New Research Alliance to Study Progress in City Schools, Funded by Gates and Ford Foundations

New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (at right) joined officials from the teachers union, civic leaders, education researchers, and policymakers on Oct. 29 in taking a major new step to advance school improvement in New York. The Research Alliance for New York City Schools at New York University, a non-partisan applied research center that is independent of city government and the Department of Education, will utilize recent advances in education science and draw on the expertise of the city’s and the nation’s top researchers to be a source of valid and reliable evidence about efforts to provide high quality education for all students.    
    
Housed within NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, the Research Alliance will have close academic connections to other NYU schools—the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service—as well as to Columbia Teachers College and CUNY, and will work to forge connections with other research universities nationally.
    The Research Alliance also named James Kemple as executive director. Kemple, formerly director of K-12 Education Policy at MDRC, a national social policy research organization based in New York City, is a former high school math teacher and program director for a community-based education organization in Washington, D.C. He holds a master’s and doctorate in education from Harvard University.
    To support the work of the Research Alliance, Klein has committed to ensuring that the new center has access to the Department of Education’s rich databases on student, personnel, and school characteristics and performance and that the department will collaborate on evaluations of initiatives aimed at improving the city’s schools.
    “Many of our reforms reflect the power of data and high-quality analysis, and we believe that the Research Alliance will help us build on our progress by doing independent, high-quality analyses of what programs are working and which aren’t,” said Klein.    
    
The initial funding for the alliance’s work will be provided by a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a $500,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. Planning for the research alliance was funded by the Donors’ Education Collab¬orative, a group of New York City-based funders interested in school reform, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the New York Community Trust, and other local and national foundations.
—Tim Farrell

Pictured, from left: NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein; James Kemple, newly appointed executive director of the Research Alliance; Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO, Partnership for NYC; President John Sexton; Deborah Glick, New York State assemblywoman; and Leo Casey, vice president, United Federation of Teachers.