Partnering with schools to strengthen education research

Sudden funding cuts at the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES), and National Science Foundation (NSF) are hitting education research hard—and spurring a hurried search for new funds.

It’s unclear if some contracts will be reinstated. Some of the cuts are to congressionally mandated programs, and whether the Trump administration can unilaterally nix them is an issue likely to go to court. The Department of Education, for example, was created by Congress, and a legal challenge is underway to determine whether the executive branch can unilaterally move to close the department. Without reinstatements, it will likely be difficult to offset the losses: IES was one of the largest funders of national education research in the country until the administration slashed $900 million from its budget (more than the total IES average annual budget, as multiyear projects were among those canceled). Meanwhile, a crowd-sourced list of cancelled NSF grantsopens in new window suggests that nearly 40% of the contracts came from the agency’s education division.

“It’s going to be very challenging moving forward,” said Beth Schwartz, PhD, the senior director of pre-college and undergraduate psychology education at APA. “Given the significant loss of federal dollars, reaching out to partner with schools is an important consideration in order to continue this area of research.”

In this environment, there are no easy answers as to how to continue developing and disseminating evidence-based education practices to students. But researchers in the field say a shift toward long-term, stable partnerships with schools has already delivered big benefits. Much of this research has the advantage of philanthropic or other non-federal funding, which may become increasingly in demand as schools seek to improve student outcomes.

“I do think private groups and philanthropies are stepping in, but I don’t really know yet how all of that is playing out,” said Stephanie Jones, PhD, a developmental psychologist and professor of child development and education at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. “People are, in real time, literally right now losing their grants and figuring out how to either finish the work or slow it down. We’re spending a lot of time thinking about how our funding for this work is diversified.”

It’s a frustrating situation for education researchers, many of whom have shifted over the past 10 to 15 years toward long-term work in partnership with schools or school districts. Compared with the one-off research projects that used to dominate the field, these partnerships are much more fruitful for both sides, said Alyn Turner, PhD, a sociologist and senior research director at Research for Action (RFA), an educational research organization in Philadelphia that partners with the city’s schools.

“There is more guarantee that the work will get used because you’re in conversation and in community with the people who need the work,” Turner said. “And [these partnerships] also inform the trajectory of your own work to make sure it has relevance.”

Partnerships are also crucial for the dissemination of evidence-based practices and to ensure proper implementation of the research. Teachers and administrators are overloaded; a common barrier to instituting a new practice or curriculum is a lack of money and time for training and ongoing support, said Karen Harris, PhD, an educational psychologist and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. Samuel McQuillin, PhD, a school psychologist at the University of South Carolina, saw the benefits of sticking with a school in 2011, when he conducted a randomized control trial of a beloved mentoring program at a local middle school and found that it didn’t work. The program connected middle school kids with college students who had been trained on proven techniques from motivational interviewing, such as empathy and open-ended questions. But the program did not promote school connectedness, bonds with teachers, or any other positive outcome for kids. In fact, compared to middle-schoolers without a mentor, kids randomly assigned to the program had worse reading grades (Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 39, No. 7, 2011).

McQuillin and his colleagues dove into the details and soon discovered why the program wasn’t working: The college-age mentors weren’t following it. Instead of approaching the kids with empathy and open-mindedness, the mentors were instead telling “back in my day” style stories and sliding into tough-love attitudes.

“Not all of them, but enough of them, would go in there, shoot it with the kids, tell them to get their acts together, go play basketball, and that would be it,” McQuillin said.

It was a stark reminder of how a research-backed program might go awry in the real world. It’s also an example of how being embedded in a school can spur the kind of give-and-take that ends with better outcomes for kids. McQuillin and his team—whose partnership has lasted since 2007—were able to improve training and supervision for mentors, including creative tweaks like last-minute video refreshers on skills such as relationship building that mentors watched right before visiting the school. The changes turned the program around. A study of the revamped program found it improved behavior, grades, school functioning, and emotional symptoms (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1483, No. 1, 2020opens in new window). The researchers were even able to adapt the program to a virtual format during the COVID-19 pandemic. The quality improvements to the program are a testament to the long-term impact of partnerships between researchers and school systems, McQuillin said.

“Psychologists and the broader research community actually know some things that are pretty useful, and they seem to be particularly helpful for people who do not have formal training or credentials,” McQuillin said. “This is disseminating psychological science to lay people, people who are not professionals, who are actually going out and evincing change in young people.”

