A Dean's Perspective Robert C. Pianta (bio) I write this commentary from two perspectives: that of an academic researcher who for several decades has relied on partnerships with practitioners and agencies in the field, and that of a dean of a school of education. From both perspectives, it's clear that research-practice partnerships are essential if research in the social and educational sciences is to be both strong and relevant—that is, if research is to have impact. I come to this belief from experience in a wide array of research-practice partnerships, most of which, fortunately, have been constructive. Here I reflect on the benefits and challenges of these experiences and the types of support that higher education institutions must provide to sustain these essential components of research infrastructure and career development. Research-practice partnerships are also critical to a university's service mission and to advancing practice and professional education. Three themes frame my comments: that partnerships are strategically important for strong and relevant social science, that effective partnerships require explicit investment and development strategies, and that partnerships are developmental contexts for scholars. An Essential Tool The value of scholarship in social and educational science is most often described in terms of the metrics employed in academia—journal impact factors, citations, peer review. Although these factors clearly help determine the value or strength of research from the perspective of the scientific community, they don't fully indicate the value of scientific research for parents, community leaders, policy makers, and the public at large. At times, people outside academia criticize social and educational science research for not yielding results that can help them in their work and for the ways that scholars communicate their results. Thus it's not surprising that we're paying closer attention to increasing our research's relevance. Scholarship is relevant to the extent that it can answer questions that are important to interested people outside academia, can be understood and used by those people, or can influence the decisions and actions of practitioners and policy makers. Because partnerships across the research-practice boundary enable the exchange of experience, information, and perspectives among academics and stakeholders, they are an [End Page 151] indispensable resource for individual scholars and institutions under pressure to produce social science that is both strong and relevant. Stronger Science From the point of view of the traditional metrics of academia, effective partnerships with practitioners (either individuals or organizations) add value in a number of ways. First, partnerships provide insights into questions, processes, mechanisms, and variables of interest to investigators—insights we can't get without the information and perspectives of field partners. These insights and this information help scholars create more refined measurement tools, develop data collection plans and protocols that are more likely to capture the phenomena we want to study, and advance a much more informed and comprehensive interpretation of the results we obtain. Second, partnerships can help researchers take advantage of scale. For many research questions in the social sciences and particularly in education, sample size is a critical factor in designing and interpreting research. Many of our research questions involve malleable factors in education systems that fall into the framework of "what works for whom under what conditions." By their very nature, such questions require a sample that draws from populations larger and more diverse than, say, the set of local fourth-grade math classrooms. To make the science strong enough to yield interpretable results, it's essential to investigate processes and mechanisms across cultural, racial, economic, or other background characteristics of students or across assorted school or classroom features. The power of our statistical analyses, our ability to understand mediating and moderating processes, and our ability to follow a sample over time are all enhanced by increased scale. Scientific work that takes place at the level of school divisions (or districts, as they're called in many states), or that is representative of regions or populations of interest, is crucial to building knowledge that reflects reality. Research-practice partnerships that allow access to scale and to variation can thus strengthen a program of research and dramatically enhance the scientific value of a single study...

Building a research-practice partnership that spans two or more organizations can be challenging. University researchers, for instance, may find themselves in schools or departments where the incentives and culture favor more individualistic, single-discipline research projects. Practitioners and policy makers may not see the value of investing in research and evaluation, or they may hesitate to prioritize this work above more pressing operational and strategic aims.

A Unique Opportunity for Education Policy Makers Jenna Conway (bio) When it comes to solving problems and measuring impact, public education organizations primarily rely on two approaches—using civil service to hire personnel directly or using competitive procurement to hire outside experts on contract. These two approaches can limit such organizations' efforts to gain insights, to incorporate cutting-edge research into policy and practice, and to develop innovative solutions quickly, nimbly and affordably. In this commentary, I discuss how public education organizations can use research-practice partnerships (RPPs), especially partnerships with public higher education institutions, to tackle new, unique, and complicated education problems and thereby help children. Consider how traditional approaches can inadvertently limit public education organizations. In civil service, most jobs are full-time, classified positions with very specific descriptions that are subject to a range of restrictions to protect the rights of employees. It can be hard to gain new insights without procuring outside experts whose rates are significantly higher than most government pay scales. Similarly, public education organizations may have a research director or team, but they usually don't have the capacity to analyze all the available data or measure the impact of everything the organization does. For new initiatives or pilot programs, public education organizations rarely have the internal research or analytical capacity to conduct rigorous, real-time research on interventions as they are implementing them. Instead, they typically rely on outside research. Doing so entails a lengthy grant application or procurement process and requires an extended time period to collect and analyze data and produce findings. Finally, with procurement, a public organization must specify both the problem and proposed solution up front, establish constraints, and require bidders to define precisely what they will do and provide and how much it will cost. This can inhibit an iterative design process where prototypes can be tested and improved. To top it off, the procurement process itself can take a year or more. Procurement may work well for well-established projects and services, but it proves more challenging when a state is [End Page 157] designing a new service, intervention, or tool, especially one that will be used by a large and diverse set of users. In contrast, RPPs, particularly those involving public higher education institutions, offer a unique opportunity for policy makers to expediently and cost-effectively gain expertise, integrate real-time research into their policies and practices, and design and build innovative solutions in an iterative manner that better meets their needs. First, RPPs allow public education organizations to gain cutting-edge expertise without having to hire full-time staff or procure expensive consultants, which may not be economically feasible. When I was assistant superintendent of early childhood for the Louisiana Department of Education, we established a multi-year partnership with Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia School of Education. In an ambitious transformation of its birth-to-five early childhood system, Louisiana unified its child care, Head Start, and school-based prekindergarten systems. Specifically, over five years, Louisiana established uniform expectations across programs, supported local networks in every community, measured interactions in every classroom, offered incentives for quality improvement at the classroom level, and coordinated enrollment locally to make it easier for families to choose the best option for their children. Louisiana's approach, which was different from that of most other states, entailed significant change for early childhood educators and for the department. Operating from the hypothesis that teacher-child interactions are what matters most for child outcomes, Louisiana rapidly gathered classroom data from thousands of child care, Head Start, and school sites across the state. It would have been hard to hire staff or craft a contract with specific targets when we were unsure what the data would reveal and when no other state or entity had done what we were doing. In exchange for our collaborating on research projects (and the grant proposals that preceded them), helping them safely and securely access appropriate data, and offering their graduate students valuable internship opportunities, UVA helped Louisiana make sense of large volumes of new classroom data, offered insights on how to encourage improvement, designed new approaches to engage families through enrollment, and...