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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An Investigation of a Professional Learning Measure to Support Teacher Leaders’ and Teachers’ Learning

May, 2026
Research Report
Borko, H. & Ing, M.

The purpose of this study was to describe the use of a collaborative professional learning measure in SFUSD. Research suggests the importance of ongoing explorations of validity evidence for the use of measures in particular contexts. In this study, we are looking closely at how SFUSD district mathematics leaders used the measure of professional learning […]

Practical measures: Improving mathematics discussions with quick, actionable feedback

May, 2026
Research Report
Borko, H. & Jarry-Shore, M.

In this brief research report, we describe what we learned from SFUSD coaches and teachers when asked to provide feedback on charts displaying data from the practical measures surveys. Practical measures are brief student surveys designed to provide teachers with quick, actionable feedback on some aspect of their lessons (Jackson, Henrick, Cobb, Kochmanski, & Nieman, […]

Supporting College-Going Pathways in SFUSD: Longitudinal Evidence from the AVID Program

March, 2026
Research Brief
Steve Juarez

The Stanford-SFUSD AVID Partnership analyzed 18 years of SFUSD administrative student data (2006–07 through 2023–24) to examine patterns of AVID participation and associated academic trajectories. This longitudinal study included 9,885 AVID students and 111,573 non-AVID students across middle and high schools. The sample was balanced across gender, and most AVID students participated for one academic […]

Want to learn more? Contact us.

Laura Wentworth

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