Stanford-SFUSD Partnership

Research, Practice, and Policy to Help 
San Francisco Students Thrive

Stanford and San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) work collaboratively on research with the community to advance equity and learning for all students in San Francisco.

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Research That Addresses District Goals
Pursue goals such as improving multilingual-learner student outcomes and advancing policies that support math achievement.
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Support for Research Production and Use
Help research and practice teams work collaboratively to produce research that informs decisions about practices and policy.
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Structures and Routines for Collaboration
Establish data use agreements and host events that allow research and practice teams to make sense of research findings.
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Connections Between District Leaders and Researchers
Connecting interested district leaders and faculty and student researchers on shared topics of interest they aim to advance through generalizable research.

Why It Matters

SFUSD leaders are expected to make changes to their systems to improve outcomes like stagnant achievement in mathematics or challenges staffing their schools with qualified teachers. In addition, Stanford researchers are expected to produce research that is not only generalizable across settings, but also is relevant and useful to practitioners and policy makers.

What We Offer
We bring together researchers and practitioners to produce research that informs decision making. In order to facilitate these collaborations, we provide a variety of supports.
Customized Coaching
Researchers and district leaders may not be used to working together in partnership—we provide tailored support from research development, to research production and research use to support teams.
Agreements and Access
Districts and universities may not be set up to easily transfer data or co-develop research proposals—we coordinate data agreements and support the collaborative development of proposals.
Events and Networking
Researchers and district leaders can often operate in silos—we facilitate events and opportunities for networking that support the development of new research and the consideration of research findings.
Accessible Research
Researchers' and practitioners' nomenclature is different—we help document and maintain a library of research briefs and scaffold opportunities to pursue funding and publication.

Research

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African American Perspectives on SFUSD Special Education Disproportionality

October, 2025
Research Brief

This research memo used the following data sources to summarize African American family and community perspectives on what causes SFUSD to disproportionately represent African American students in special education services:

Summary of: Research Study on Examining the Connections Between Collective Teacher Efficacy and Lesson Study, Year 2

June, 2025
Research Brief

This summary provides an overview of the initial analysis from the research study “Examining the Connections Between Collective Teacher Efficacy and Lesson Study.” The report addresses the research question: What do teachers and leaders identify as the essential components of lesson study (LS)? This qualitative case study was conducted during the 2024-2025 school year in […]

Examining Language Program Models in SFUSD Based on Recommendations from the National Academies of Education 2017 Report

March, 2025
Research Brief

This memo explains an analysis of San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)’s expected components or principles intended to guide their language program models. This analysis compares SFUSD language program principles against recommendations and findings from the 2017 National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine report (referred henceforth as “the NAS report”) titled, Promoting the Educational […]

Want to learn more? Contact us.

Laura Wentworth

Laura Wentworth

Director of the Research-Practice Partnership Program
California Education Partners
laura@caedpartners.org