Project OverviewIn 2014, the Institute of Education Sciences awarded a two-year grant jointly to the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) Office of Research and Evaluation and to the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) to support the development of a formal research-practice partnership. The primary focus of this partnership—named SDP-Penn GSE Shared Solutions—is evaluating the District’s various school improvement efforts, including Renaissance Charters, Promise Academies, District Transformations, and School Redesigns. A key component of the Shared Solutions partnership is working

collaboratively with practitioners to develop instruments that will be used to identify promising strategies for school improvement.

Contributors/StakeholdersThe Partnership is led by Tonya Wolford, Deputy Director of Research and Evaluation for the SDP, and Laura M. Desimone, Associate Professor of Education Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. The project team includes Andrew Porter from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as SDP researchers and Penn GSE graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. It is advised by a board of key school and community stakeholders.

ActivitiesOn November 12, 2014, Shared Solutions held a mini-conference at which practitioners and researchers came together to discuss the District’s Action Plan v2.0. Insights from these discussions informed the development of our surveys and interviews. On February 11, 2015, the Partnership invited a small number of principals, teachers, and parents to provide feedback on draft surveys. Similar events will be held in the near future.

The StudyWe will use a matched-comparison, quasi-experimental design and a combination of cohort and interrupted time series analyses to study the academic achievement of students in a subset of schools undergoing improvement and compare them to a group of traditional public schools in the District. We will also use interviews and survey data to investigate the mechanisms through which school improvement efforts work to improve student achievement. Interviews and surveys will be administered in Spring 2015, and analyses will begin this summer.Research Questions1. What are the characteristics of the school

improvement models? a. What are the key characteristics on

which the models differ from each other as well as from traditional schools?

b. How do the models evolve over timec. What are the supports and challenges

to establishing and maintaining the improvement models?

2. How do student achievement trajectories differ across improvement models, and how do these trajectories compare to those of traditional schools?

3. What are critical factors in fostering student success in these improvement models?a. To what extent do policies, school- and

classroom-level factors, and context (e.g., socio-economic status, crime rates) mediate or moderate the improvement models’ impacts on student achievement

4. Based on our findings, what recommendations can we make to the District for refining school improvement models?

SDP-Penn GSE Shared Solutions

Contact InformationDr. Tonya Wolford, SDPtwolford@philasd.org

Dr. Laura M. Desimone, Penn GSE lauramd@gse.upenn.edu

Figure 1: Over 100 researchers and practitioners attended the Partnership’s first mini-conference on November 12, 2014.