That’s absolutely crucial for cost reasons, McQuillin added, because there will never be enough school counselors or mental health professionals to meet kids’ needs. Teachers, mentors, and other adults in kids’ lives need to know what psychologists know in order to help young people thrive.

School-research partnerships can be beneficial for multiple needs within the education system, from how best to teach kids to read and write to the most effective supports for social and emotional learning (SEL)—a particular target of the Trump administration and some state governments. SEL is intrinsically entwined with academic success. “Those kids who feel excluded often get alienated,” said Melanie Killen, PhD, a developmental scientist and educational researcher at the University of Maryland. “This experience often leads to social withdrawal and a lack of motivation. Promoting school belonging and identity enables all students to thrive.”

Killen has worked on a variety of projects in public, private, and pre-K schools to learn more about children’s experiences of social exclusion, along with their social and moral reasoning about exclusion. She and her research team at the University of Maryland created a school-based intervention called Developing Inclusive Youth, which uses online, individualized reflections and teacher-led classroom discussions to help elementary schoolers reason through their own interactions and experiences. A multisite randomized control trial found that children in the program were more likely to view peer exclusion as wrong, were more likely to see positive traits in children of different genders, races, and ethnicities, and were more likely to report playing with peers from different backgrounds than children not in the trial (Child Development, Vol. 93, No. 3, 2022opens in new window).

Communicating the results was a big part of the success of the project, Killen said. In addition to publishing their findings in academic journals, the research team also put together customized reports for the teachers, counselors, and the kids themselves. She also wrote about the research in Scientific American for the general public and in American Educator to reach more teachers.

Taking time to listen to teachers’ needs and priorities can make the research more relevant and adaptable, said Harvard’s Jones. She and her team have developed an intervention called SEL Kernels, which pulls effective subcomponents from across SEL curricula and turns them into a deck of mini lessons that teachers can slip into the school day.

In afterschool programs in Nebraska, staffers asked for lessons that would help kids with executive function; in schools in Ukraine, teachers in the middle of a war were looking for ways to support their students who had experienced trauma. “We did a project in northeastern Nigeria and learned in the very beginning that there were important concepts of self-discipline and respect that were very real priorities,” Jones said. 

Partnerships aren’t always easy. School districts have multiple levels of leadership, and it’s important to go through the appropriate channels to get approval for a research project, Killen said. Private schools and preschools also have their own less formal processes, so she advises reaching out to administrators first.

Long-running partnerships can give teachers the support they need to properly adopt new curricula, said Harris, who developed the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model, an instructional method for teaching writing that has been shown to improve outcomes in multiple countries (Educational Psychology Review, Vol. 36, No. 104, 2024opens in new window). “We have decades of research that clearly shows us that when teachers learn something new, just like anyone learning something new, they need follow-up support, they need feedback, they need the opportunity to keep learning,” Harris said. A long-term research partnership allows for that kind of follow-up.

In an effort to create more sustainable impacts, researchers and schools are working to nurture partnerships that outlast a single project, much like the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, which has been working with Chicago Public Schools for 30 years. In 2014, RFA and the Philadelphia Public Schools launched the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium (PERC), a partnership modeled on the Chicago Consortium. PERC has tackled research projects ranging from evaluating reading instruction to improving student attendance and understanding how to help English language learners thrive.

The advantage, said RFA’s Turner, is that various members of the partnership bring complementary perspectives. For example, in one project exploring the impact of tying graduation to end-of-course exams for high schoolers, RFA researchers were most interested in ensuring that parents and students understood the implications of the policy, while district staffers were more focused on the logistics of supporting individual students. “It’s really hard to have one project meet all those needs,” Turner said, “and it can only be done in partnership.”

Partnerships can thrive without federal funding. PERC, for example, is funded by the William Penn Foundation. McQuillin’s lab has been funded by the Duke Endowment to expand its work in school-based youth mentoring. There is a lot of grassroots support for research, McQuillin said. “If you talk to principals and administrators, they have a bucketful of challenges. They would love support.”

The educational research community is also poised with a well-trained workforce and promising master’s and doctoral students in the pipeline, Harris said. The question is what the current funding chaos will do to that pipeline.

“It's a catastrophe, really, and I think what’s happening is going to take 20 years or more to turn around,” Harris said. “Hopefully, we’ll turn it around.”