Stanford, school districts partner to study English learners

The Stanford University Graduate School of Education has launched a long-term research partnership with nine local school districts to study the experiences and outcomes for students whose first language is not English.

The Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative will study 30,000 students between kindergarten and 12th grade who attend the Sequoia Union High School District and its eight feeder districts, including the Menlo Park City School District and the Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto.

The collaborative is taking a more mutually beneficial approach to research, said Michelle Nayfack, the associate director of research practice partnerships for California Education Partners, a nonprofit that is coordinating the research. Rather than having faculty drop in for a single study that might not be impactful for a school district, the collaborative is bringing together professors and district administrators to develop research questions together and drive toward findings that other school districts can learn from, Nayfack said.

“We’re trying not to fit into that traditional mold of research where you’re in and you’re out and the utility to the district is more token than at the center of what you’re trying to do,” she said.

The research collaborative was born in 2016, modeled after an existing, decadelong partnership between Stanford and the San Francisco Unified School District, where there are more than 40 research projects currently underway. In San Francisco Unified, Stanford faculty have studied early literacy methods, new ways of identifying students at risk of not graduating, and English language learner programs, among other topics.

When Dan Schwartz became dean of the School of Education in 2015, he wanted to replicate the San Francisco Unified partnership to amplify Stanford’s impact in its own community, Nayfack said. He reached out to the superintendent of Sequoia Union at the time, James Lianides, who insisted on involving all of the high schools’ feeder districts, Nayfack said.

The Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative was officially launched in the fall of 2017 with a focus on English language learners. Across the nine districts, despite their varied demographics, size and resources, supporting these students is a shared problem, Nayfack said. Students’ primary languages in the participating districts include Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Hmong and Russian, according to Stanford.

The collaborative is now running six research projects driven by district priorities. The most ambitious is one tracking the trajectories of English learners from kindergarten through 12th grade at all nine districts. For the first time, all of the districts will be able to track students as they progress from school to school and can study the impact of key indicators, such as attendance or grade point average. The researchers and districts spent most of the 2017-18 school year developing a shared data set to aid this project, Nayfack said.

“In education we don’t always have the luxury of basing our decisions on deep program evaluation,” Sequoia Union Superintendent Mary Streshly said in a press release. “It’s usually more anecdotal, as opposed to a structured study. Or we’re looking at research on what we’d consider a similar school somewhere else, like New York City.”

Other projects include studying long-term English learners, or students who have not learned enough English to be redesignated as proficient after six or more years in school; and how teachers with few English learners in their classes can use design thinking to better support them.

Five Graduate School of Education faculty, four doctoral students and numerous staff from two School of Education research centers are involved in the collaborative.

While the idea of universities partnering with school districts on research projects is not novel, Stanford believes this collaborative’s long-term nature and focus on real-world impact set it apart.

“What we’re hoping for is to make long-term matches where these folks will work together over time and co-develop all the research questions and think about how to use the findings in their practice and maybe,” Nayfack said, “it leads to new research questions.”

Elena Kadvany writes for the Palo Alto Weekly, The Almanac’s sister publication.

Elena Kadvany writes for the Palo Alto Weekly, The Almanac’s sister publication.

Elena Kadvany writes for the Palo Alto Weekly, The Almanac’s sister publication.