Proving Ground Director Bi Vuong is quoted in this Education Week article that focuses on the importance of education parternships.
"In terms of [research] infrastructure investment, Massachusetts, for example, started with a higher baseline, but it still substantially leverages partnerships with researchers to answer questions ...," said Shaun Dougherty, an assistant professor of education policy and leadership at the University of Connecticut. "So even in places that are tooled up to do [education research] on their own, they still recognize there is much more that they want done and can achieve only through these partnerships."
Smaller states and districts are even more reliant on partnerships, said Bi Vuong, the director of the Proving Ground, an initiative of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. "To get them to the point of doing longitudinal research, of doing short-cycle research—that capacity at the district level is rare. There are some school districts and some states that can do them, but only for a very limited number and subset of issues."
Vuong, who works with a network of districts in Ohio to study chronic absenteeism, argued that most districts, particularly in rural areas, have too few students to conduct a rigorous study of an intervention under the Every Student Succeeds Act's evidence rules on their own. She argued that current federal research and privacy laws need stronger structures for data sharing among researchers and networks of schools and community groups.
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