Executive Director: Cindy Blitz
Website: http://cesp.rutgers.edu
The Center for Effective School Practices (CESP) is an
equity-focused unit of the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University
dedicated to excellence and integrity in research and evaluation. Rutgers CESP
regularly engages in and mediates collaborations among public and private
school districts in the tristate area; institutions of higher education; local,
state, and federal government agencies; community organizations; and industry
partners to generate and implement practitioner-relevant best-practices in
education.
CESP is strongly committed to connecting a broad range of
education stakeholders with the best available research evidence to inform
sound education policy and practice decisions needed to support the delivery of
quality education to all students while closing persistent achievement
gaps.To this end, CESP supports active
collaborative structures such as professional learning communities and
researcher-practitioner partnerships, in addition to translating and
disseminating evidence-based guidelines and delivering professional development
opportunities. CESP is supported by a robust team of experienced researchers
and evaluators with a strong commitment to building the capacity of educators
and policy makers to develop and deliver high-quality evidence-based
instruction, curriculum, programs, and policy initiatives with significant
potential to improve learning for all students while directly addressing
existing inequities and systemic bias in education.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, National
Institutes of Health, and state and federal Departments of Education, CESP
develops and executes innovative and impactful projects on educational
initiatives in addition to serving as internal and external evaluators on
large-scale research projects. A current focus of CESP's work is on scalable
mechanisms for improving equity and access to robust computer science education
across the K-12 continuum. We work to build the capacity of educators through
sustained, inquiry-driven computer science professional learning at the high
school level, and are implementing and assessing a technical assistance
framework for the middle school level, as well as exploring the added-benefit
of teacher participation in the research-practice partnership collaborative
structure. We are also working as evaluators on a number of pre- and
post-doctoral training initiatives, and working as research partners on an
exploration of the use of research-evidence in policy ecosystems.
For more information, please contact Cindy Blitz, Ph.D., the
Executive Director of Rutgers CESP and Research Professor at the Graduate School
of Education, by phone at 732-564-9100, ext. 21, or by email at
cindy.blitz@gse.rutgers.edu.