district data. For instance, a Fellowship site might design a project focusing on using enrollment and course detail data to document student progress through high school, course taking patterns, and graduation rates. This might include the percentage of 9th grade students who complete algebra, are promoted on time, complete a core curriculum, and graduate from high school within four (or more) years.
- A second type of study might focus on interventions by refining a concept for an intervention, developing a plan for implementation, and measuring both uptake of the particular intervention and the effects of the intervention on school level education practices.
- Yet a third type of study might examine the effects of a particular intervention on student achievement, using either some sort of planned variation (e.g., random assignment of schools, classrooms, or students) or a rigorous quasi-experimental approach such as an interrupted time series with comparison groups.
Research Priorities
Given the relative lack of clear, research-based, policy guidance regarding how to address the challenges facing secondary schools, fellowship awards will be focused on projects that have the greatest potential to inform and improve secondary school instruction and achievement in urban school districts. Within this focus, award decisions will emphasize the following research priorities:
- Secondary school math instruction
- Transitions to secondary school
- High school course taking and graduation patterns
- Improving instruction for English Language Learners
- Access to (and definitions of) high quality, effective teachers; and
- Using assessment data to refine instruction.
In order to be considered, fellowship proposals must include secondary schools as a major focus and be directly relevant to one or more of these categories. Moreover, any project funded as a part of this program must be directly relevant to strategies for urban school systems to generate widespread improvement.
Research Design
In addition to the types of research and the research priorities to be addressed, the RFP will identify a set of criteria regarding the nature of the research that will maximize the quality of the research and the contribution that selected projects can make to the process of scientific inquiry in urban education. These criteria include:
· The “proximity” of the research question to the teaching and learning interaction and to the challenge of improving achievement in urban school districts,
· The generalizability of the results to the universe of large urban school districts
· The clarity of the theory underlying the key hypotheses being explored,
· The clarity of the connection between the underlying theory and the key research questions,
· The connection between these research questions and the intended design, i.e., will the proposed design produce evidence that reliably answers the research question.
To the extent that the project focuses on an estimated effect of particular programs or
practices, there may be several additional considerations, such as:
- The extent to which the design provides a reliable estimate of the outcomes that would be observed in the absence of the program or treatment
- The intensity of treatment contrast, i.e., the extent to which the design provides for sufficient differences in exposure to the programs or practices in question and allows for reliable conclusions regarding the program’s effectiveness, and
- The absence of selection effects, i.e., the extent to which the design captures exposure to the program or practices in question that is otherwise unrelated to student outcomes.
Target Applicants
The goal of this program is to fund high quality research by senior researchers with established track records of producing rigorous, policy relevant, research on educational improvement in urban contexts. Though there are no strict requirements, we anticipate that successful fellows will be researchers with at least 7-10 years of experience who have significant track records of publication in the area. Moreover, strong preference will be given to applicants who also have an established track record of partnering with urban school districts and a history of successful collaboration with the district(s) to be included in the project.
If you have additional questions or require additional information, please contact Amanda Horwitz at 202-393-2427, or ahorwitz@cgcs.org.
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