COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION

The Committee on Education, which is in formation, will consist of ten or so core faculty members of international reputation whose primary interest is in education and learning. More than a dozen additional faculty members with occasional research projects in education will also be part of the committee.

The founding of this new Committee is rooted in two basic tenets. The first is that scholars studying aspects of education within their disciplines will benefit from inter-disciplinary interchange. The second is that a well-orchestrated interplay between researchers and practitioners will foster outstanding new scholarship.

Interdisciplinary Interchange

Leading social and behavioral scientists at the University have long pursued questions of fundamental importance to education. The questions are broad in scope, for example: How do children learn to speak, to read, and to reason mathematically? How can classroom instruction promote such learning? How can school organization support such instruction? How does the political economy of a school system affects its productivity? Taken in isolation, each question is important for understanding human development and society. But the answers emerging in each domain of research have implications for inquiry in the other domains. The Committee will enable scholars throughout the University to explore these implications, deepening the work in each domain, uncovering new questions, and intensifying interdisciplinary scholarship in education.

More specifically, the Committee will sponsor an ongoing workshop on Education; administer training grants in educational research; and foster connections among education-related programs in existing departments and schools, including SSA’s Community Schools Program, the Urban Teacher Education Program, and courses in educational psychology, educational sociology, economics of education, social work, and educational policy.

Interplay Between Researchers and Practitioners

A crucial resource for the Committee’s work is the University’s Urban Education Initiative (UEI), perhaps the most ambitious attempt by a leading university to collaborate with educators in improving urban schools. In the charter schools UEI controls, the University will put to test its best ideas about how children learn, about how school and classroom organization can support learning, and about the incentives and management practices that best support effective practice, and about how schools can contribute to children’s social development through effective social services. Beyond its own charter schools, in a broader network of schools it will influence, UEI will test its understanding of how the professional development of incumbent teachers can improve their practice. In its Urban Teacher Education Program, UEI will test its knowledge of how best to prepare new teachers.

Indeed, UEI intends to develop a distinctive “Chicago Model” for urban schooling. The model will simultaneously draw on and test the best ideas about teaching, learning, school organization, school governance, teacher preparation, and social service provision.

Clearly, the breadth of knowledge required for UEI to succeed matches the breadth of inquiry characterizing education research across the disciplines at the University. The Committee will therefore strive not only to facilitate interactions among University faculty but also to promote intense and sustained interaction between scholars and practitioners. Viewed from the standpoint of UEI, the Committee will be an invaluable resource, providing a stream of new findings and insights from research that can be of use in practice. From the standpoint of the Committee, however, the UEI is a key resource because UEI’s efforts to improve practice will reveal the limitations of accepted ideas and approaches while generating new questions and fresh insights from which academic research can benefit.

Effective educational practice is based on concerted action in the face of uncertainty. It requires loyalty, solidarity, and commitment in pursuit of common goals. Science, on the other hand, thrives on skepticism and the critical reappraisal of assumptions. The Committee aims to manage a creative interplay between these perspectives in order to advance scholarship on schooling while supporting UEI’s commitment to reflective practice. A vigorous fund-raising effort, including a major endowment component, will support the practical work and the scholarship, insuring that the interplay between them will be sustained for many decades to come.

The Role of the Committee on Education in

The Urban Education Initiative

v The founding of the Committee is predicated on two tenets. The first is that scholarship in education will benefit from interchange among researchers working in different disciplines. In this sense, the new Committee follows a long and productive tradition at the University of Chicago.

v The second and more novel tenet is that a well-orchestrated interplay between researchers and practitioners will foster outstanding new scholarship in education. Not all members of the Committee will engage in this interplay, yet the interplay will energize the work of the Committee. To understand how this can unfold requires a brief discussion of the Urban Education Initiative and how its efforts relate to educational research.

v The Urban Education Initiative represents the joint effort of the Center for Urban School Improvement, the School of Social Services Administration, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, and the new Committee on Education to create, test, and improve a new model for urban schooling.

