National Research and Development Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools

The nation’s schools continue to innovate as they address persistent underachievement among specific student populations (e.g., low income students, minority students, or English language learners). The National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools (Effective Schools Center) is taking advantage of these innovations by identifying policies, programs, and practices that distinguish between schools that effectively educate students from traditionally underachieving populations and schools that do not.

The goal is to scale up successful practices among schools serving similar student populations. This work is being done in partnership with a consortium of districts so that it aligns with the districts’ policies and programs, takes advantage of the districts’ expertise, and, if successful, can be integrated into the district’s regular activities.

Working with researchers from Vanderbilt University, WCER’s Value-Added Research Center (VARC) will deliver the latest value-added models to help the research team identify those programs and curricula that deliver the highest growth in student learning. In particular, this project will take advantage of a new form of value-added model we refer to as differential effects value-added. This new model compares value-added by student subgroups (English language learners, income level, ethnicity, etc.). These differential results allow researchers to discover if particular interventions are more or less effective with different sub-groups of students.