Completed CSBD Project

Strategic Education Research Partnership

Publications: Learning and Instruction: A SERP Research Agenda (2003)
Strategic Education Research Partnership (2003)

Mission

The mission of the Strategic Education Research Partnership is to promote a research enterprise that has the capacity to offer teachers, school administrators, and policy officials a well-organized and powerful knowledge base that supports their efforts to improve K-12 education. In its current phase, the project is establishing an independent 501 © (3) organization. For more information go to www.serp-institute.org. This project was supported by the following foundations: Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlitt Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation

Background Information

For two years, a distinguished committee of leaders from business, education, and public policy have engaged in a productive effort at The National Academies to conceptualize and design a new organizational structure capable of achieving an historic breakthrough in linking educational research and development, policy and practice. The committee’s report, Strategic Education Research Partnership, details a vision and strategy for launching a bold and innovative partnership.

The committee’s report comes at a time when a powerful consensus has emerged in the United States about the importance of improving student learning, particularly for children in elementary and secondary schools. This consensus has led to significant federal and state investment in education. To make that investment productive, however, will require a commensurate effort to investigate systematically how to improve teaching and learning. A proliferation of content and accountability standards has not been accompanied by companion efforts to ascertain whether and how those standards can be reached for the highly diverse population of students to whom they apply. The pressure on schools and teachers to meet accountability standards creates a demand for the type of research and development that can improve classroom teaching and learning. The SERP vision is that the field of educational research will become more productive, and more closely linked to both education policy and practice. Thus, SERP would dramatically change the knowledge and tools available to schoolteachers, administrators, and policy makers, and the conduct of education research and development.

The committee’s proposal is designed to grapple with difficult issues of linking research with development, creating incentives for R&D focused on the problems of the classroom, and opening new opportunities for researchers and practitioners to work together in classroom settings. The plan addresses the need for coherence in the development and steering of a sustainable program and the need to work in school settings throughout the country on agendas that are responsive to the needs of those schools. The committee proposes a novel, long term funding structure that is a public-private partnership anchored by the contributions of a compact of states. The proposed compact provides the potential for stability that is critical to the success of R&D in any sector, but has never before existed in education.