Dive Brief:
- The Learning Policy Institute, run by Stanford professor emeritus Linda Darling-Hammong, deals with politicians and policymakers across parties, fulfilling a mission to improve education practice through the dissemination of high-quality, independent research.
- In a Q&A with University Business, Darling-Hammond says the institute synthesizes and assembles research while investing in new research. That helps policymakers who often do not have much of an institutional memory, given frequent electoral changes, she says.
- The Learning Policy Institute gains insights from administrator focus groups and looks for things that are working on the ground while also offering recommendations to states and districts on best practices, along with its work with policymakers.
Dive Insight:
The United States has more than 13,000 public school districts with close to 100,000 public schools. In many ways, it's almost impossible to avoid recreating the wheel. Schools and districts often operate in silos, forced to focus on what is happening right in front of them rather than looking up and out.
Teachers, though, are encouraged to create professional learning communities that stretch beyond school walls and find best practices to bring to their classrooms. Increasingly, these professional learning communities are becoming global, and best practices from abroad are able to filter into U.S. classrooms. This also provides opportunities for collaboration between classrooms that give students experience interacting with international peers.