School Boards Working Group Meeting Information and RSVP

Thursday, July 18, 2013
Stanford University

The School Boards Working Group brings board members from across the United States together with Stanford University professors and graduate students to discuss important issues facing today’s school boards. It is part of a broader project on school boards being coordinated by the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University. Our long-term objective is to improve school board members’ capacity for grounding their decision-making in high-quality empirical research. In part, this involves providing board members with the tools, skills, and knowledge necessary to identify and utilize current research. It also involves building researchers’ understanding of which research would be most useful to school board members. We believe that school board members and researchers have a great deal to learn from one another, and the extraordinary influence of school boards on American schools makes it essential that this mutual learning occurs.

The Working Group represents an early step towards building these relationships and knowledge. We will assemble a group of 10-20 school board members, along with several Stanford faculty and graduate students, for a full day of discussion about school boards and research-based decision-making. The group will meet on the Stanford campus from approximately 8:30am-3:00pm on Thursday, July 18. Our funding, much of which comes from a grant from the federal government’s Institute of Education Sciences, enables us to pay for participants’ transportation (to and from Stanford), accommodations (on the night of July 17), and meals (on the day of the event).

We have taken great care to assemble a group of board members with a wide range of experiences, roles, and perspectives on their boards, and whose boards govern a wide range of American school districts. We have invited more board members than we can ultimately accept, and we encourage you to RSVP, below, as soon as possible. In the meantime, we are more than happy to discuss any questions you might have about the event or the broader project.