Partners
NCRERN has partnered with over 100 districts in 17 states across the country through its continuous improvement network and replication network.
Empowering Our Partners with Data and Evidence
Rather than relying on anecdotal advice or popular trends, network partners have access to real data from districts with shared challenges. While network partners may test different solutions due to varying capacity and context, all partners benefit from shared insights on what works and what doesn’t, enabling them to rapidly identify solutions.
We don't have anybody in house that has time to sit and look at it in that way and know the statistics and numbers. That is incredible, and has helped us look and look at some of our data. Some of the same data sets that I've looked at for 10 years—I would get things from NCRERN, I'm like, oh, never looked at that data point within this data set. That's making me think a little different.
So much of the research that's out there is done on city schools and practices that work. To pull something that works for Chicago public schools and try to think about will it work [here]? There's differences there. And it's not always going to be a plug and play. So [it's valuable] to have the support of a research institution that's pulling [this evidence] together.
To get a large enough data set, you've got to look at a lot of different rural districts. So [it's helpful to have] somebody that's doing that and helping to communicate to us—these are best practices, these are worth your time and energy, and these are not. Because we get these ideas, we hear what other people are doing and we're always working to try and be better. But it's hard when you waste energy on something that's not research-based and ultimately it's not showing effectiveness. We just don't have enough resources to waste.