Two research professors from the Center for Social Organization of Schools (CSOS) at Hopkins were among 44 scholars named American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellows.
On April 10, James McPartland and Joyce Epstein were inducted into the second group of the AERA Fellows program, which was started last year. The first group of inductees was largely composed of previous officers or close associates of AERA, and was chosen without a nominating process. The 2009 Fellows were nominated and sponsored by members of the first class of fellows.
In its press release, AERA explained that through the fellows program, the Association aims to convey its commitment to excellence in research and to underscore to new scholars the importance of sustained research contributions in the field.
"The Fellows program is kind of a lifetime achievement award. It's meant to highlight general contributions from people who have been in the field for a long time," Epstein said.
McPartland and Epstein have been close colleagues at the CSOS. Both received their doctorates through the Hopkins Department of Sociology. McPartland participated in the preparation of the influential 1966 "Equality and Educational Opportunity" Report for Congress, in association with noted sociologist James Coleman who worked at Hopkins at the time.
Epstein has worked with CSOS since the mid-1970s.
McPartland is now the director of the CSOS and has led the center's Talent Development Program for middle schools and high schools. The Talent Development Program is a comprehensive school reform model that seeks to address a broad range of issues in underperforming schools, including student attendance, discipline, achievement scores and dropout rates.
"For a long time, [the CSOS] was engaged in research that compared various natural variations across schools to try and find what were the best strategies," McPartland said. "But we realized that there wasn't a whole lot of difference between many of these schools except for the student population."
The Talent Development program is distinguished from many other reform models by the close cooperation and support given by the CSOS to each school.
"About 10 years ago, we started the Talent Development program because we realized that we had to develop new methods and structures to help schools succeed."
McPartland explained that the program typically involves a one-year transition period, followed by a three-year implementation period. During this time, CSOS provides coaches to help train teachers in the curriculum and techniques that have been developed by the center's researchers and former practitioners. The CSOS also organizes the school into academies, called "schools-in-a-school", to help create smaller communities where students can feel more engaged in their education.
"We have seen opportunities to expand our program, but we haven't grown as quickly as we could have," McPartland said.
"We wanted to make sure we were giving enough attention to each of the schools that we partnered with."
Joyce Epstein is the director of the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships and the National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS).
The NNPS works with schools, districts and several state departments of education, to establish new structures to help change the dynamics of parent involvement in schools.
"For a long time, schools used parental involvement for their own sake, or to help with fundraising," Epstein said.
"We want to change the paradigm so that we are focusing on family and community involvement to benefit student success, and that we reach out not just to those who are easy to get involved, but to all families."
Epstein's program seeks to make the nature of parental involvement a partnership in which schools, parents and the wider community share the responsibility for student success.
A partnership paradigm, as Epstein explains, forces schools to acknowledge the role they have to play in reaching out to families and bringing them into the process, rather than passively expecting some families to get involved.
Epstein also emphasized the need to change parental involvement from being about parents to being about student success.
One important part of this was to increase cooperation and dialogue between parents and teachers, so that parents' educational activities in the home would help to reinforce the skills and knowledge being developed in the classroom.
Both McPartland and Epstein's work with the CSOS focuses on combining research and practice. The CSOS, under McPartland's leadership, has changed the composition of its staff to include more former teachers and education practitioners.
This has allowed the CSOS to do education design work, such as creating new types of homework, classroom tactics, or curriculum that teachers will be able to implement.
"After all of our research, we try to develop the best educational strategies we can, but we also closely cooperate with our schools, to hear what worked and what doesn't, and what new obstacles they see," Epstein said.
"This allows us to further refine our research questions in the future. We have research improving practice, and practice improving research."
