Rigorous research on public education systems can be revelatory: Knowledge that researchers generate through their study of school data can change education practices, policies and schools. But to do so, researchers must be able to hold an independent mirror to the entire public education system, pursuing an agenda of serving public interest, not one that benefits a certain branch of government or a specific education agency.
I served as the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools for seven and a half years, and I constantly had to look in the truth-telling mirror held by the Chicago Consortium on School Research. The consortium was created in 1990 as an objective observer of Chicago’s public schools. The researchers at the consortium are not employees of the Chicago Public School System or the city government; they are employed by the University of Chicago. And they have only one job: conduct research on the Chicago Public Schools. They set their research agenda independent of city politics, and they finance themselves almost entirely through foundation grants. For more than 30 years, they have been collaborating with schools, using student-level data the school systems voluntarily give to the consortium, discovering many truths the school system hid from parents, students, teachers and policymakers...