Research Evidence Use in Urban School Districts for Instructional Improvement

Three large urban school districts in the United States, with enrollments ranging from 50,000 to over 200,000 students, were studied by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. The study examines how district and school staff made strategic decisions about instructional improvement and the weight they gave to research evidence. The analysis focuses on decisions about adopting reform designs, implementing changes, and scaling up reforms.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the role of research evidence in strategic decisions about school reform designs.
• Studying the challenges of implementing and scaling instructional improvements in large urban districts.
• Modeling decision-making processes in decentralized, high-stakes accountability environments.

Strengths

• Focuses on three distinct large urban districts with enrollments from 50,000 to over 200,000.
• Examines a specific, policy-relevant issue: the use of research evidence in instructional improvement.

Limitations

• Row count and specific data format are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic and institutional bias inherent to the three studied districts.

Provenance

Source

Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE)

Collection Method

Study of decision-making processes in three urban school districts.

Geography

Three urban school districts in three different U.S. states.