Building toward Effectiveess JoAnn Hsueh (bio), Barbara Condliffe (bio), William Corrin (bio), Samantha Steimle (bio), Rekha Balu (bio), Margaret Hennessy (bio), Sharon Huang (bio), Vianny Lugo-Aracena (bio), Michelle Maier (bio), Shira Mattera (bio), Shay O'Brien (bio), Amena Sengal (bio), Jed Teres (bio), Samantha Wulfsohn (bio), and Jennifer Yeaton (bio) Researchers, as well as school districts and other providers, all share the goal of ensuring that early childhood education positively affects young children's social, emotional, and academic development. Because they align practice with the best knowledge available, research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are one of the strongest hopes for bringing the varied perspectives and expertise of these players together and thus maximizing potential benefits for children.1 Many RPPs bring together talented university-based researchers with school districts and providers. Yet they can be challenging to sustain, and some last longer than others. RPPs, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, can vary widely in terms of their initial lines of inquiry, goals, and the kinds of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers who constitute them. Indeed, to meet the needs, interests, and circumstances of districts and providers, relationships in an RPP need to be flexible. Researchers can find it quite challenging to adjust as real-world contexts and circumstances change. An RPP in which an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization like MDRC is the research partner serves as an example of one RPP model, and in this commentary, we describe our experiences and how we've been able to use our infrastructure and diverse expertise to meet the changing scope and needs of different phases of long-standing partnerships. In doing so, we aim to illuminate key principles and offer potential strategies that other researchers can adopt to establish long-standing, collaborative partnerships of their own. Partnering with a Research Organization What does a partner like MDRC bring to RPPs? MDRC is a mission-driven social policy research organization with a 47-year [End Page 161] history of developing and evaluating policies and programs that seek to improve the lives of low-income families, children, and communities. Supported by a blend of philanthropic grants and public funding, our work is informed by a deep institutional history of integrating impact and implementation research and of providing technical assistance and feedback to our partners, including school districts, government agencies, and nonprofits. We focus on supporting the use of data in decision making to strengthen program operations and implementation and to guide continuous program improvement. Historically, MDRC has been best known for large-scale demonstrations and program evaluations that often employ random assignment. Usually, our projects involve years of research, during which we work closely with government agencies, schools, and program providers. In these partnerships, we've not only conducted research but also advised partners on their programming or provided technical assistance to them, thus both generating new knowledge and helping to apply it in practice. In fact, a significant portion of MDRC researchers have experience as program administrators, teachers, and frontline staff, meaning we have a strong understanding of how programs operate in the real world. We're also trained in multiple disciplines, including developmental and implementation science, applied behavioral sciences, and predictive analytics. School districts and providers join RPPs because they want to be sure their programs are making a difference. As an organization known for assessing the impacts that programs achieve, MDRC focuses on understanding the value that an intervention produces compared with the business-as-usual approach. Thus we start from a philosophy of wanting to create value beyond the status quo. To establish mutually beneficial RPPs in early childhood education, the members of each group that makes up an RPP must play a variety of research roles to supply information needed by their partners. Our work as an intermediary, in which we draw on evidence-based insights to ground and support program implementation with practice partners, has spanned multiple partnerships with public school districts, Head Start, and community-based childcare centers. One sustained partnership has been with the New York City's Department of Education (DOE), which has been eager to learn through interactive evidence-building and program improvement. Relying on both public and private funding raised collaboratively...
A Dean's Perspective Robert C. Pianta (bio) I write this commentary from two perspectives: that of an academic researcher who for several decades has relied on partnerships with practitioners and agencies in the field, and that of a dean of a school of education. From both perspectives, it's clear that research-practice partnerships are essential if research in the social and educational sciences is to be both strong and relevant—that is, if research is to have impact. I come to this belief from experience in a wide array of research-practice partnerships, most of which, fortunately, have been constructive. Here I reflect on the benefits and challenges of these experiences and the types of support that higher education institutions must provide to sustain these essential components of research infrastructure and career development. Research-practice partnerships are also critical to a university's service mission and to advancing practice and professional education. Three themes frame my comments: that partnerships are strategically important for strong and relevant social science, that effective partnerships require explicit investment and development strategies, and that partnerships are developmental contexts for scholars. An Essential Tool The value of scholarship in social and educational science is most often described in terms of the metrics employed in academia—journal impact factors, citations, peer review. Although these factors clearly help determine the value or strength of research from the perspective of the scientific community, they don't fully indicate the value of scientific research for parents, community leaders, policy makers, and the public at large. At times, people outside academia criticize social and educational science research for not yielding results that can help them in their work and for the ways that scholars communicate their results. Thus it's not surprising that we're paying closer attention to increasing our research's relevance. Scholarship is relevant to the extent that it can answer questions that are important to interested people outside academia, can be understood and used by those people, or can influence the decisions and actions of practitioners and policy makers. Because partnerships across the research-practice boundary enable the exchange of experience, information, and perspectives among academics and stakeholders, they are an [End Page 151] indispensable resource for individual scholars and institutions under pressure to produce social science that is both strong and relevant. Stronger Science From the point of view of the traditional metrics of academia, effective partnerships with practitioners (either individuals or organizations) add value in a number of ways. First, partnerships provide insights into questions, processes, mechanisms, and variables of interest to investigators—insights we can't get without the information and perspectives of field partners. These insights and this information help scholars create more refined measurement tools, develop data collection plans and protocols that are more likely to capture the phenomena we want to study, and advance a much more informed and comprehensive interpretation of the results we obtain. Second, partnerships can help researchers take advantage of scale. For many research questions in the social sciences and particularly in education, sample size is a critical factor in designing and interpreting research. Many of our research questions involve malleable factors in education systems that fall into the framework of "what works for whom under what conditions." By their very nature, such questions require a sample that draws from populations larger and more diverse than, say, the set of local fourth-grade math classrooms. To make the science strong enough to yield interpretable results, it's essential to investigate processes and mechanisms across cultural, racial, economic, or other background characteristics of students or across assorted school or classroom features. The power of our statistical analyses, our ability to understand mediating and moderating processes, and our ability to follow a sample over time are all enhanced by increased scale. Scientific work that takes place at the level of school divisions (or districts, as they're called in many states), or that is representative of regions or populations of interest, is crucial to building knowledge that reflects reality. Research-practice partnerships that allow access to scale and to variation can thus strengthen a program of research and dramatically enhance the scientific value of a single study...
