Welcome to the website of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools. My hope is that stakeholders in the city’s education system will turn to this organization and this website as a powerful source of credible, non-partisan information that can assist them in promoting evidence-based educational policies and practices. I encourage you to sign up to receive regular updates from us.

Now in our third year of operation, we have established a solid infrastructure for the Research Alliance including eleven full-time and six part-time researchers and support staff. We have established partnerships with a growing number of collaborators in and outside of New York University. We have built extraordinary longitudinal databases of detailed information about the city’s students, staff, and schools dating back more than 15 years.

While building this infrastructure, we established a base of compelling initial research projects. These projects are now yielding our first publications and serving as catalysts both for outreach and dissemination activities and for the development of new studies. Our work to date sheds light on factors that influence teacher mobility and turnover, early indicators of student success in the middle grades and progress toward graduation and college, characteristics of successful middle and high schools, and how schools use data to inform administrative and instructional decisions. For more information about our projects, see the descriptions on our website.

 Looking ahead, we will extend our work into schools and the organizations that support them. We will also focus on developing a strategic plan that can sustain the Research Alliance in the long term. Our ultimate goal is to aid schools in their search for solutions to the challenge of ensuring that all students have access to a high quality education. Achieving this goal requires sustained commitments from funders, collaborators, and other stakeholders who support an evidence-based approach to educational excellence and equity.

 The creation and early development of the Research Alliance reflects a remarkable consensus among the city’s education leaders: rigorous evidence can and should play a more prominent role in shaping the difficult decisions about how best to ensure that all students have access to a high quality education. This consensus cuts across the political spectrum and across the interests of a wide range of stakeholders and their constituencies. On behalf of New York University, our Governance Board, our staff, and collaborators, I want to express our profound gratitude for the confidence that has been placed in the Research Alliance to serve this important function for New York City’s schools.

 We welcome the opportunity to work with and learn from the many stakeholders in the New York City schools and look forward to contributing to the ongoing process of school improvement throughout the city.