Research Collaborations Not Seen as Two-Way

Partnerships between researchers and school districts have become a top priority for federal education research efforts, from the National Science Foundation to the Institute of Education Sciences, yet scientists and teachers argue the current system doesn’t provide much incentive for practitioners to collaborate.

“That is really a major problem,” said Barbara Means, the co-director of SRI International’s Center for Technology in Learning , in Menlo Park, Calif. “If we want to follow through on what [President Barack Obama] has said—that we want to change our education system to support innovation—we have to find room in that system for education systems to become self-learning.”

Federal agencies and private research groups alike increasingly require district collaboration for their grant competitions, said Suzanne Donovan, the executive director of the Washington-based Strategic Education Research Partnership institute, or SERP, an initiative begun by the National Academies to foster...