Partnership for Early Education Research

On November 15, PEER member organizations gathered at The Leir Retreat Center in Ridgefield, Connecticut for a strategy session focused on leveraging research to enhance decision-making. Despite the season’s first snow storm, the session was attended by representatives from 23 different member organizations across Bridgeport, Norwalk, Stamford, and around the state. The goals of the session were to explore how PEER research findings have or might impact practice within member and affiliate organizations and to strategize about what potential projects within PEER’s priority research areas would best serve member communities in the years to come.

To provide a national perspective, PEER invited John Q. Easton to provide the keynote address, and the management team was thrilled that he was able to attend and share his deep expertise in research-practice partnerships. Easton is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium), a 30-year-old research-practice partnership that he previously led as Executive Director. While away from the UChicago Consortium, Easton served as Director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) from 2009 to 2014 and as Vice President of Programs for the Spencer Foundation from 2014-2018. In his keynote address, entitled Why I Think that Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs) Can Improve Education Research, Practice, and Policy, Easton shared examples from his time at UChicago Consortium, IES, and the Spencer Foundation in which researchers and practitioners worked together to conduct research that was relevant, rigorous, and actionable. Examples included UChicago Consortium’s On-Track Indictor as a Predictor of High School Graduation and recent UChicago Consortium/Ounce of Prevention efforts to design and test the Early Education Essential Organizational Supports Measurement System, which helps early childhood education programs to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses. During the keynote address, John also shared lessons he has learned about the conditions under which educational systems are most likely to use research to drive decision-making...