Improving K-12 Education

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Center for Education Policy Analysis

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INFORMING AND ADVANCING EFFECTIVE EDUCATION POLICY

Despite years of reform efforts, U.S. student performance has shown little improvement. Now, more than ever, policy makers and practitioners at all levels from the federal government to the classroom need scientifically based evidence to help them develop strategies that lead to improved performance. But such evidence, let alone clear frameworks for assessing policy choices, has proven difficult to come by. Stanford is uniquely positioned to fill this gap. Past educational policy in the U.S. and in California has been disappointing, as new efforts and initiatives have failed to provide improved student achievement. An important cause of the ineffectiveness of educational policy is the paucity of reliable scientific research upon which to build better education policies.

Professor Susanna Loeb

Here is where Stanford is positioned to contribute through its diverse group of educational researchers that will provide intellectual leadership for an emerging scientific approach to developing more effective educational policy.

Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA), a new independent research center, will unite an interdisciplinary array of nationally prominent scholars from across the campus to provide the depth and scale of research needed to affect education policy in meaningful ways. The core researchers will be drawn from the fields of economics, law, political science, psychology, public policy, and sociology, and currently reside in the schools of Arts and Humanities, Business, Education and Law, as well as at the Hoover Institution. Their rigorous inquiry is based on the empirical realities of schools, well grounded in the needs of policy makers and education practitioners, and aimed directly at improving education for all students. Read the CEPA white paper.

Dr. Eric Hanushek

A special focus of attention of CEPA’s long-term research agenda will be to examine policies that promote and support highly effective teachers and school leadership, the strategic priorities of the other two centers that comprise the Initiative on Improving K-12 Education. A core part of CEPA’s mission is developing the next generation of leading education researchers and policy makers. Some of the best graduate students in the country are now engaged in education policy research and their work holds great promise for the continual improvement of K–12 education. Through CEPA these doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows will gain training in rigorous empirical methods, exposure to a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, and a deep understanding of the realities of K-12 schools and policy institutions.

Current CEPA researchers actively interact with policymakers at the federal, state, and local level. These researchers introduce the latest research to policymakers directly through a variety of personal interactions, and through membership in such forums as the National Board for Education Sciences and in serving on the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors in California.

Collaborative research projects with individual districts across the nation – from San Francisco to Miami – will ensure that the research is closely related both to the reality of schools and to the formulation of policies.

The Center for Education Policy Analysis seeks to expand Stanford’s commitment to education policy research by attracting the best and brightest researchers and students; building an ongoing program of preeminent visiting scholars and policy makers; and establishing a robust dissemination effort to help translate research into practice that will place findings into the hands of those who need them. The synergy of CEPA’s diverse perspectives and methodologies promises to yield some of the most substantive, objective, and innovative education policy research in the nation---and to position Stanford as the country’s leading center of education policy research.

For more information on Center for Education Policy Analysis contact Susanna Loeb or
Eric Hanushek

To learn more about how to support Center for Education Policy Analysis contact
Heather Coleman Trippel