Components of the Urban Education Initiative

v The Center for Urban School Improvement (USI). This sixteen year-old enterprise is perhaps the most ambitious attempt by a leading university to collaborate with educators in improving urban schools. USI has created two charter elementary schools and plans to start a high school in 2006 on the city’s south side and will launch two more over the next few years. USI will help to incubate up to fifteen additional new schools which will be operated by others on the south side over the next five years. It also assists a broader array of Chicago schools in the professional development of educators and assists in the University’s Urban Teacher Education Program.

v The School of Social Service Administration (SSA). To be successful, urban schools must contribute to the social and developmental needs of children of hard-pressed families. In some communities, schools are one of a small number of institutional resources available to families and can provide important opportunities for social and economic development. Schools can work with their communities to meet the developmental needs of children and families while benefiting from community support. The University’s School of Social Service Administration brings substantial experience and knowledge to meet this challenge.

v The Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR). For the past 15 years, CCSR has provided a wealth of information to inform educational policy making in Chicago. CCSR maintains the finest archive of data on student learning, school climate, and the conditions of teaching available to any urban school district in the US. CCSR also provides considerable analytic capacity to answer policy questions facing Chicago schools. CCSR serves nationally as a model for how large school systems can benefit from systematic data collection and policy analysis.

The work of UEI will be pursued within a larger context of a broad array of public school improvement efforts across the University, including those sponsored by the Physical Sciences Division, the Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Community and Government Affairs, in the Collegiate Scholars and CPS Scholarship programs, and at the Oriental Institute, Court Theater and Smart Museum, among others.

A Model for Urban Schooling

UEI will put to test the best available ideas about how children learn, how school professionals can be trained, how school and classroom organization can support learning, how social services can be integrated with academic instruction, and how incentives and resources can best support effective practice. Indeed, the overarching objective of UEI is to develop and test a distinctive “Chicago Model for Urban Schooling.”

The Chicago Model will consist of a set of protocols and standards of practice scientifically shown to substantially improve the academic learning of students from low-income urban families and to increase their chances of graduating from four-year colleges. It will be designed to facilitate replication in other urban settings and to stimulate emulation by other leading universities. It will be formulated in and implemented by the University’s charter schools. Its effectiveness will be rigorously evaluated by University researchers. And this research will be used to both refine and improve the Chicago Model as well as disseminate it to other researchers, practitioners, and policy makers across the country.

This vigorous attempt to improve practice will reveal the limitations of accepted ideas and approaches while generating new questions and fresh insights from which academic research can benefit. The Committee will work with USI, SSA, and CCSR to develop an ambitious research agenda aimed at testing the best available ideas about how to improve urban schooling and the efficacy of the model and its components. Education experts at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) will provide significant assistance in developing and implementing this research agenda.

A Shared Vision and a Stimulus for Inquiry

UEI will soon develop a monograph entitled “The Chicago Model for Urban Schooling Part I: Primary Schools.” The monograph will explicate UEI’s central ideas about the instruction in reading and mathematics and, building on CCSR’s work, the essential supports required to enact such instruction. These supports include the development of the professional capacity of prospective and incumbent educators; the establishment of effective school organization and leadership; the fostering of a student-centered learning climate; the mobilization of appropriate resources and incentives; the establishment of parent and community ties and trust; and the delivery of social services in school settings.

The text of this document will be broadly accessible, but the document will have extensive footnotes evaluating the evidentiary basis for every key proposition stated in the monograph. We expect that some propositions will find strong support in the available scientific literature, while others will reflect judgments made under substantial scientific uncertainty. The Committee will promote deliberation about the state of current knowledge, articulate key unanswered empirical questions, give voice to alternative viewpoints, and engage in a research agenda that can, over time, reduce uncertainty about the key issues and important elements of the Chicago Model.

The Committee will engage a broad range of faculty and students, inside and outside of the University in these deliberations. The monograph will likely become a “living document” because new evidence and insights will emerge, compelling revision of earlier editions. We expect this document to be widely read and debated as educators across the nation pursue school reform in other cities.