Introducing the Issue Daphna Bassok (bio), Anna Markowitz (bio), and Pamela Morris (bio) High-quality early childhood education programs can have lasting impacts, particularly for children in low-income families or families that have been historically marginalized.1 Beyond their direct benefits for children, early childhood education (ECE) programs also support families and the economy by providing safe, warm environments for young children while their parents work—an attribute that recently gained new significance when COVID-19 upended in-person instruction. But even though the promise of early education—for children, for families, for equity, and for society—is widely recognized, delivering effective ECE programming at scale remains elusive. Findings from promising research studies rarely make their way into early childhood practice; at the same time, policy and practice decisions are often made without research evidence to guide them. Many large-scale ECE programs don't consistently offer the types of high-quality experiences that research suggests support development, and thus they don't deliver on their promise to ameliorate poverty-related and other inequalities.2 The discrepancies between what we know, what decision makers need, and the reality of children's experiences have caused many researchers, policy makers, and practitioners to wonder if there's a better or faster way to produce change. To build a system of high-quality early care accessible to all children, some early education research must pivot to questions, methods, and timelines that align with the needs of policy makers and practitioners who are making high-stakes, systems-level decisions. At the same time, research must stay firmly rooted in the science of how children develop.3 This issue of the Future of Children argues that research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are a particularly promising strategy for doing both well, and thus offer another critical tool to support high-quality early childhood education. RPPs are long-term collaborations between researchers and policy makers and/or practitioners that are designed to improve educational outcomes through sustained collaboration and commitment.4 These partnerships are defined by their longevity, mutual decision-making and compromise, and the commitment of both parties to larger-scale, systems-level problem-solving, [End Page 3] rather than a single project or research question.5 When done well, RPPs can produce research that's both more relevant and useful to policy makers and more rigorous and/or innovative than the studies that researchers could undertake outside of a formal partnership. But this work isn't easy. Researchers and policy makers are used to operating with very different timelines, goals, and incentive structures, and these differences can present challenges for effective partnership. A clear understanding of what partnership work requires, and strategies for overcoming these hurdles, are essential for creating the kind of long-term, open relationship that results in better policy and stronger scholarship. This issue explores these challenges as well as the potential of partnership work for helping to transform ECE systems. Unlike a typical Future of Children issue, which describes what's already known about a topic that affects children's lives, this issue focuses on an approach to research and practice. We aim to distill lessons from existing ECE partnerships and to provide a road map for researchers and policy/practice leaders who want to collaborate. The articles examine both the challenges and the opportunities of partnership work, and show how partnerships may, in some instances and when carefully designed, pave the way for systems-level change. Each article is centered on a major challenge or opportunity, such as creating a research or funding agenda, developing tools, taking innovation to scale, navigating different timelines, finding a balance between rigor and feasibility, and building capacity. Three commentaries, written by a university dean, a practice leader, and policy organization researchers, describe how the contexts in which policy makers and researchers work—universities, state systems, and research firms, respectively—can effectively support RPP work. As a whole, the issue sets the stage for strengthening and investing in partnership work in early education. Historical Role of RPPs in Early Education ECE research has its roots in RPPs. The three major studies whose results have driven much of the public investment in ECE—the Perry Preschool...
In this article, Rachel Abenavoli, Natalia Rojas, Rebecca Unterman, Elise Cappella, Josh Wallack, and Pamela Morris argue that research-practice partnerships make it possible to rigorously study relevant policy questions in ways that would otherwise be infeasible. Randomized controlled trials of small-scale programs have shown us that early childhood interventions can yield sizable benefits. But when we move from relatively small, tightly controlled studies to scaled-up initiatives, the results are often disappointing. Here the authors describe how their partnership with New York City's Department of Education, as the city rapidly rolled out its universal pre-K initiative, gave them opportunities to collect experimental and quasi-experimental evidence while placing a minimal burden on educators. They argue that this type of research can answer the most pressing ECE questions, which are less about whether ECE can make a difference and more about the conditions under which early interventions are effective at scale. They offer three recommendations for researchers, policy makers, and practitioners who are considering partnership work: build a foundation of trust and openness; carefully consider whether rigorous causal research or descriptive research is the right choice in a given situation; and be flexible, seeking opportunities for rigorous research designs that may already be embedded in early childhood education systems.
