WHAT IMPACT CAN RESEARCH-PRACTICE PARTNERSHIPS HAVE? SIX STORIES FROM OUR COMMUNITY

Quick partnership facts
Based in: Fairfax, VA
Founded in: 2023
RPP mission: The Research Practice Partnership is dedicated to harnessing our collective resources to address key challenges in our region and measurably contribute to improved conditions for the education community, and in turn, to equitably impact the quality of life for students, families, and our shared society.

In 2025, ERA.NOVA expanded its research-practice partnership with Prince William County Schools (PWCS), launching a new chapter of collaborative inquiry rooted in pressing problems of practice. A pivotal milestone was the establishment of a Master Research Services Agreement (MRSA), which formalized our shared commitment to designing research that is both rigorous and directly responsive to district needs. This agreement has created the foundation for a more agile and reciprocal research ecosystem that moves us beyond transactional projects toward sustained, systems-level impact. 

With this structure in place, ERA.NOVA and PWCS co-developed protocols for identifying high-impact areas of study, navigating approval processes across institutions, and ensuring transparent communication of research findings. These processes have streamlined collaboration, strengthened trust, and accelerated the timeline from research to practice, positioning our work to inform decision-making at the school, district, and policy levels. 

Two major studies now exemplify the promise of this partnership. The first, funded by a nearly $2 million U.S. Department of Justice grant, is a multi-year initiative titledComprehensive Safety and Violence Prevention in Diverse Middle Schools. This project brings researchers and practitioners together to co-design and evaluate interventions that support equity, student well-being, and safe learning environments. The second study explores the integration of artificial intelligence in mathematics instruction, examining how emerging technologies can enhance teaching and learning in ways that are both innovative and equitable.  

Taken together, these efforts signal a transformative shift in how ERA.NOVA and PWCS work together. By embedding co-design, trust, and shared accountability into the research process, our partnership is not only generating knowledge but also directly shaping practice. This year’s milestones highlight the power of RPPs to reimagine the relationship between universities and school systems—ensuring research serves as a lever for meaningful, timely, and lasting educational change.

Quick partnership facts
Based in: Multnomah County, OR
Founded in: 2022
RPP mission: Improving equitable access to high-quality preschool opportunities for children and families in Multnomah County, Oregon, with a focus on racial equity.

2025 marked the third year of our RPP, and we continue to gain momentum. Our partnership exists within a complex system of community members, schools, educators, families, and organizations - all of whom keep equity and access at their core. Reflecting back, our partnership themes in 2025 were relationships, adaptability, and innovation. 

One major goal of our partnership this past year was to increase response rates across the three surveys our partnership administers. To accomplish this, we revised our surveys for simplicity, clarity, flow, and language accessibility (including translation). We also increased the incentives and continued collaborating with trusted partners to help conduct outreach. Our efforts were a success! We were able to double the response rate for all three surveys, thus ensuring that family, preschool, and educator voices were included in Preschool for All implementation.

Another priority area for our RPP was to build new relationships with Multnomah County’s Child Care Resource and Referral so that coaches were included and able to utilize our ACSES framework. Ultimately, we were able to design, launch, and complete the first professional development training cycle with the CCR&R coaches. We are excited to see how coaches will implement the tools they learned to help support teacher professional development and improve classroom experiences for children and their families.

One final highlight for our partnership was that we had a manuscript accepted for publication! This manuscript, titled “Centering Equity in the Planning and Implementation of Universal Preschool,” utilizes focus groups and a community of practice to better understand the strengths, challenges, and early lessons of Preschool for All’s early implementation. Ultimately, we find that equity needs to be embedded from the start, structure needs to be balanced with flexibility, and early implementation requires adaptability.

Quick partnership facts
Based in: North Carolina
Founded in: 2022
RPP mission: We aim to develop, support and advance partnerships between academic researchers and education practitioners to enhance K-12 and postsecondary student learning in North Carolina.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Carolina took a bold step: bridging the gap between research and classroom practice to help students, educators, and schools recover—and grow. Through a strong partnership involving the NC Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI), NC Collaboratory, and other university partners, the state launched the North Carolina Learning Research Network (NCLRN). This network isn’t just about producing papers—it’s designed to generate actionable findings that feed directly into policy and practice. 

