Social Science Research Council

Education—both as a focus of research and as an organizational function—is central to the SSRC's mission and transcends research domains. The K-12 Education Program is dedicated to the promotion of rigorous social science research on education informed by experts across disciplines and drawing on SSRC’s institutional history. This Program is organized around two programmatic strands: 1) evaluation, assessment and interpretation; and 2) education, law and business.

• SSRC Projects on Education Evaluation, Assessment, and Interpretation are introduced in response to the need for empirical interdisciplinary and interpretive disciplinary based education research, grounded in the social sciences. Projects in this research strand train early and mid-career scholars, build research networks and facilitate collaboration among the field's leading experts, collect and archive critical data on education, and disseminate necessary knowledge to policymakers, the academe, and the public. Activities are currently focused on developing a research consortium on New York City public school(http://nycresearchpartnership.ssrc.org/).

• SSRC Projects on Education, Law and Business are established in recognition of growing linkages between the public and private sphere around education and a system-wide trend toward litigation and the use of statutory case law to bring about societal change. The SSRC hopes to stimulate research into the vast impacts associated with these movements, with special attention to perceptions of individual rights in schools. The SSRC is also interested in stimulating inquiry into the coming together of the private and public sectors around issues of education. While public debate about initiatives associated with this trend is strong, empirical research in this arena is in relatively early stages of development. With strong ties in both the private and public sectors, the SSRC is ideally positioned to stimulate research on education and business along two basic themes: business management and leadership models in schools, and corporate philanthropy in education.