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In research-practice partnerships (RPPs), the line between researcher and practitioner can be blurred, and the roles for everyone involved may be unclear. Yet little is known about how these roles are negotiated and with what consequences for collaborative efforts. Guided by organizational theory, we share findings from a multiyear case study of one RPP, drawing on observations of partnership leadership meetings and interviews with school district leaders and partners. Role negotiation occurred in more than one third of leadership meetings, as evidenced by identity-referencing discourse. When roles were unclear, collaborative efforts stalled; once partners renegotiated their roles, it changed how they engaged in the work together. Several forces contributed to these dynamics, including the partner’s ambitious yet ambiguous identity and the introduction of new members to the group. This study offers implications for those engaged in partnership work and provides a foundation for future research regarding role negotiation in RPPs.

Despite calls for evidence-based decision making, the field has a limited understanding of how educational leaders actually engage research. This study draws on a nationally representative sample of 368 district and school leaders who named pieces of research that were useful to their work. Educational leaders found frameworks and practical guidance in the form of books to be most useful. They report turning to research across different domains of leadership practice, including supporting their own professional learning, guiding instructional activities for others, and monitoring and supporting implementation. While a small portion of sources named would qualify for the top three “tiers of evidence” of the Every Student Succeeds Act, those sources named as useful for program selection more frequently met these criteria. Together, these findings offer a broader portrait of research use, one rooted in leaders’ engagement with research as a part of their multifaceted and complex practice.

School district central offices regularly engage with external partners in improvement efforts, but these partnerships are not always productive. Indeed, little is known about under what conditions partnerships are likely to lead to organizational learning outcomes. We conducted a longitudinal comparative case study of two departments in one urban school district central office, both working with the same external partner. Data included 131 interviews and 372 hours of observations as well as artifacts and social network data. While one department did not incorporate the partner's ideas into policies and routines, the other demonstrated greater integration. We argue this difference is due to organizational conditions that foster absorptive capacity and to the nature of department-partner interactions.

Given the rapid growth of research—practice partnerships (RPPs), we need a framework that helps the field understand how RPPs can facilitate organizational learning in service of local educational improvement and transformation. Drawing on sociocultural and organizational learning theories, we argue that learning can happen for the organizations engaged in RPPs at the boundaries of research and practice. Such learning is evident when there are changes in collective knowledge, policies, and routines of participating organizations, with implications for longer-term outcomes of educational improvement and transformation locally and more broadly. The degree to which organizations can make use of the ideas from the RPP is dependent, in part, on the presence and design of boundary infrastructure and the preexisting organizational capacities and conditions. We conclude with implications for those engaging in RPPs and future research.

As scholars studying school districts, we became increasingly concerned with how research from the Global North dominates global understandings of school governance, organization, and reform—what we term coloniality in global education reform. This special issue seeks to broaden these perspectives by examining how schools might be governed and organized with a focus on power, history, local and regional contexts, multiple ways of knowing, and sociopolitical dynamics. Through six articles, this issue interrogates how power operates and shifts across school organizing, governance, and community engagement. Featured studies span topics such as anti-racist leadership practices, the sociopolitical contexts of reform implementation, the reproduction of inequalities through “shadow education,” and the racialized dynamics of state takeovers. Insights from the Global South, particularly from Mexico and Brazil, challenge dominant narratives rooted in the Global North, highlighting the need to decenter Eurocentric perspectives. Extending this analysis, we reflect on how coloniality shaped the editorial process itself, revealing tensions around language, power, and representation in academic publishing. By questioning both global education reform practices and traditional approaches to academic scholarship, this special issue invites readers to critically examine with us the dominant paradigms and imagine more just, inclusive, and contextually-grounded possibilities for school governance and organization.

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) provide opportunities for researchers to support school districts in addressing the complex challenges they face. Cynthia E. Coburn, William R. Penuel, and Caitlin C. Farrell situate RPPs in the history of educational research and discuss the needs they were designed to address. They then describe what contemporary RPPs are and what they do and close by discussing ways that RPPs can contribute to educational improvement and transformation.

Globally, school systems are pressed to engage in large-scale school improvement. In the United States and other countries, school district central offices and other local governing agencies often engage with external organizations and individuals to support such educational change efforts. However, initiatives with external partners are not always productive. We draw on the idea of absorptive capacity to present a conceptual framework for understanding when and under what conditions partnerships are likely to foster district learning and support change efforts. We contend that prior knowledge, communication pathways, strategic knowledge leadership, and resources to partner are preconditions for a district central office’s absorptive capacity, and we identify the features of the external partner that likely matter for productive partnering. We argue that the relationship between district absorptive capacity and features of the partner is mediated by the nature of the interactions between district and partner, with likely consequences for organizational learning outcomes. For researchers, this framework serves as a tool for understanding how a district central office can learn from an external partner for educational improvement efforts. For school district leaders and external partners, this framework provides a structure for thinking strategically about when and under what conditions a partnership is likely to be productive.

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are long-term collaborations between researchers and practitioners aimed at educational improvement and transformation through engagement with research. Yet RPPs can be challenging to implement, and even long running RPPs experience bumps in their work together. Caitlin Farrell, Laura Wentworth, and Michelle Nayfack discuss what conditions helped school district leaders and researchers from the partnership between Stanford University and San Francisco Unified School District be more or less successful in influencing school district policies and practices, and they share recommendations on how to develop or support conditions for successful partnerships.

Using over 350 hours of observational data from district-level meetings, we investigate how leaders support their interpretations of problems and proposed solutions during closed-door negotiations around three policy decisions, and how they invoke race, class, and language in the process. District leaders primarily cite constraints from stakeholders, practical realities, and policies during deliberations. They also draw on beliefs, values, and—to a lesser extent—information like research and data. Race, class, and language discourses were layered with values-based reasons, and most often addressed structural challenges to equity. The balance of attention to these factors depended on the configuration of participants and the nature of the policy decision itself, particularly decision makers' perception that it would be controversial among certain groups.

While there is an abundance of data-use literature available, there is still a need to develop methodological approaches for studying naturally occurring data use in decision-making processes over time. The central contribution of this paper is a strategy to understand the use of data in long-term observations of educational leaders' policy-making deliberations. Using longitudinal and observational data, we created 'decision trajectories' that traced microprocesses of deliberation around specific decisions over time. We employed frame theory to locate when and how data entered decision-making processes within these trajectories. Our approach addresses the use of data as they arise in the context of longitudinal observations - a method that provides insight into how data may be used to inform, frame, or justify educational decisions.