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Chicago Group Promotes Links for Districts, Researchers

Consortium Shares Its Approach to Creating Partnerships, Sharing

Chicago

Sensing growing interest among researchers and school districts in partnering to solve the vexing real-world problems of schools in their communities, the Consortium on Chicago School Research sent invitations to a dozen or so districts to attend a two-day meeting on how to go about doing it.

To the surprise of consortium leaders, virtually everyone accepted, and some even named others to invite as well. In the end, representatives from 19 districts showed up for the May 19-20 meeting here, suggesting that interest in the kind of nitty-gritty collaborative work that the Chicago consortium is known for may be on the rise.

The attendees of the meeting, which was sponsored by the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , the Spencer Foundation of Chicago , and other donors, included representatives from Baltimore, Newark, N.J., and New York City, where formalized collaborations between school systems and researchers are already under way. Also in attendance were researchers and district officials from California, Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Pennsylvania, where similar efforts are testing the waters, in the early stage, or aiming to network...