By Omar Lopez, DFER Policy Analyst
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) had its annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia this year and DFER was on the scene. With some 13,000 participants and 2,000 scholarly papers, posters, and roundtables presented there was a great variety of opinions and focuses.
In an effort to address criticism that AERA’s collective research does not, as their mission declares, promote “the use of research to improve education and serve the public good” in concrete ways, the theme this year was Non Satis Scire – To Know is Not Enough. Whether they accomplished the goal of making the conference more relevant to the frontlines of education is up for debate, but there was some work that stood out from the rest to that end.
Though there were certainly plenty of sessions focused solely on criticizing our US education system without proposing any real solutions to those problems (reinforcing the stereotype of AERA), a clear exception was the collection of research that focused on issues of local education governance.
Scholars from Michigan State University, for example, are working on a research paper entitled, “Creating a Portfolio Management District in Detroit: Contested State Intervention and Regime Change.” Portfolio Management is a term used to describe a district that runs traditional public schools as well as privately managed but publically financed [ie. charter] schools and holds all schools accountable under the same performance standards. (Previous research on this topic can be found here.) In the paper, the authors write, “Advocates see portfolio management as a promising response to the problems of traditionally governed urban districts. Implementation, however, requires a reconfiguration of governance and political power in schools.” Their study is set in Detroit, where progress is being made despite “entrenched opposition from the district’s elected board and employee unions.” The research is ongoing, but their final paper will be one to watch.
What’s more, anyone who follows education reform knows that successful reforms can be made or broken by the quality of the relationship between labor and management. Jonathan Eckert from Wheaton College has conducted a study through the Department of Education, which he presented at the conference entitled, “How Labor Management Relationships Advance Reforms: Findings from 12 Districts.” In the paper, Eckert identifies 12 partnerships between districts, boards, and teacher organizations and extracts the elements that create a successful partnership between stakeholders. The most important aspect of the research, I find, is the fact that successful labor-management relationships are not dependent on unique personalities but best practices that could be replicated elsewhere. This is hopeful news for districts with dysfunctional partnerships.