With over $7 million in legislative funding and ARPA support, the NCLRN seeded research projects across NC—projects that focus on pandemic recovery, from lost instructional time to shifts in educator workforce, and from multilingual learner success to the experiences of high schoolers entering college.Investigations into things like statewide literacy training (LETRS), cyberbullying-mitigation technologies, teacher bonus programs, and the role of virtual learning are helping to map what worked—and what still needs work.

One especially powerful story comes from rural Elizabeth City-Pasquotank’s PW Moore Elementary, a school serving a mostly Black and economically disadvantaged population. Once chronically low performing, it has improved from an “F” rating in 2021-22, to “D,” and now “C” in 2023-24. That turnaround has been supported by a community-school framework that boosted parent engagement, staff morale, after-hours event participation, and leadership capacity. 

Meanwhile, findings around post-secondary enrollment show student attendance at both two-year and four-year colleges dropped, especially among students who would attend moderately selective in-state institutions—highlighting areas where interventions and supports are still deeply needed. 

At a convening in June 2025, about 70 researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from across the state gathered to present 20 projects under this framework. They not only shared findings, but discussed what makes research-practice partnerships sustainable: scalability, equity, and alignment with real school, district, and state priorities.

The impact of this work is already visible—in policy conversations, district practices, and improved outcomes in schools like PW Moore. As final research results come in by late 2025, North Carolina anticipates sharper, more nuanced tools for recovery and for setting up a system of ongoing improvement—not just fixes, but transformations. In December 2024, the success of NCLRN led the NC General Assembly to create the Office of Learning Research (OLR) at the NC Collaboratory via S.L. 2024-57, SECTION 2A.8.(a-e) investing $1.5M annually in state funds to support research on the efficacy and efficiency of programs, activities, initiatives, procedures, and any other factors related to elementary and secondary education in the State.

Quick partnership facts
Based in: Besançon, France
Founded in: 2017
RPP mission: Improving education through research-practice partnerships.

In 2025, the University House of Education (LaMue) moved from promise to practice. We began the year by launching a cross-sector, six-person university certificate program to train RPP brokers - school leaders, a pedagogy advisor, a primary teacher, a school district administrator, and an instructor from our teacher education program learning together online. This first cohort created a new backbone for partnership work across the school district and the city.  

Relationships deepened where they matter most: in classrooms and lecture halls. At the university, our brokers were invited to translate evidence on first-year student success for faculty members – a session that turned research into concrete teaching moves. In schools, practitioner dilemmas became shared agendas: the “Gender Inequalities” project convened at Albert Mathiez Middle School to co-design early interventions; the “School Bullying” project prepared findings for the World Anti-Bullying Forum; and the JIGSAW project presented results for the RIPSYDEVE conference. 

We also opened our work to the public. Through our “Education Inquiries” lecture series – spanning cognitive science, learning myths, dyslexia, and family math– we brought students, parents, teachers, and researchers into the same conversation, on campus and online. 

Evidence grew and traveled. The “Dynamilis” project published in Computers & Education, signaling that RPPs can deliver high-impact, practice-relevant scholarship. The “Metacognition” project published in The Journal of Educational Research, showing gains in both motivation and memory among fourth and fifth graders. Our “360° Video in VR” project shared results at the AIESEP Conference. 

2025 was also the year LaMue became a bridge beyond France. In March, we hosted a week-long workshop for colleagues from Sudanese universities and teacher-training institutions, exploring how RPPs could strengthen education systems under reconstruction. The exchanges revealed how the RPP approach – centered on equity, trust, and shared inquiry– resonates across very different contexts.

Perhaps most visibly, we helped shift the national and European conversation. On May 21, Besançon hosted France’s first day devoted to an RPP –“Digital Parenting” within the Doubs Digital Education Territory–  with practitioners and researchers co-presenting their progress. We then linked local work to continental learning: building a European RPP research network, exchanging with Leuphana (Germany), and co-organizing the first European seminar on RPPs with NNERPP at Rice University’s Global Center in Paris.

