Education

Making Houston a World-Class School Research Hub

By Debra Viadero — February 17, 2010 1 min read
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The Houston Chronicle’s education blog is reporting that city schools Superintendent Terry Grier is talking about finding a “world-renowned researcher” to help make the school system the hub of a new research center dedicated to measuring what works in the Houston schools.

“Think about it,” Grier told the bloggers over at School Zone. “We’re sitting right here in Houston. M.D. Anderson is the biggest cancer institute in the world. We have all kinds of energy and petroleum companies that are constantly doing research around trying to find alternative fuels. We are the hub of a research center here in Houston that I think would rival that of any place in the world. I’d like to see us have a research center tied to our school system that helps us measure what works -- whether it’s computer software programs or a literacy reading program in a particular school or whether it’s which algebra books get the best results from kids.”

Faithful readers of this blog may remember that I wrote back in November about the Texas Consortium on School Research, of which Houston is a part. Similar sorts of scholar-school district collaborations are popping up across the country as well. The model for these efforts: the Consortium on Chicago School Research, based at the University of Chicago, which has been churning out a steady stream of studies on Chicago’s schools for nearly 20 years. Read more about it here.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Inside School Research blog.