Unveiled in 2008, New York City’s Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS) was one of the first district-wide investments in data-driven education reform in the United States, a major undertaking for the nation’s largest school district.

The Student Success Network (SSN) is a group of about 80 youth development and education organizations (including schools) that have coalesced around the goal of measuring and improving students’ social emotional learning skills.

This project is leveraging the diversity and scale of NYC's CTE programs to learn about the conditions under which CTE is most effective

Recent years have seen a tremendous growth in data-driven initiatives aimed at improving schools, including instructional techniques and accountability systems that rely heavily on using and interpreting data.

Design2Learn is an afterschool program for students in middle school—a period in which student performance in science often declines sharply.

The Research Alliance is developing a set of education equity indicators aimed at informing policy decisions and enhancing public understanding of educational inequality in New York City.

One of the most significant challenges facing schools in New York City and around the nation lies in their relationship to larger societal inequalities.

The Expanded Success Initiative (ESI) was designed to improve the educational experiences and outcomes of Black and Latino young men in high schools across the City. To gain an understanding of whether, and how, ESI benefitted students, the Research Alliance undertook a five-year mixed-methods longitudinal evaluation of the initiative.

iMentor is a nonprofit organization that provides school-based mentoring, with a focus on helping students develop the skills they need to be prepared for and succeed in college.

MDRC is conducting a study of the NYC P-TECH Grades 9-14 school model. The Research Alliance is supporting MDRC’s work by advising on research design and analyses, helping identify appropriate samples of students for the study, and constructing longitudinal data files needed to evaluate P-TECH’s implementation and impact.

By examining the experiences of schools participating in the Center for Racial Justice in Education’s training, this study contributes to a growing body of research on equity in education and addressing racial injustice in the classroom.

CS4All is a 10-year, $81 million public-private partnership between the City of New York and the private sector, designed to bring computer science education to every student in NYC public schools.

Research has demonstrated important connections between students’ sense of safety—both physical and emotional—inside their schools and outcomes such as academic effort and achievement.

The New York City Department of Education’s InnovateNYC Ecosystem aims to transform the DOE’s procurement process for education technology tools, thereby raising the quantity and quality of technology in NYC classrooms.

The study is aimed at better understanding how many and which students are interested in STEM apprenticeships, documenting students’ experiences in the programs, and assessing how the programs shape students’ interest and engagement in STEM subjects and fields.

The Internationals Network for Public Schools (INPS) is a system of public high schools that serve recently arrived students with low levels of English language proficiency.

The Research Alliance is continuing our partnership with the NYC DOE to define, measure, and support effective learning environments in NYC schools.

New York City is home to the largest high school choice program in the country. Since 2004, all City 8th graders have been required to rank their 12 preferred high school programs (in 2014-2015, there are over 700 programs offered in 400 schools).

In recent years, policymakers across the country have instituted school choice policies, which aim to increase equity and narrow achievement gaps by offering students access to a wide range of schools, including schools outside their home neighborhood.

In New York City, between the 2001-2002 and 2008-2009 school years, the Department of Education identified and scheduled 29 large low-performing high schools for closure. This was part of a larger reform effort that included opening smaller high schools throughout the City and implementing a new system of universal high school choice.

As early as 9th grade, student engagement and achievement can offer strong signals about which students are on the path to on-time graduation, and which are at risk of dropping out.

In collaboration with Schools That Can and MakerState, the Research Alliance is evaluating the implementation of Maker Partnership curriculum and professional development.

Some amount of teacher turnover is generally thought to be constructive, as it brings new ideas, energy, and skills to schools. However, research suggests that too much turnover may have serious instructional, financial, and organizational costs.

This partnership between CUNY, the NYC DOE, and the Research Alliance is bringing together the key stakeholders who focus on secondary and post-secondary education in New York City, enabling researchers to link together CUNY and DOE student data.

This research-practice partnership is supporting the roll out of Pre-K For All in NYC and providing evidence to help improve the quality of pre-k programming.

In the 2012-2013 school year, the NYC Department of Education served 145,000 students designated as English language learners (ELLs)—nearly 15 percent of the total student population.

In the 2010-2011 academic year, three New York City middle schools began piloting School of One (SO1), a program that leverages data to individualize math instruction.

This project filled important gaps in our knowledge about how and where students with disabilities are being served in New York City. The study illuminated inequities, as well as areas of progress, and laid a valuable foundation for future research.

Educators have long asserted that the middle grades are a time of both great importance and vulnerability. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggest that students encounter new social and emotional challenges, increased academic demands, and major developmental transitions during these years.

This project will work to identify key indicators of being on track for success in postsecondary education and career pathways, and empirically test the relationship between those indicators and student outcomes.

The Research Alliance is collaborating with AIR to support the study’s examination of NYC schools that have adopted deeper learning principles and practices.

The power of early warning and college-readiness indicator systems is that they take messy, seemingly overwhelming problems—such as getting students to graduate from high school and persist in college—and focus attention on opportunities to successfully intervene.

The Teagle Foundation’s College-Community Connections (CCC) program aims to help financially disadvantaged high school students overcome the barriers they face in pursuing an undergraduate degree.

The Research Alliance for New York City Schools is supporting Dr. Michael Kieffer's work leading CSEL’s policy strand. This research explores how policies, structures, and system-level practices may constrain or enhance secondary English Learners' access to the general curriculum.

What can be learned from low-performing middle schools that have beaten the odds and substantially improved student performance?

In partnership with Share Our Strength, the Research Alliance is conducting a qualitative study to learn about families’ participation in summer meals programs, including barriers that may prevent low-income families from taking advantage of such programs.

Since 1999, the landscape of New York City high schools has changed dramatically. Over 150 new high schools have opened, with an average enrollment of just over 100 students per grade.