In summary, this is what changed in 2025 through our RPP: From projects done to schools to work built with them; an infrastructure of brokers; shared routines for inquiry, public learning spaces, and research that informs decisions from the classroom to city hall. The result is tangible: new relationships, new evidence, and a durable culture of co-design for student and family success in Besançon, France.

Quick partnership facts
Based in: Evanston, IL
Founded in: 2017
RPP mission: Equity and excellence in education in Evanston.

In a year of great challenge and change, NEERA was grateful to support a dozen collaborative education research projects in our home community of Evanston. Here we shine a spotlight on the work of the Learning in Places team, who created opportunities for awe at a time when awe is particularly appreciated.

Learning in Places (LiP) has a mission to support youth, educators, and families in co-designing learning environments that cultivate ethical, transdisciplinary, field-based science education while nurturing wellbeing and collective change-making. Northwestern professors Megan Bang, Carrie Tzou, and Shirin Vossoughi serve as the project’s principal investigators (PIs).

In Evanston’s K-8 school district, LiP’s collaboration has evolved into a multi-year partnership dedicated to reimagining science learning as a practice of care, curiosity, and community stewardship. The partnership currently includes eight schools and 11 educators across grade levels, with a shared goal of expanding place-based, inquiry-driven learning that helps students connect local phenomena to global systems.

To accomplish this, district educators and LiP researchers create and study professional learning experiences including summer summits, ongoing professional learning communities, classroom-based inquiry cycles, collaborative reflection, and collective visioning. Across these spaces and activities, educators explore and refine pedagogical approaches which integrate outdoor investigations, community knowledge, and connections across science, social studies, art, and literacy. They aim to foster students’ sense of wonder towards investigating and collecting field-based data to inform emergent Should We questions: ethical, socio-ecological situations that help learners explore how their choices and relationships affect both people and the environment.

Through these efforts, as well as the PIs’ contributions to district sustainability and learning garden initiatives, Learning in Places supports educators and families as co-designers of more just and livable futures, while generating research that informs how systems of education can respond to community needs and ecological challenges.

Quick partnership facts
Based in: 2006
Founded in: Baltimore, MD
RPP mission: Conducting and disseminating long- and short-term strategic data analysis and research that informs decisions about policy and practice to improve the educational and life outcomes of children in Baltimore.

With just one year to go before its twentieth anniversary, BERC leaned into partnership and collaboration in 2025. Working with our longtime practice colleagues at Baltimore City Public Schools, we made important contributions to research spanning early childhood to workforce entry.  

With our teammates in Baltimore’s Early Childhood Advisory Council, BERC was one of several contributors to the Baltimore City Early Care and Education Landscape Analysis. Expanded access to pre-kindergarten is one of the pillars of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the state’s landmark education legislation passed in 2021. In this report, a broad coalition of philanthropic and early childhood education partners came together to complete a landscape analysis of the quantity, geographic distribution, and characteristics of early care and education opportunities for children from birth to age five. Insights from the report are being shared with city and state elected officials to inform policy decisions.

We also released the long-awaited update to BERC’s 2018 study, Launching into Adulthood, which followed Baltimore City public high school graduates into college and the workforce. The 2025 edition took an even longer view of the data, looking at the post-secondary destinations of students from the Class of 2009 through the Class of 2020. We found that graduates are matriculating at higher rates into four-year colleges, and that the share of graduates who are either employed or enrolled in higher education has increased over time. We celebrated this new publication with a webinar and panel discussion featuring local college access and workforce development organizations that support teens and young adults.

In 2025, we continued important work that we started in 2023 and 2024 studying the landscape of career development opportunities in Baltimore City Public Schools, and implementing an early warning system for middle-school students. We started a five-year partnership with the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County to co-lead our early childhood initiatives. As we look ahead to the rest of this year and the start of the new one, we are co-designing new projects with our partners and identifying creative ways to answer research questions without relying on external funding. Through it all, we’ve been guided by monthly meetings of our Research Board and biannual meetings of our member institution deans. We’re excited to update the NNERPP community in 2026 about where these conversations have taken us!