Educator-researcher partnerships show promise in HISD

As the director of Rice University's Houston Education Research Consortium, Ruth López Turley seeks to close socioeconomic gaps in achievement in the Houston Independent School District, according to her university profile. The Laredo native and Harvard-educated professor works to strengthen the connection between education research and practice, and founded a network of research institutions and public school districts that have partnered in 13 cities nationwide.

Q: What problems exist between educators and researchers, and how are you trying to fix them?

A: Academic researchers are typically trained to do research in a certain way that's not conducive for decision-makers. We're trained to follow four steps: We generate our own research questions based on our expertise and literature; we choose a research site based on our questions; we are trained to collaborate with schools or districts on short-term projects; and then we are trained to focus on publishing research in academic journals. But those journals are often only read by other academics and are inaccessible to decision-makers I'm trying to reach. So I'm trying to promote a partnership-research model. We take those four steps and the idea is instead of just generating our own research questions apart from others, we're trying to work closely with potential users of our research from the very beginning. So before the research begins, we jointly produce a research agenda. That makes decision makers more invested because they played a role in deciding on the questions in the first place. We're aiming for long-term alliances that involve working on series of projects to address long-standing problems instead of one small problem or project at a time.

Q: What's an example of when this new research partnership showed real-world implications?

A: Houston ISD identified two years ago a problem in that they didn't have enough college advisers. They had counselors, but the counselor-to-student ratios tend to be terrible, which is not unique to HISD - it's a nationwide challenge. But it's especially problematic in districts like Houston, with high proportions of low socioeconomic students and students who may not get that information elsewhere if they're not getting it at school. In the summer of 2015, it used grant money to hire 28 college advisers districtwide across its high schools, and we were asked to track their impact. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We still have analysis to do. But in one academic year, preliminary data suggests the college application rates went up from about 59 percent to 79 percent of all high school. I can't definitively attribute it to the intervention yet, but those kinds of descriptive statistics are very powerful in terms of suggesting that it is what's making the difference. It's an example of when you can bring together research and efforts of the district.

Q: How could these educator-researcher partnerships shape the future?

A: Taking the last example of college application rates as illustration, imagine the long-term impact. What I described is what happened after one year. Imagine the kind of long-term impact this could have when those students are more likely to also enroll in college, hopefully, and are more likely to complete college. One of the strongest predictors of academic performance or educational attainment and achievement are your parents' education level. So if we are able to improve the educational attainment of this generation, even to just some small extent, that's having a very long-term impact because that impacts subsequent generations.

Text, edited and condensed, by Shelby Webb. Photos by Yi-Chin Lee / Houston Chronicle