The Future of Education

As the recent PISA scores have indicated (OECD, 2019), student performance around the work has hit an asymptote with some countries’ performance going down and some countries failing to make any progress. After 30 years of education reform in the United States, this pattern repeats itself in urban, suburban, and rural settings. Coleman (2018) made the argument that in order to improve outcomes for all of our children, we need to take a more systemic approach to school improvement that includes cooperation among the adult community across the various ecologies in which a child grows.  In this paper, it is our intent to articulate how a cooperative approach between scholars and practioners is an important factor in developing cultures of continual improvement within schools and lead to scholarship that improves the practice of education. Building on the work of Coburn and Penuel (2016) and Byrk et al. (2015) this paper will outline strategies for building successful research practice partnerships and give examples of two research methodologies that are effective at generating new knowledge from the field of practice and support the scaling of effective practices both within a particular context (e.g., a school district) or in other contexts (e.g., across national settings).

Keywords: Partnerships, School Improvement, Research.

References:
[1] OECD (2019). PISA Results 2018: Combined executive summaries. Organization of Economic Co-Operation and Development.  Paris, France.
[2] Coleman, H.L.K. (2018). Getting to great, for all.  Conference Proceedings: Future of Education (8th Ed.). Florence, Italy: LiberiaUniversitaria
[3] Coburn, C.E., & Penuel, W.R., (2016) Research–Practice Partnerships in Education: Outcomes, Dynamics, and Open Questions. Educational Researcher V45, pgs. 48-54.
[4] Bryk A,S, Gomez, L.M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P.G., (2015). Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Get Better at Getting Better. Harvard Education Publishing, Cambridge MA.